The Girl on the Glider by Brian Keene Read Free Book Online Page A

them all down on paper. Suffice to say, it was a weird few months.
        Was I scared? Well, of course I was fucking scared. You would be, too. Either our house was haunted or I was losing my goddamn mind, and since I wasn’t the type to believe in ghosts, and since Cassi or my friends or my neighbor hadn’t reported hearing anything weird or seeing anything unusual, option number two was looking more and more likely every day.
        In early-June, I decided that I’d been hallucinating all this time. I became convinced that I had a brain tumor, and that was what was causing the hallucinations. It seemed plausible enough. Tumors had popped up elsewhere on my body that summer. If Spring is the growing season, then my body had a bumper crop. There were a total of nineteen, all of which had quite literally sprung up in just a couple of weeks. They were scattered throughout my body-arms, chest, abdomen, thighs, and elsewhere. The smallest was about the size of a marble. The biggest was like a ping pong ball.
        Needless to say, I was scared-scared in ways that a self-rocking glider and phantom cell phone tones couldn’t begin to touch. Obviously, I had cancer. I mean, what else could the tumors be? I wondered how I’d gotten them. My Dad’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, perhaps? Or maybe it was the fact that I’ve used tobacco since I was twelve and I drink like a fucking fish? Eventually, I decided it didn’t really matter how I’d gotten cancer. The how wasn’t important. What mattered was what happened next.
        It was a strange summer. I felt like I’d become one of my own characters. I was Tommy O’Brien from Terminal or Harold Newton from “Marriage Causes Cancer In Rats.” I was meant to be working on novels and novellas and short stories and comic books for a variety of small press and mainstream publishers who would dick around with my paycheck, my rights, and everything else. Instead, I found myself facing mortality and, for the first time, considering-I mean really considering-my own eventual death. I made sure all my shit was in order. Talked with Nate Southard and Mike Oliveri and brought them up to speed on where everything was (because if I did die, they’d be best suited to finish any uncompleted manuscripts). Checked into my life insurance policy and made sure it was up to date.
        And then I went to the doctor. He was less than comforting. He said it could be cancer, or it could be something called lipoma-a benign tumor composed of fatty tissue. I asked him if he could be any more specific, if perhaps he could narrow it down to one or the other. He said that he couldn’t, but that a specialist could. So I went to see the specialist. He said it was most certainly lipoma and that normally that wouldn’t be a concern, but in my case, several of the tumors were growing towards major organs, including my heart, liver and kidneys. So he sent me to see a surgeon. It turned out that the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and one of the girls who ran the office were all fans of my work. On the day of my surgery, the three of them brought books for me to sign. I did. Then they knocked me out and I went under the knife. They removed ten of the nineteen growths, including a particularly nasty fucker that had, according to the surgeon, grown its own circulatory system and was sending tendrils toward my heart.
        And then we were done.
        It’s human nature to go back to doing what one was doing before, but I didn’t. Instead, I became preoccupied with death. What happens after this, you know? Is there really an afterlife? Does our consciousness-our spirit or soul-continue after it leaves our body, or do we just become worm food? Is there a God, Allah, Krishna, Cthulhu, etc.? Is there a Heaven or a Hell, and if so, where would I go? I don’t know which scares me more-that there is an afterlife and I might end up in the bad part of town, or that there’s nothing after