Circling the Drain Read Online Free

and rose from the armchair as Jack reentered. Back later, I said.
    See, love was not part of the bargain. I know love never is, etc., etc., but I expected more respect. I’ll be your wife, I had told him, professionally. Like a job, I’d said. You hire me and that’s my job: wife. Nothing else.
    Right, he’d said, beaming. Wife.
    It wasn’t until later that I realized how little he understood.
    So he didn’t like Fred. But everyone liked Fred. It was part of the way of the universe: people met and liked Fred. That was how the world was formed. But not Sausage Steve. The first thing he said when he met Fred was: He is not the good man. He is not the husband for you.
    Right, I told him, you hired me. He disappeared. He’s just my obscenely perfect ex-boyfriend who has a strange effect on people.
    Steve didn’t get it. He is the no good, he muttered, and glared at Fred.
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    Jack née Fred was many things, I must agree, but not really a bad person, exactly. I mean he acted irresponsibly, sure, but generally because of a helpful impulse, I thought, not a malicious sensibility.
    Still, I felt stuff in the back of my head, forgotten dreams maybe, fleeting thoughts, the sense that I had a running list of things I was losing, things left behind. When we walked out of the house, I looked at Fred but he had his hands inhis pockets and was staring at the night sky, the fat ladies blocking the stars like black holes, like gasps of breath, like forgotten clouds. I shook my head at the way that I felt, yearning for his touch, the anger I’d been storing hidden somewhere distant. He waited for me to catch up, then he put his arm around my shoulders, kissed my forehead and I followed him home.
    In the morning we had breakfast at a diner near the park. I sipped coffee and Fred gnawed a banana muffin. The staff watched us, frightened—they had seen the damage Fred could do. This probably isn’t such a great idea, I began in my head, but what I said was, Nice day.
    On the radio there was much debate over how to get the fat ladies down from the sky. They waved happily in the daylight but I imagined they must be hungry by now.
    Then I thought maybe this was the evolution of things, the way the world spun. Maybe this was the way things changed and maybe that was true for the fat ladies also—that one minute something was an orange and the next it was a peach. One minute the world holds you down and the next it lets you go. And maybe they would drop quietly as they lost weight until they landed here like the rest of us, drawn, haggard and dreamless, all their glorious roundness gone.

TESTIMONY
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    1.
    About 2 years ago I had a dream…. I walked outside with my classmates and the sky was a ruby red. I…felt very frightened by the color…. In the sky was large Hebrew writing…there was a voice that read it aloud. The voice was very deep and loud (I knew it was God) and he said, “Kneel before me.”
    Nacogdoches, TX USA
    In the city there were trees outside my window but they were very far away and small. Mostly I saw apartment buildings, housing projects, people struggling through their day. The city was a vigorous place, and at first it suited me.
    I moved there after my brother, Jack, died. I wanted words, a voice, something, and I quickly became addicted to other people’s prophecies. Most of them were dark dreams that I read on the Internet: dreams of doom, or slow disorderly destruction. Not many were hopeful, but in the gray light of my bedroom, the green glow of my computer, they felt intimate and familiar.
    As I wandered through the visions night after night, I saw lines weaving and dipping: war, anarchy, rubble. I collected these threads, strung them across my apartment, confused myself in their web and slept hard and dreamless.
    My co-workers would have been surprised to learn of my fascination with prophecy. At twenty-nine, I worked in a