Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor Read Free Book Online Page B

exciting features. As a kid, Tran had envied his friends whose families fished and farmed. Heused to beg to help feed the ducks or go netting for shrimp. Only later did he realize his manicured yard seemed so boring because his family was a bit richer than most of the others in the community. Not wealthy by any means, but they didn’t have to raise their own food. A lot of people out here did.
    He wondered what the slackers, technoheads, and baby peaceniks at the rave tonight would think of that. Probably they would think it was cool, that such people were in touch with the earth, which they all wanted to save as long as they didn’t have to stop dancing to do it. But Tran was willing to bet none of those ravers had ever wrung a duck’s neck and plunged the carcass into boiling water to remove the feathers. Nor, he wagered, had any of them picked leeches off their ankles after wading in a stagnant pool of canal water to catch crawfish.
    Like most Asian-American kids he’d met, Tran lived in two worlds. Since his twin brothers were still too young, he often helped in his parents’ café. His table service was barely adequate, but he ran the cash register like nobody’s business and knew how to make perhaps a third of the eighty-seven traditional dishes on the menu.
    That was one world, the existence spanning the restaurant, his home, his family. The other world was the French Quarter, his tidy little acid business, clubs and raves, people like Jay Byrne. Glamorous, dangerous men … like the one who had introduced him to this other world. But that was over, and something he didn’t want to think about after such a fine night.
    He got out of the car, crossed the damp lawn, and let himself into the house. The living room was a mass of overlapping blue and gray shadows, swathed in dawn. He made his way down the hall, past the closed door of the twins’ room, and let himself into his own room.
    His father was sitting on the bed.
    This in itself was a shock. Tran wasn’t sure his father had ever been in his room before. He and his father were seldom even home and awake at the same time. But the real shockwas the look on his father’s face. Truong Van Tran had a couple of expressions that seemed to serve him well in almost every situation: an acquiescing but faintly impatient smile, a tight-lipped glare, a steady gaze that was almost neutral if you failed to notice the slight disdainful crook of an eyebrow. T.V. did not approve of wasted time, and he did not suffer fools gladly. He did not suffer them at all when he had a choice.
    So the look on his face was new to his oldest son. It had elements of sorrow, anger, fatigue, and, most frightening of all, bewilderment. Bewilderment in a man who had always seemed sure of everything, who ran his small café like a barracks. His father’s gaze made Tran feel like a stranger, like an intruder in his own home, in his own room. There was a dark smudge on T. V.’s forehead, as if he had handled something grimy and then wiped his hand across his brow. Tran could not remember ever having seen his father anything but immaculate.
    Awful scenarios ran through his head. Something had happened to his mother, or the twins. But if so, why was T.V. waiting for him in here, alone? Vietnamese families congregated in times of catastrophe. If anything bad had happened to a family member, the living room and kitchen would be full of milling relatives, and the house would reek of strong coffee sweetened with condensed milk.
    This was something for him, then; for him alone. Tran began ticking off the possibilities in his mind. All of them were very bad.
    â€œDad?” he said uncertainly. “What’s wrong?”
    His father stood up and reached into the pocket of his trousers. At that moment Tran realized he was still wearing the sweat-soaked, gaudy rave dress; he hadn’t even bothered to tuck it into his shorts. It seemed the least of his