Critical Injuries by Joan Barfoot Read Free Book Online

watch for danger and prey. One might have a blood-red body, another an iridescent green shimmer. The best were the ones that over time and through stages became some completely other thing. Something that crawled or slithered wound up with wings. Tails fell away. Skins changed their colours. Dead things were ruffled, disturbed, distressed by last moments.
    At home he used razor blades to slice pictures of tiny shelled and segmented and many-legged and antennaed creatures from library books, carefully, carefully, so that absences were not apparent. Also, sometimes, from books he and Mike shoplifted. He loves his room at the top of the house, where the ceilings slant and if he sits straight up in bed he bumps his head. He took those radiant photographs from the books and hung them low on the walls. Some of them unfold in strips showing the shifts of the most special creatures from earthbound to aerial life.
    His dad called them ugly. Mike said, “Gross,” but that’s because in the photographs they’re blown up so big. His grandmother said it was nice Roddy had such an interest, and maybe he’d be a biologist or some other kind of scientist someday.
    He liked the small grey desk for doing homework that his grandmother said was his grandfather’s when he was young, and the adjustable light that leaned over it. Once he wasn’t so angry, he liked that his grandmother told him, “This is all yours, Roddy. You can do whatever you like with it,” so a couple of years ago when he painted the walls black, she didn’t say anything. He thought the pictures would look more dramatic, and anyway he liked the idea of it feeling like night in there all the time. His grandmother didn’t say anything either when he saw the room looked awful, and totally depressing, and started trying to paint over it yellow, with mixed and muddled results.
    His poor grandmother. She wasn’t planning on having her son and his son move in with her and never move out again, and looking after them like nobody ever grew up and went away. His dad never says much, even to her. He and Roddy still have some kind of language, though. Passing by, he pats Roddy’s shoulder, skids his hand across the top of Roddy’s head. Or, “All right!” he yells if they’re watching hockey and there’s a smart pass, or a goal, and he and Roddy grin at each other. Roddy figures that inside, they’re shaking hands then, giving high-fives, pounding each other on the back.
    Words don’t matter so much anyway. His grandmother says it’s what people do that counts. His dad works and watches hockey, and his grandmother bakes and tells Roddy to eat up so he won’t be so skinny, and neither of them can be totally trusted. And his mum buggers off. Really, absolutely buggers off.
    When Roddy was fourteen, in the summer between public and high school, they finally told him. “You’re old enough,” his dad said. Maybe his grandmother insisted. Roddy still bugged her sometimes, still had the idea he could go find his mother because when he thought about her, or pulled out those two old photographs, he knew she had to be wondering what had happened to him and was even probably looking for him and feeling bad. At night, when all the lights were out and he could lie in bed looking into the top branches of the tree on his grandmother’s front lawn, he sometimes pictured his mother roaming dark streets, looking in windows, buttonholing strangers, in search of her son. He could even make himself sob briefly, picturing that.
    Also there was something he’d wanted to tell her, to maybe save her, although he could no longer totally remember what it was, any more than he could truthfully remember what she looked like, beyond those two happy snapshots. Still, even if she’d changed as much as he had, and he guessed his dad too, he’d know her if he saw her. Would she know him? If it was a movie she