Burridge Unbound Read Online Free Page B

shit ache turn
not Joanne
she’s the safe spot the warm voice
damn!
I can’t move it’s all pressing down
don’t touch her!
a slope of earth turned mud and sliding now burying me take the house swallow the town your kids your life
not her!
I hear her voice now from way up on the surface shrieking God I know what they’re doing I can’t stand it I shouldn’t have called I should’ve just let them kill me don’t they know one shock too many and my heart bursts that’s it end
fin
I’m free I didn’t need to call Joanne I’m sorry so sorry I brought you into the trap
goddamn them …
    Hands now on my face going for my throat ripping into me burning fire arcing across my limbs and I need to go deeper into blackness down into the hood just further and it goes away it does they never kill me they never do it just will go like this and on until it doesn’t until …
    Breathe and breathe and breathe.
    It’s what you do after the twister has left. When you’ve been shipwrecked and lie on the beach seven-eighths dead with the cold waves washing you and your skull feels like cracked eggshells your skin tissue paper guts a mudslide trees upon houses and cattle corpses and dead cars and mud, mostly mud.… I open my eyes and for several heartbeats cannot comprehend what reality this is. Slowly the world returns. I’m wrapped stiff in bedsheets. Joanne is holding a warm cloth on my head. My tongue feels swollen, eyes beaten, pores exhausted. It’s morning. Which morning? Sometimes I find myself days later. I was doing so well. Wasn’t I doing well?
    Joanne unwraps me, cleans me gently, draws a hot bath. I hobble out of bed, soak in the water, sip hot lemon-and-honey tea with the lights off. “When did you get here?” I ask softly.
    “That night,” she says. “I should’ve come when you called.”
    “I told you not to.”
    “Yes.”
    Soft music in the background. My eyes are so sore, but I don’t want to close them. I lose so much when I do.
    This is how it is after a twister: you’re thankful to be breathing still. You don’t know how you survived. It’s internal, a savage storm that comes from nowhere, goes to nowhere … A virus injected with all the other drugs. The Kartouf virus. It shifts, lurks in my organs, my brain cells. Attacks now and again just to let me know:
you never really escaped
. I’m not free. I will be destroyed, any time they choose.
    This is what terror is all about.
    The water turns cool and I reheat it, turns cool and I reheat. Just want to stay here. One breath at a time. Scrambled eggs and more tea. Served in the bath. Sometimes months go by with nothing. Just the threat, the knowledge. The Kartouf is still inside me.
    I get out finally and dry off, pat the towel gently against my aching skin. On with my thick robe. Joanne tells me to sleep, but I refuse. Gently. The only way I can now. Quite a blue sky. She tells me it’s cooler, that the storm brought in a breath of autumn.
    “What day is it?”
    “Thursday.”
    I sort through the lint in my brain. The twister hit on Tuesday night.
    The tears start. Everyone says I need to cry them. But two years later – two fucking years later? Do I still need to crythem? How long does this go on for? I cry the tears and then head back to my computer. Thursday! What time is it? 4:02. It couldn’t be morning, it’s too light. All that traffic on the bridges. It’s Thursday fucking afternoon.
    “What happened?” I call to Joanne. “Did anything happen while I was out?”
    I like that word,
out
. It sounds so inoffensive.
    “You need to rest, Bill.”
    “I know. I have been. Did anything happen?” This computer takes so long to boot up.
    “Clinton bombed terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan,” she says. “It’s classic wag the dog.”
    “Oh, for God’s sakes!” I have a friend in Sudan. “Was it Khartoum?” This computer!
    “I think so.” She tells me the announcement came just as Monica Lewinsky was going in to