The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories by Ethan Rutherford Read Free Book Online

poster has been taken down. His friend’s haircut has been normalized. There is, at first, a strange formality to their interaction, as if years, rather than weeks, have passed. One of the boys looks at the other like a question mark, noticing his friend has closed a little, his face slightly different than he remembers, as if, in their time apart, his memory has played a small trick on him. This feeling hovers, just beyond recognition but threatening to take hold, until one of them tentatively unloads his pockets to produce three packs of unopened Garbage Pail Kids and then the uncertainty lifts the way it’s always lifted. It’s the middle of August, and the hot summer days are coming to a shimmering close, but there’s still time, now, to skateboard down the street, still time to rent a video, still time to call plays in the front yard, and cut matching streak lines in their hair with the closet clippers if that’s what it’ll take to erase whatever it is that has come between them. These two friends, they will never need anyone else. The gulf will be bridged. That’s what friends are, that’s what friends can do. They will be college roommates, twin terrors on the football field, playing not only defensive tackle but iron-manning it, switching off quarterback and wide-receiver duty, playing safety. Whatever this is, one of the friends thinks, there is time to figure it out. There is time to fix it. There is a lag-time between them now, though, a circuit delay, as if they have run two cans together with string and insist on speaking through those even though they are standing four feet apart. One of the boys wants to say to the other, what happened, you are not you (by which he means, you are not me), but can’t find the words to say it, and in fact thinks that maybe his friend knows something he doesn’t, and it’s this thought that he must put from his head.
    Do the parents notice this? Do parents notice anything? Would they turn their head even if a planet, on a collision course, appeared suddenly above? Food is procured. Godzilla 1985 is rented, the clerk, who is Jeremy’s age, giving them the eyebrows, like, again? Down into the cool basement, the cassette is slipped into the player. The cartoon, the opening credits, the enormous man-lizard sweeping fire across the city, the fleeing Japanese hordes. The voices are dubbed, and the words don’t match the shape of the mouth that is making them, the emotional inflection one assumes was originally there in the performance turned up to a flat yell. And it is when the atomically awakened monster is wading back into the Japanese sea that one friend turns to the other and says that Jeremy had been over, and he had brought his movie, and they had watched it while his parents were gone.
    A feeling of complete desolation washes over one of the boys. In his mouth, he tastes, jealously, the tang of exclusion, the finality of the reveal. He feels this way because, secretly, he always knew this would happen. Jeremy isn’t his cousin. This is not his house, after all. His father doesn’t talk like a cigarette dispenser. His mother doesn’t take him on junk food supermarket sweeps. It was never his poster to pin up and take down. He’s always been a visitor, a home-peeper—a pervert frosting the glass. He’s known it without knowing it, and now he feels exposed. They are lying, the two of them, on the L-shaped couch. In the corner, Ms. Pac-Man silently, automatically, perpetually munches pixels. Without me? the boy wants to shout. You did that without me? But he doesn’t shout, because he doesn’t know how to shout at his friend. He doesn’t know, even if he wants to. What he wants is fifth grade again. What he wants is June. What he wants is matching BMX bikes. The basement is suddenly cold, the television now playing a blue screen that bathes everything in the room in an aquarium murk. Maybe he should be shouting at himself.
    But he looks at his friend, who has