Read Mercy for Free Online Page B

was some army o f them, some mass, a creature
    from the deep, the blob, a giant parasite, some spreading
    monster, pods, wolfmen. They called you names and they
    hissed, hot steam o ff their tongues. They followed you in
    beat-up cars or they just stood around and they whistled and
    made noises, and the dark pushed you down and banged into
    you and you were on your hands and knees, the skin torn off,
    not praying, waiting, wanting all right, wanting for the dark
    to move o ff you, pick itself up and run. The dark was hissing
    and hot and hard with a jagged bone, a cold, brutal bone, and
    hips packed tight. The dark wasn’t just at night. The dark was
    any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there,
    right up against you, pressing. You can’t see anything and you
    don’t know any names, not who they are or the names for
    what they do; the dark is all you know, familiar, old, from
    long ago, is it Nino or Joe or Ken or Curt, curly hair or
    straight, hard hips, tight, driven, familiar with strange words
    whispered in your ear, like wind lashing it. Do they see you,
    do they know your name? I’m Andrea you whisper in the dark
    and the dark whispers back, okay babe; shut up babe; that’s
    cool babe; that’s a pretty name babe; and pulls out all the w ay
    and drives back in, harder, more. Nino is rough and bad, him
    and his friend, and he says what’s w rong with making love
    here, right now, on this lunch counter. We are in Lits. I’m
    alone, a grown-up teenage girl; at the lunch counter, myself.
    They come up to me. I don’t know the name o f the other one. I
    have never heard anyone say “ making love” before. Nino

    takes the salt shaker and the pepper shaker from the counter
    and he rubs them against each other, slow , and he talks staring
    at me so I can’t m ove m y head aw ay from his eyes and he says
    w hat’s w rong with it, here, now , in the daytime, on this lunch
    counter, you and me, now, and I don’t know w hat’s w rong
    with it; is N ino one o f them, in the dark? Stuart is m y age from
    school before he stopped coming and went bad and started
    running with gangs and he warned me to stay aw ay from him
    and Nino who is older and bad and where they go. N ino has a
    knife. I write m y first poem for Nino; I want it to be N ino; I’d
    touch him back. I ran away lots o f times. I was on the bus to
    N ew Y o rk lots o f times. I necked with old men I found on the
    bus lots o f times. I necked with Vincent and Charles different
    times, adults, Vincent had gray hair and a thick foreign accent,
    Italian, and Charles had a hard, bronze face and an accent you
    could barely hear from someplace far, far away, and they liked
    fifteen-year-old girls; and they whispered deep, horsey,
    choked words and had wet mouths; and you crunched down
    in the seats and they kissed you all over, then with their hands
    they took your head and forced it into their laps. One became a
    famous m ovie star and I went to watch him in cow boy films.
    He was the baddie but he was real nice to me. I said I wanted to
    be a writer, a real writer, a great writer like Rimbaud or
    D ostoevsky. He didn’t laugh. He said we were both artists and
    it was hard. He said, Andrea, that’s a pretty name. He said
    follow your dream, never give up, it takes a long time, years
    even, and we slouched down in the seats. I knew the highw ay
    to N ew Y o rk and the streets when I got there. I knew the back
    alleys in Philadelphia too but I didn’t like Philadelphia. It was
    fake, pretend folksingers and pretend guitar players and
    pretend drug dealers, all attitude, some pot, nothing hard,
    pretend poets, a different attitude, no poems. Y o u couldn’t get
    lost in the dark, it w asn’t dense enough, it w asn’t desolate
    enough, it was safe really, a playpen, the fake girls went there

    to not get hurt, to have regular boyfriends, to pretend they
    were different or bad; but I was really lost so I had to be lost,
    not pretend, in a dark