Read The Canal for Free Online

expressway." The expressway was
momentum, it was progress, it was optimistic. Everything the canal
wasn't.
    "You're trying to change the subject."
    "No. No. You were, you were talking about the
neighborhood."
    "I was talking about you, Alan." She shook
the newspaper at him. "I was talking about these, these crazies and
you're out there, you're around them, Alan. It's like...it's like
they're part of your workplace. And what if...what I'm trying to
say is, God forbid. God forbid one of those crazies were to skin
you, Alan. That's what I'm trying to say.
    "I worry, Alan. What would I do if something
happened to you? What would I do? Me, a widow? And with a child?
Where would I turn? How would I survive? I'd become one of those
tramps, Alan, one of those soggy tramps who go to bars by
themselves. All alone. Doing anything for a drink. But who would
possibly want me, Alan? Who, at all? Except for rough dockworkers!
Longshoremen!"
    "Suze--"
    "Don't Suze me, Alan! I will not be Suze'd!
You... You might as well take my skin. Take it right now and throw
it all away. Throw it out in the street, I don't care! Because
that's how I feel, Alan, peeled -- peeled to the core!"
    She was near tears. And Alan was...the truth
was, he'd heard all this before. This argument of theirs was a
running motif. What had she said the last time? She had said that
she couldn't live on a widow's pension. She said she would not be
one of those women who clip coupons. She would not hunt
bargains.
    "Susan," he began, "nothing's going to happen
to me. It can't, if that makes sense. But if it makes you feel
better, then the Garden of Peace would be fine. But I'm not..." He
didn't want to say the word, it was sour to him, "...dead yet. I'm
not even thinking about that, Susan. It's kind of off the table
right now."
    Which was true. You couldn't accept death.
Acceptance was acknowledgement. And acknowledgement was defeat.
    Susan averted her eyes. She stared at the
baby's head, into the gauze of silken hair. "I'm just saying," she
sniffled.
    Alan let out a slow breath. Coincidentally,
the real disagreement, it hadn't even begun. Not even close.
Sensing a lull, Alan picked up his fork and knife. No, the real war
was just getting started. Because where Susan and he exchanged
their most acrimonious broadsides was right in front of him. The
food.
    Punishment on a plate.
    His leftovers, they looked to be quivering.
From palsy, or derangement. And Alan, he had merely to approach a
cutlet with his knife for it to burst open with a wet groan and
release a sickly steam.
    But Alan would devour every last gelatinous
dredge. He would not concede this to Susan, would not acknowledge
her insistence on his mortality. Nor could he allow any evidence of
this criminal meal to remain in existence, compelled as he was,
fundamentally obliged by some deep-seated and immutable force, by
the highest principles of justice, to return his plate's porcelain
to its former unsullied grace.
    And so, with Susan watching intently, Alan
made his counter-argument. He gouged loose a corner of chicken and
pulled it free. He placed it in his mouth and hoped for the
best...
    Texture: disturbing. Aroma: past due. He
detected the taste of refrigerator -- a vague amalgam of Freon and
the spirits of onions past. But that was a gourmet highlight
compared to the overall spoil, which somehow imparted a rather
vibrant and violent memory, that of the original animal itself,
stripped of its feathers, naked and pecking, writhing atop a
blood-drenched chopping block.
    Swallowing began to assume hara-kiri
proportion. All his instinct, all the collected wisdom of ancestral
eons begged him not to do it. Alan searched Susan's face for even
the slightest hint that she might be enjoying this.
    Rescue came from the telephone. Wondrous,
glorious rescue. Alan immediately dropped his utensils and hurried
into the living room, spitting chicken into his hand.
    "Yes?"
    "Alan, it's Vincent."
    "Oh, Vincent."
    "...Yeah?"
    "I'm glad