Breeds Read Online Free

of the hill. The inhabitants of Upper Amherst Cove had fought for the delivery service, else they’d have to drive down to Bonavista to get their mail. And with his fixed income, it was a challenge every month to keep the house warm and the scattered bit of food on the table. Politicians didn’t have that particular worry, not with their fat pensions. Just the thought of their campaign-smiling asses, all understanding when they were looking for the senior citizen vote, only to reveal their true self-serving interests once in power. It made his scrotum and asshole pucker up in a tug-o-war on either side of an angry taint. Soon, very soon, if cutbacks to regular pensions continued, and everything else kept rising, it wouldn’t be a challenge of heating the house and having food on the table––it would be a choice. The thought of it made his blood boil all the more and he scowled his angst at the falling snow.
    Standing in front of the mailboxes, he got out his key and unlocked his own. Grocery flyers, cable bill, which he’d have to cancel this month. Nothing more, so he slammed the mailbox shut with a muttered curse. Still nothing on his damn colonoscopy either, and that riled him anew. The Canadian health system was another victim of government cutbacks and, while once proudly heralded as being one of the best, was now reduced to shit. A year he’d been waiting for notification––always sent by mail, never over the phone––of his turn to head into Clarenville and have his shit chute plumbed with a camera. A simple cautionary procedure for men of his age, and one he despised having done, but to wait nearly a year on something three years already overdue was something else. His doctor sympathized with him, citing a lack of resources. Shea knew it wasn’t up to him, but it didn’t make the anger and frustration go away.
    Flyers in hand, he took a moment to gaze past the mailbox, where the hillside fell away into an enormous ice-filled bay. The other side of the water lay hidden this morning, lurking somewhere behind a thick, calming snowfall. The view always relaxed him, vented the rage of his memories of seemingly unheeded protests to local municipal town officials, and he stood there and just mentally linked flakes with lowering his blood pressure.
    If it didn’t work, he had roughly a hundred and fifty liters of homebrew sitting in his basement which sure as hell would. Thirty of which had just reached the bare minimum four weeks of aging, making it just ripe for chugging.
    “Lovely day, Harry.”
    Harry Shea turned and saw an elderly man with a blue snow shovel in hand, a pinched cone of a bright red, homemade stocking cap on his head, and a black-and-yellow snowsuit replete with a reflective orange-and-yellow vest. The figure ambled along a thin path, some fifty feet long, trenched between the porch of a white, two-story house and the main road.
    “Lovely day, Sammy,” Harry greeted back. Samuel Walsh was another of the twenty homeowners of Upper Amherst Cove, and probably the only true friend he had in the small community.
    “Gray, though,” Sammy said, poking at his thick bifocals. The brutes almost completely shielded his face from the weather.
    “Gray day, yes sir, gray she is,” Harry agreed, and studied the red cap with disapproval. “Y’look like a fuckin’ simpleton with that.”
    Sammy shrugged. “Sally knitted it for me, so I wears it. What can I say? If I don’t wear it, well, I don’t wanna think about that bit.”
    “Even if it makes ye look like a retarded elf?”
    “S’pose so.”
    “My son. She’s got you by the balls, don’t she?”
    “She does. She does.”
    “She’d skin ya.”
    “She would.”
    “Skin ya proper.”
    “Yeaup,” Sammy agreed again, stretching the colloquial mashing of ‘yeah’ and ‘yup.’
    “Whattaya up to today?” Harry asked his friend, to which Sammy held up the shovel. “Gettin’ started early, ain’tcha?”
    “Naw,” Sammy replied.