Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston Read Free Book Online

there is.
—Yeah, lady, you could maybe just shoot me now instead of talking me to death.
She looks over her shoulder at the young woman with her efficient machine pistol. —Shoot you?
She looks back at me.
—No, Mr. Pitt, I think not.
Slowly, she lowers herself into a graceful squat that someone who looks as old as her should have more trouble executing. —Being shot is not in your immediate future.
She reaches out and places the tip of her index finger on my cheekbone. —Other things are in your future, but not that.
She presses the finger gently into my cheek, drawing the skin down from the bottom of my eye.
—By the way, Mr. Pitt, you mentioned that Id let you take my eye when we last met. In point of fact, and while I don't wish to be thought ungenerous, I never actually considered it a gift.
She lifts her finger. —And I've always rather believed you owed me something in return.
She opens her mouth wide and goes to work, evening accounts between
There comes a time when you think there are no new territories of pain. After a certain number of stabbings, shootings, clubbings, whippings, beatings, thrashings, cuttings, slashings and eviscerations, you begin to assume you've
had the worst of it and nothing of that nature can really surprise you very much.
And then someone comes along to show you that you re wrong.
And you can do little but scream your thanks and appreciation for the lesson.
So I scream. My eye being gnawed out by a crazed old woman, I scream like I rarely have. Because some things, some things are truly horrifying.
But maybe you have to have them happen to you to get that.
—Because it was due me.
—I am not arguing whether you had grounds, Mrs. Vandewater. I am stating as
fact that you were charged to bring him unmolested.
—Yes, so I was. And I abused that charge. And you have asked me why I
abused that charge. And I have answered. Because it was due me. This seems
to leave little enough to discuss. The only question seems to be, how will you
discipline me for my failure to do as you charged?
I open my eyes.
Correction.
I open my eye.
Seeing as its caked with the blood that spilled out of what used to be my other eye, it doesn't help much. Clotted darkness with a distant blur of light punctuated by two smaller clots of darkness that don't seem to be getting along all that well just now. I close my eye and let my ears do the work, still having two of those for the moment.
—Yes, how will I discipline you. Yet again we come around to the same topic. I am bemused, Mrs. Vandewater, as to how a person so wholly devoted to the concept of discipline can be entirely lacking in it herself. —That is due entirely to your own lack of awareness. —Indeed. Well. Illuminate me. If you are inclined.
Her footsteps sound down the long echoing room as she begins to pace. —Illuminate. I have spent my life in that very effort. And no little part of it in a specific effort to illuminate you. Bright child. Such a bright child. With an utterly dim outlook. You still see no further than your dogma. Maintenance of status quo. This, despite all evidence of the erosion taking place under your feet. Illuminate!
The hard slap of a flat palm on a desktop.
—You fail to make sense of my actions, and you interpret them as disobedient and undisciplined, because you measure them against your own authority. You
refuse again and again to see that I am in the service of a larger order of things. While your eyes continue to be on the path just before your feet, I am looking well ahead to where the path becomes lost and tangled in the woods.
Silence. The impression of contemplation. Then the mans voice. —And yet I am still unclear as to what that has to do with biting his eye out.
Silence again. The impression of a stare-down. The woman's voice. —I took his eye because I have no respect for your authority. Because I do not believe you are long for your position. Because in some few months time I expect not to be forced to