Read Eggplant Alley (9781593731410) for Free Online

sweaty. The cut on his face stung.
    The elevator thumped on the ground floor.
    Click-click click-click click-click.
    Footsteps cascaded down the stairs, coming for Nicky.
    The elevator door grumbled open. Nicky squeezed through when the opening was barely wide enough. He smacked his palm on the CLOSE DOOR button.
    Click-click click-click click-click.
    The footsteps hit the last of the stairs. The odd thought occurred to Nicky: I am being stalked by a tap-dancer.
    He leaned into the CLOSE DOOR button.
    The door grumbled and slid across. Like everything else in Eggplant Alley, the elevator door had seen better days. It shuddered, moaned. The door stopped closing.
    Clickety-click. Clickety-click. CLICKETY-CLICK.
    Frantic footsteps sounded on the lobby tile, nearby to the elevator.
    â€œClose, door, close!” Nicky begged.
    The door shuddered, crunched. The door slid, closing.
    Click-CLICK.
    A face flashed in the narrowing space of the elevator door. The face was contorted, thick-lipped, grotesque and yellow-red in the shadows thrown by the elevator light. Nicky saw eyes bulge behind black-rimmed eyeglasses. The lunatic creature emitted a raspy panting sound. Nicky was horrified when he saw tiny fingers claw around the sliding elevator door. The fingers scratched and hissed on the metal.
    Nicky opted for surrender. He would hand over the mail.
    â€œI’ll let you have it,” Nicky howled.
    The small fingers snapped away from the elevator door.
    And the door clonked shut.
    â€œClose shave,” Nicky said, breathing heavily. He felt the sweet lift of the elevator in his belly.
    Nicky squeezed out of the elevator on the fifth floor. He thrust his key into the lock of 5-C and zipped through the door in record time. He slammed the door, turned the lock, and hooked the security chain, as fast as his trembling fingers could work.

File Clerk
8
    N icky huffed and puffed into the kitchen. The envelopes clattered in his shaking hands. Mom was seated at the kitchen table and did not look up from her beadwork. Beadwork involved stringing exactly 467 orange plastic beads onto an twelve-inch length of elastic to produce a cheap necklace. A friend of Uncle Dominic’s from Brooklyn would send over big spools of elastic and huge cardboard boxes filled with thousands and thousands of beads. The guy paid Mom two cents for every necklace she put together. Beadwork was part of the effort to get money to move away from Eggplant Alley.
    Nicky panted, “Mom! This guy, this creature, came after me in the lobby.”
    â€œI’ve made two dollars today,” Mom said without a trace of pride. “That will make a nice down payment on a house, right? I never want to see an orange bead for the rest of my life.”
    â€œHe chased me from the second floor to the lobby. I think he was after the mail.”
    â€œAnything in the mail?” Mom said over her shoulder.
    Nicky shuffled the envelopes in his moist hand. Second from the top was an envelope with a red, white, and blue border. Theenvelope had a military postmark. The script writing on the envelope was Roy’s.
    â€œYeah,” Nicky said. “This.”
    Mom dropped a string of beads, and forty-five minutes’ work unraveled onto the table. Mom grabbed the envelope. She took a seat, carefully peeled open the envelope flap, and extracted the letter. The letter was written on a slice of thin paper, which folded over Mom’s hands like a tissue. Mom chewed her lower lip as she read.
    â€œOkay, okay. Good,” Mom said, nodding. She handed the letter to Nicky. “You want to see?”
    â€œNo, tell me what it says.”
    Mom read off the main points. The weather was really hot in Vietnam. The place stank like the back alley of the Chinese Palace restaurant on Broadway. Roy was assigned as a file clerk at a huge base called Long Binh. Roy and some of his fellow soldiers at the base were thinking of playing stickball. Half the day he worked in an