Read The Joy of Killing for Free Online

down at the typewriter and settle my fingers on the keyboard. The girl slowly raised her head up until my dick popped out of her mouth; and—I mean this literally—I felt an intense pain as the cool air rushed the head. Her lips pressed into mine. I reached my right hand under her sweater and ran it up the flesh until I came to the soft mound.
    She sat up and slowly lifted her sweater over her breasts. I glanced around, then back: even in the diffusion I could see that the breasts were perfectly symmetrical and several shades lighter than the rest of her. The nipples were more button-like than I had imagined, a little darker, as was the surrounding area. “Jesus,” I whispered. She pulled the sweater up a little further, and my hands rose slowly and reached for them, fingers spreading as if to pluck fruit from a tree. I gently bunched each breast between my thumb and fingers until the nipples protruded out like dark cannon on a hilltop. I looked for a difference between them, but they were identical. My eyes shut just as my lips closed on the tip of the left nipple, and then moved down a little, and then a little further, until the entirety of it was in my mouth. It felt different than it had in my fingers; not smooth and perfectly shaped by a potter’s hand, but with tiny crevices across it and rough edges around it. I began sucking on it, like a baby. There was a little shiver in her chest. My lips found the tiny bumps at the base. A slight move by her pushed herother breast a little closer to my mouth. I abandoned the left nipple and slid my mouth an inch or two over, until I was hovering over the other. She tapped my head lightly, and I hesitated another second. I bit down, and the girl’s chest bucked a little, and she gave a muffled cry, and her chest bucked again. She turned to me with her other breast in her hand and pushed it into my mouth. I bit down on the nipple. She froze in midair for a moment, then released, and her breastbone banged into my nose.
    W HAT WAS THAT ? A scraping sound? Like a heavy object being dragged across the floor. I close my eyes and listen closely: nothing. Old houses are full of noises. I had checked in the closets and under the beds, even the fruit cellar around back. Everyone is gone now. I’m carrying forth alone, and I’m tired. I can see my mother standing at the kitchen counter in her apron, cutting brightly colored vegetables on a board and humming quietly to herself. Joseph had been in our kitchen more than once for snacks after a day at the water. My mother loved to ruffle his thick sandy hair. I don’t remember her, or my father, mentioning his name afterward.
    The innocence the boy on the train wears as a cloak doesn’t seem like that to him now; he feels clumsy and awkward and ignorant; but the girl sees it, and it draws her to him. She is used to boys seeking to devour her in one bite, and in his hesitation she sees sweetness, perhaps even caring.
    I cherish the story of the night on the train, not only for its own sake, but because it’s clear to me now that the telling of it is the only way to reach the finish line before the dawn.
    I turn the light out and listen. Nothing. Through the window I see that night’s black canopy has been punctured by a shower of tiny diamonds. Clouds sail beneath the moon, now a whiter shade in the glow of the stars, and cast their own shadows across the lake. There is time left, I think, but not a lot. I wonder, as I have before, what the boy would’ve been like if he had never lost the story of the detectives at the front door and what had gone before. Once the membrane is breached, there is little to be done. No repair. No healing. For some, the best way is to die before the roiling images burst through. As for me, the boy on the train, or the unsuspecting groom at the wedding ceremony, the future was long ago foretold. My father, in his slacks and summer shirt, came to the door in his usual