Milk-Blood by Mark Matthews Read Free Book Online Page A

stuck.”
    Every day when the sun started to dip he would hear the shriek of the school bus bringing home the children of the street. The boy would run out to the sidewalk to play with them on their way home, but nobody even knew he was there.
    I know what you feel like, Jervis thought. I was like you.
    Once somebody dropped a school book and Jervis brought it back to the house for Oscar to read. James and the Giant Peach , it was called, and Jervis tried to read it out loud, but there were too many words he couldn’t make out. Inside the book, there were exactly twelve pictures that he could look at.
    But Oscar loved the book, and finished it fast, and wanted other books to read. All Jervis could do was tell him stories of his own life while the boy sat and listened. They had all the time they needed, and Jervis was good to him like a father might be, but the boy wasn’t real. Jervis wanted a real child to make his own.
    When bad weather hit and Jervis had no money, he would have to stay sober for a few days, and this made his brain spin faster. The outside crept in, and the world reminded him who he really was. Hordes of voices shot at him from everywhere. Radio waves from other counties. Currents from electrical lines, with birds on the wire standing watch. It was like walking into a spider web you couldn’t see and it’s too tiny and sticky to get free. The spirits learned how to trap him when he was caught unawares. They would make him do things. Oh, it hurt his head to think about it.
    His skin turned red from rage boiling out. His blood burned until his veins were just filled with the ashes of his dad. Being alone and angry was terrible—he needed someone to hurt.
    “This is my fucking house …leave me alone,” he howled at the boy.
    As soon as he said it he wanted to cry. He felt the spirit of Oscar receding. Not leaving but going back into the nooks and crannies that only he could fit inside—back into the insides of this house, back into the rubble in the yard.
    Oscar would never be the real child that Jervis wanted, but still, they both belonged in this burnt up house. His lungs were coated with the dust of this place and that would never change. Even though the furniture inside was just piles of ashes, he had a home.
    It was g ood living until the voices became too much and his blood surged with anger. He wanted to hurt people, real people, to inject his hurt into them and make them his own. And eventually, he did hurt people—he did inject people, too many to count. And when he did, his skin wasn’t just black, but a raging red fire.
    Like the woman from many years ago —it was the spirits that made him do it. They caused his rage and made him grab her and inject her with his deepest parts. She ran off with parts of him inside of her and left behind a puddle of milk.
    But then she returned. The body of his lover came back. He knew it was her before she came, same way he could see through time to the future or hear brain waves if he just listened right. She arrived in pieces and someone buried her under the land.
    Dead. Now she was dead. Jervis could hear her cry through the earth. It kept him up nights. He squeezed his own temples hoping it would stop, but it just got worse and felt like a dentist drilling into the side of his skull. Finally he went to the spot she was buried. He lay there and pressed his face to the ground.
    “ Why are you so sad?”
    “I’m dead. He killed me.”
    “ You’re dead but you’re not done yet.”
    “I know.”
    “Why don’t you come up?”
    “I can’t, he burned me and cut me up and buried me.”
    “I can help you ,” Jervis said. “You can come into me. Spirits done that in the past.”
    “No, I don’t want help from the likes of you ,” she answered. “There is another. I have gone into his head. I can do that. I can get in people’s skulls.”
    “Who se head? Who is he?”
    “ Someone who will help. I will see to it.”
    “ You don’t need him. I