Rules for Werewolves by Kirk Lynn Read Free Book Online

on all the time. Malcolm and Tanya take a room together. Sometimes another couple will form and drift off into the house somewhere. Every once in a while you wake up and a couple is forming right there on the living room floor. It’s a kind of weather that passes through the group. Susan took me upstairs in the last house. The next day the storm passed and she treated me like any other guy. She went back to the living room and I went back to the pantry.
    I like to have a door. I believe in doors. Doors are the greatest invention known to man. Before doors there were no families. A caveman could walk into your cave in the middle of the night and take your wife. Or he could come in and take your whole family. He could carry your son out to the forest and hold him down by the neck and if the boy made a sound it would only attract the dinosaurs who would eat the both of them. No one loved anyone before the invention of the door, because what was thepoint in loving something that could be taken away at any moment? You might as well fall in love with a single moment from a single day.
    When I lived at home no one was allowed to lock any doors. That’s a rule that Donald made. And he walks around the house and checks. It doesn’t matter whether you are going to the bathroom or trying to have a private phone call or if you want to try to talk to Mom again about what Donald has done. You can’t lock the door. And if you do, if Donald tries the bathroom door and it’s locked, he will start banging and he won’t stop until you open it. If he finds your bedroom door locked in the middle of the night he will start banging on it even if it wakes up everyone in the house. He wants to know what you’ve got to hide. And Mom believes him. She said, “If you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of then you don’t need to lock your door.”
    One of my best tricks was to start locking doors and shutting them without me in the room. Then I would leave the house and go check out new comics at Dragon’s Lair. Donald would start banging and kicking and screaming and there was no answer. I wasn’t ever brave enough to do that when I was in a room. But for a while he must’ve thought I was getting really brave. It was fun to come home and walk past him like nothing. I would get my ass beat, but it was fun. Then once I came home and he had kicked in the bathroom door and no one was in there. Mom let Donald ground me for that trick, and I had to give up money from my savings to help pay for the new door. And Donald definitely paid me back.
    Also I snore really bad. So I want to have a door between me and everybody else here. Nobody has said anything about it, but I wake myself up with it when I’m around others. In the first house there was a guy who minded—Dan. Dan isn’t around anymore. I guess he went back home. People come and go. I think the big majority of us just met other ones of us hanging out on the street or at a canned food giveaway. Susan found me in the alley. When a new one comes in, he or she usually still has a good phone. Then we might pick up another new recruit from a text message or the newcomer might call one or two close friends and say if things are cool here. I always try to borrow a phone and call my brother and leave a message, which is also a way to let my mom know I’m all right and to let my stepdad know I’m still alive and still building my strength in order to kill him. But pretty soon the battery dies or the unpaid bill ends it.
    We don’t charge our phones. We don’t take showers. We don’t comb our hair. We don’t wash our clothes. We don’t brush our teeth.
    We wipe our asses when we shit and that’s about where hygiene ends for us. There is a look we’re going for, and a smell, and a taste. We want to become rotten. We want to look wild. You get a kind of respect from it. People don’t fuck with you. People don’t even look at you. Even if you’re a little guy. People can tell that you’re not