Read Are You Loathsome Tonight? for Free Online

useless tissue invading his steadfast soldier's heart. Billy understood none of this at the time, did not even properly understand that his grandfather had died. No one had told him. “Do you want to see Granddad?” Momma asked him when he came running into the house one day, knees scraped raw from the big girls pushing him into the grit and gravel of the vacant lot next door. He wiped the dirty tears off his face—Momma would never notice them anyway—and nodded. Of course he wanted to see Granddad. He always wanted to see Granddad.
    Momma lifted him up and up, through the warm viscid air of Grammaw's parlor, past the shelves of fragile knickknacks and figurines Grammaw always told him not to touch, even though Billy didn't want to touch them; they were useless, not like Granddad's gun. The gun could blow them into a million razor-edged smithereens. Momma lifted Billy until it seemed his head was nearly brushing the cobwebbed crystal teardrops of the antique chandelier.
    And there was Granddad, looking more enormous than ever because he was so still, his best-suited body long and narrow and somehow flat in the confines of the wooden box that cradled him. Billy felt his heart rocketing in his chest, a strange and fearful excitement building there, trickling down through his ribs and into his groin. Dead ; this was what the grownups meant by that short, inflectionless, utterly final word.
    Then he remembered that it was his grandfather who was dead, and it felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach harder than the big girls ever could. The air in his lungs went hot and searing.
    Granddad's cheeks were so sunken that Billy could see the outlines of his false teeth in his mouth, big and horsey. Granddad's eyelids were stained pale blue, webbed with tiny threads of purple and scarlet. Granddad's nostrils were huge and black like holes in the earth; Billy could see tiny yellow hairs bristling at their edges, and deep inside the left one, a delicate scrim of snot. How could you be dead and still have a booger in your nose?
    â€œHe's just sleeping, honey,” Momma whispered as if hearing his thoughts. Looking back now, that seemed the cruelest thing of all. She had made him think Granddad would wake up, would come back somehow, someday. But Granddad never did.
    Within the year, Momma was gone too. This was the Summer of Love, and she heard the siren song of San Francisco, of men who had never seen a Georgia dawn and never wanted to, who thought of her pussy as the gateway to the Goddess, not a combination sperm receptacle and baby dispenser. She wanted flowers in her hair, music and orange sunshine swirling in her brain, not the endless dull trap of motherhood.
    She never found any of it. Hitching on I-95, she got in the wrong car somewhere outside Las Vegas, a haunted part of the desert just south of the Nevada Test Range. A skull turned up a year later in a dry lakebed, bearing the toothmarks of coyotes, bleached to a brittle sheen; flesh and hair long since stripped away. The remaining teeth matched her dental records, and they shipped it back to Georgia in a cardboard box. Grammaw had it buried in the church cemetery next to Granddad. Standing at the grave, Billy felt a dull vindication. He hoped she had known fear and pain. He hoped she had thought of him when she realized she was going to die.
    Billy's father, he of the logical mind, was long gone. Billy remained with his faded belle of a grandmother, who always smelled of sickly-sweet dusting powder and lost time, who was kind to him but so vague that she could barely carry on a conversation with an intelligent six-year-old.
    Each Sunday Billy was forced to sit through the slow torture of a Baptist sermon, enjoying only the lurid image of Jesus nailed to the cross, filthy iron spikes raping his hands and feet, acid-green thorns piercing the smooth flesh of his brow, raw infected gash weeping in his side. He died for your sins , thundered the