Read Radio Belly for Free Online Page A

and on, out and out, like a slow-leaking air mattress. Again three days in which I held her and became her. Three days to learn the miracles of the body, and of the bright still organs, and of the heart, slippery like a grape and too soft for this world.
    THE GUYS I found were mostly immigrants, mostly illegal. Mario the butcher. Multiple generations in the business and yet, in this country, he couldn’t get certified, so he got set up in a barn on the edge of town and learned to say yes to every kind of work—off-season game and more complicated jobs too. We sipped Cinzano on a couple of overturned buckets in the chill of his workshop, and I asked him, did he ever look at the living and see what they would become, was he ruined by what he did?
    An old leather tanner named Yosef—guy with a moustache like you wouldn’t believe. We stayed up late drinking clear liqueur that tasted like burnt hair while he told me about his best work, a yellowing hide pegged to the wall above us, a piece he’d tanned with such care, making sure to keep every freckle and detail in the skin. He’d tanned it in the old country the old way, rubbing the brains into the skin to begin the process. Eet adds the peer-son-ality to the skeen, he said, and his moustache jounced and bounced in such a way that I couldn’t help but mouth the words along with him.
    An upholsterer named Jesus. Together we picked our way through his shop, a graveyard of chairs waiting to be stuffed and covered. We passed a yerba mate gourd back and forth while he helped me choose a little loveseat.
    I want you to know that technically, it’s a double-wide chair, but I call it a loveseat because I’m a romantic and this is a love story. You should see the leather, so well-worn and gentled that it’s transcended itself, the way the paper of an old map can come to feel like something else over time. And you should see how, when I step away, the leather of this loveseat remembers my shape, how it waits for my return. Day after day I sit here, looking out at the Baja coastline, thinking of her, snoozing the days of my early retirement away. Day after day I broadcast my story at the outer edges of the shortwave dial. Sometimes I have visitors, lovers and dreamers who’ve heard my story and made their way to the end of this long and bumpy road to see for themselves. They pay their money and I let them sit on my loveseat with the box of letters. There are some who find me cruel, some who question what I’ve done, but that’s because they can’t imagine a love like this. Sometimes, in the moments before or just after sleep, I can hardly imagine it myself.

Large Garbage
    T HEY’LL COME AT night, the papers warned. They’ll come hauling carts of empty wine bottles, all racket and ruckus, their skin the colour of city, the smog rubbed right in. They’ll have no hygiene, no fixed address, no shoes or toothbrushes. Some will have no teeth. They’ll come with their sores and their fleas and their nineteenth-century coughs, hacking and spitting, scratching and bleeding, right into our gardens and backyard gazebos. Like disease they’ll come, fast and unforgiving.
    â€œA new breed of homeless. A sign of the new economic reality,” the experts claimed, although it meant little to us at the time. We knew they were overeducated, unemployed and migrating, east to west, across the country; we’d heard rumours of how they set up at the edges of wealthy neighbourhoods, living off the fat of the land, hosting late-night salons in other people’s living rooms, but we all had our own economic realities to contend with. Some of us had even been forced to lay off the help.
    At some point we stopped reading the stories. Sure, we fit the profile: a pocket of stately homes just at the edge of downtown, but our city was the westernmost in the country, set apart from the mainland by a two-hour stretch of ocean. We knew the