Read Body and Soul: Short Story for Free Online Page A

laundry on a windy day and the sheets were pelting her head. She remembers her own daughter’s tantrums at this age, her cruel tongue, and she tells Terry, “This is nothing. This won’t hurt you.”
    One day, though, when Julie is stomping around the living room, the picture over the couch—an oil painting of two Scotty dogs exactly like Angus and Haggis, the litter-mates she andNorman used to have—comes crashing down, ripping away a chunk of plaster and missing Terry, who is looking at a magazine on the floor, by a fraction of an inch.
    After the first seconds of silence following Terry’s scream, Aunt Bea turns to Julie and says, “Bad girl.” She is so angry that her jaw trembles.
    Julie throws herself on the floor and begins to punch herself in the head.
    “Bad,” Aunt Bea says. A sob leaps to her throat.
    Terry is kneeling over the painting. It has landed face down and she seems to be trying to dig her fingers under the frame.
    “Don’t do that!” Aunt Bea snaps.
    “But where’s their backs!” Terry cries. “Where’s the back of them?”
    Aunt Bea has no choice except to call Fred, the superintendent, to fix the plaster. She hates doing this because Fred always acts rudely interrupted and because the first time Terry saw him after the operation, she said, “I thought you would have hair.” But Fred says, “Christ, I guess I better take a look at it,” and arrives with powdered plaster, which he mixes in Aunt Bea’s cut-glass salad bowl. When he’s done he makes Aunt Bea come out of the bathroom so that he can hold the nail up before her eyes. “You mean to tell me you were using this?” he says.
    Aunt Bea fails to understand.
    “You can’t hang a picture that size with a half-inch nail. You got to use a screw. Drill a hole, stick in a wall plug.”
    “Oh, I see.” Aunt Bea pats her heart. “Could you do that for me, Fred?” She doesn’t own a drill. She has palpitations and gas. She has just remembered that it’s her wedding anniversary. She can’t get Julie, who is still lying on the floor, grimacing wildly, to so much as glance at her.
    “The plaster’s wet,” Fred says, as if she’s an idiot.
    “When it’s dry then,” Aunt Bea says.
    “I haven’t got all day,” he says. “I’ll do it now, a couple ofinches over from where you had it. Doesn’t look like it was centred on the wall anyway.”
    He comes back with a drill. Terry covers her ears when he turns it on, but Julie scrambles to her feet and stands right next to him, so close that he lifts his elbow and orders her to back up. A few seconds later he says, “Christ, now look what you made me do.” He’s drilled a hole too big for the plugs he has in his pocket.
    He goes back down to the basement. Terry accompanies him to the elevator so that she can press the button. Aunt Bea goes into the bathroom to take more antacid.
    Julie picks up the drill.
    She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t make a peep. When Aunt Bea hears the whirring, all she thinks is, That was fast. She comes out of the bathroom just as Terry disappears into the living room.
    Terry’s scream is as high and clean as a needle.
    “Oh, dear,” Aunt Bea says, because she doesn’t know yet what she is seeing. Julie’s head jerks, as if she is sneezing. Red paint drips from her forehead. She holds the drill in both hands. Fred’s drill—that’s what’s upsetting to Aunt Bea. Fred’s paint.
    Terry screams again. Right into Julie’s head the scream goes, right into the hole where Julie’s finger is going. Aunt Bea brings down the knick-knack holder on her way to the floor.
    Everybody reassures Aunt Bea. The doctor pokes rods into a rubberized brain to demonstrate the harmless route the drill bit took and the dozen other harmless routes it might have taken. The child psychologist says that nothing short of boring the hole and sticking her finger in it was probably going to convince Julie there weren’t rocks in her head. The social worker says that