Ribbons by J R Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

with the green plastic slats weaving through the wire. The plastic was starting to crack, and several slats were missing. Foster wasn’t sure why anybody would’ve taken them. It’s not like you would want to see more of this place if you lived next to it.
    Some of the windows were boarded up, but not all of them. One window had a sheet of plywood lying next to it, covered in shattered glass. Maybe somebody else got nostalgic for the closest thing they had to a home. Or maybe they were just looking for a place to get high and have sex. The graffiti suggested the latter. The broken window was low so Foster didn’t have to pull himself up to get inside. He just had to hike one leg up, and hop high enough to avoid smashing his nuts on windowsill. He surprised himself by making it in with a full complement of nuts.
    He landed in a TV room . . . from the eighties or close to it. In fact, when he landed he stumbled a bit and almost fell down on a beanbag chair. Instead, he ended up kicking it and sent beans spilling out all over the floor. The floor had a sticky feel to it. Foster might have blamed the stickiness on the water damage he saw in one corner, but then he remembered the floor had been that way back when he used to watch He-Man in here after school. There had always been more kids than seats, so you were lucky to get a beanbag or even one of those miniature plastic chairs that always seemed ready to collapse. The place hadn’t changed much since he’d left, and he wondered if it had closed down right away, or if it had just never gotten any new stuff.
    There were toys here, too. Or things that used to be toys. Foster picked through the remains until he found something recognizable. He put the View-Master up to his eyes and looked toward the window. He found himself between slide frames and gave the lever a pull. There was a cracking sound, but the lever didn’t break. The cardboard slide-wheel turned, and a frame locked into place. It was an undersea picture. A puffer fish was all ballooned out, its spikes acting as a warning to whoever had taken the picture. Half the frame was coated in mold, and it took Foster a few seconds to realize what he was looking at. When he figured it out, he quickly dropped the toy back where he found it and wiped his hands on his pants. Being a janitor, he knew what caused mold like that to grow.
    He let his hands drift over stuffed animals with missing eyes, a Lite-Brite with a handful of discolored pegs, and a snow globe that was so hazy he had a hard time seeing the faces on Mount Rushmore. They finally landed on a book. He didn’t remember reading this one: The Woman in the Garden . The cover was plastic and strangely thick. He opened it to find a cutout that held a cassette tape. The book seemed mostly intact, and he flicked through a few pages. It looked like one of those storybooks that read itself to you when the adult in charge needed a break. On the same bookshelf was a cassette player.
    There was no way that thing was going to work, but Foster slid in the cassette and pushed “play”. Nothing. He turned the player over and popped open the lid to the battery compartment. Inside were the mummified remains of two D batteries. They had corroded and burst long ago, coating the compartment with whitish-green sludge. The batteries made grating sounds as he pried them out. He blew into the compartment and then immediately coughed as he inhaled a cloud of ancient battery dust. His throat burned. He leaned over and spit to get the metallic taste out of his mouth. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go through, but Foster could use a story right now. A calming voice to tell him everybody would live happily ever after.
    He had brought a flashlight in case the lights didn’t work, which, of course, they didn’t. He unscrewed the bulb and let the two D batteries slide out into his hand. He slotted them into place in the cassette player and snapped the lid closed. He pushed “play.”