Ugly Behavior by Steve Rasnic Tem Read Free Book Online Page A

her glass half full of juice. “Refreshments.”
    K.T. stood up, giddy with an odd sort of excitement. He hadn’t
felt so playful with a woman since before his older sister left home. She lived
in Florida now, three kids, and they hadn’t spoken in years. He went to the
foot of the bed and started peeling away items from a pile of dirty clothes.
“Ta da!” he said, revealing a dusty TV screen.
    “Turn it on and come sit by me,” she said, holding up her juice
glass again. With a flourish K.T. slapped the “on” button, grabbed the sports
jacket and slipped it on. It bunched at the shoulders, spoiling the gesture,
and he had to pull and tug to make it feel right. Then he threw himself onto
the bed beside her, thinking she would either run or laugh and in fact he
didn’t really care which, as long as she reacted to what he’d done in some way.
    The TV came on in the middle of an old war picture. K.T.
recognized some of the actors—he was pretty sure they were all dead. More
and more this seemed to be the case for him: watching movies full of dead
actors. What was worse, he suspected anyone younger than he wouldn’t even know
these actors were all dead—the notion would never cross their minds. The
way they were in the movie would be the way these actors would be forever.
    “I bet Silver Surfer would make a good movie-type hero,” she said,
close to his ear, almost whispering, slurring her words. “They should make a
movie about him. Mr. No-face.”
    For just a brief moment he thought she was referring to him, that
in his playful rush his face had slipped off and was now lost within the
anxious clutter of the room. He pulled sweaty hands up to his mouth and nose
and felt around, then jerked them away in embarrassment. “Oh, yeah.” He
laughed. “He’d make a great one all right.”
    She held the juice glass up to his lips. He was so close to her
now he could see inside the eyeholes of her mask. Her eyes looked red, heavy
and drugged. They would not fix on him. “Wait.” She pulled the glass away. She
took a small liquor bottle out of a big pocket in her dress, unscrewed it, and
poured some into the juice. “Just to freshen it,” she said, pressing it again
to his lips. The glass was hard and cold and the liquor made his own eyes
burn—she’d obviously been adding stuff from the bottle to the juice the
whole time she’d been here. He closed his eyes and let her pour it into him.
The edge of the glass bit like a hard cold kiss and then the warm fluid tongue
inside his mouth and her hard swollen belly pressed up against him, nose
filling with the perfume and the stench of her, and with his eyes closed he was
seeing the both of them inside his monitor, trapped inside the tube, falling
out of their clothes and then falling out of their faces until they were just
this liquid descent of electrons down the screen and off the edge into nothing.
    “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he murmured into her neck as he moved up to
kiss her, and feeling the fullness of her beneath him he couldn’t help thinking
of the sow with the frightened boy’s head and the babies sucking and feeding
and there’s nothing the little boy can do to escape. “Jesus,” he said again,
more softly now as if to pray that terrible image out of his head, and wondered
not for the first time if now and again he brushed against monsters.
    She clung to him with a desperate strength that frightened him,
and when he finally opened his eyes to tell her that they should be more
careful about the baby, because he really was worried about the baby,
frightened for her baby, he could see that her mask had slipped, more of her
face was exposed, and the rows of circular cigarette burns like tiny ruined
mouths all around both of her eyes.
    “Tommy says I’ve got to wear my mask,” she whispered huskily, and
refitted it to her face, and tried to draw him back into her, into her smell
and lips and eyes, into skin thin as desire, brief as a flash of phosphors on