The Cloaca by Andrew Hood Read Free Book Online

eye. “The Bully’s been fighting is all,” he’ll say. Belly will not allow herself to be held by me, will writhe and twist until she either falls or I drop her. “Bullies never cry.”
    Or else, we’re under the trees after a summer rain, say. Kim and I will be on a stroll and a breeze will ruffle the leaves, and we get sprinkled. Like the tree’s sobbing all over us.
    I can bring tears to pretty much anything without having to try.
    And I gather from this that I’m either overly emotional or underly creative, and I’d really rather not be any of those ways.
    Because it’s not that those things don’t cry; it’s that they can’t.
    And it’s not our business to burden unburdened things with ours.
    So:
    Kim comes in from the courtyard with drops of water hanging from his earlobes in no way like teardrops. Maybe more like earrings.
    They’d ambushed him.
    A rush of water balloons and those pump action deals that can soak you from fifty metres away while he was having a beer on our steps after work.
    Kim turned the garden hose on them and wrestled their guns away. Turned the tables on those kids.
    â€œWe’re going to get a phone call,” he says, walking into the kitchen, struggling to peel his sopping shirt off his skin. His shorts come off and he’s down on the kitchen tile, which is the coolest part of the house during early August. A secret he learned from Belly.
    The tongues of his steel-toed boots droop out like the tongues of exhausted dogs in this heat.
    When he fights with the neighborhood kids, Kim loses with a stink. They clobber Kim like clockwork and he’s such a sore loser. On purpose, though.
    Because for a kid nothing’s more insulting than having an adult let you beat them. There’s no joy of triumph. Only that weird feeling of being patronized. Like the feeling of wearing a shirt backwards. Upon losing, Kim throws a tizzy and won’t talk to them for days.
    The following afternoon, the kids show up hugging basketballs to their chests and balancing ball bats in their palms.
    â€œWhat’s Kim doing?” they ask.
    â€œDon’t tell him I told you,” I’ll say, “But he’s upstairs. Crying. Can’t you people take it a little easy on him?”
    And they scatter away, triumphant, miffed and still needing a third for Suicide Squeeze.
    Of course Kim is really at work, building cookie cutter houses on the crusts of town. These kids think that because they’re off of school he gets a break, too.
    But I’m afraid if I called them on their oversight, accused them of not knowing how the world really works, probably they’d ask, Well, then what are you doing home?
    Days later, those people will be on the court behind our house and see us on the roof killing a bowl at dusk.
    â€œKim, come play!” they call.
    They don’t even know my name.
    Kim’s over the fence. He takes the lead, but then falls back by a few points. And that’s when he becomes a flurry of elbows, inevitably opening up a young chin under the boards. Kim runs home and hides, leaving me, high as a spooked cat in a tree, to assuage the inevitable moms that will come knocking.
    Kim has no problem being fucked up around children. But I can’t abide that. If I had a child I would never let it see me drink or drug. Never let it see me cry. Never let it see me rolling pennies at the kitchen table. If it saw me doing any one of those things and asked, Why do you do that? there’s no way I could tell it the truth.
    Because it’s hard sometimes.
    Belly flits in through the kitchen window now, sniffs at Kim’s sock balls on the floor. She curls up on his bare stomach.
    There’s a knock at the door.
    Kim, lethargic like he just woke up, is running his finger over the grey down on Belly’s nubs. She lost most of her ears to frostbite before she was our cat, back when she was someone else’s