Deathbird Stories Read Online Free Page B

was cold and untoasted. There was no lettuce under the patty.
    Beth managed to catch the waitress’s eye. The girl approached with an annoyed look. “Please toast the bun and may I have a piece of lettuce?” Beth said.
    “We dun’ do that,” the waitress said, turned half away as though she would walk in a moment.
    “You don’t do what?”
    “We dun’ toass the bun here.”
    “Yes, but I want the bun toasted,” Beth said firmly. “An’ you got to pay for extra lettuce.”
    “If I was asking for extra lettuce,” Beth said, getting annoyed, “I would pay for it, but since there’s no lettuce here, I don’t think I should be charged extra for the first piece.”
    “We dun’ do that.”
    The waitress started to walk away. “Hold it,” Beth said, raising her voice just enough so the assembly-line eaters on either side stared at her. “You mean to tell me I have to pay a dollar and a quarter and I can’t get a piece of lettuce or even get the bun toasted?”
    “Ef you dun’ like it...”
    “Take it back.”
    “You gotta pay for it, you order it.”
    “I said take it back, I don’t want the fucking thing”‘
    The waitress scratched it off the check. The milk cost 27¢ and tasted going-sour. It was the first time in her life that Beth had said that word aloud.
    At the cashier’s stand, Beth said to the sweating man with the felt-tip pens in his shirt pocket, “Just out of curiosity, are you interested in complaints?”
    “No!” he said, snarling, quite literally snarling. He did not look up as he punched out 73¢ and it came rolling down the chute.
    The city responded to her overtures:
    It was raining again. She was trying to cross Second Avenue, with the light. She stepped off the curb and a car came sliding through the red and splashed her. “Hey!” she yelled.
    “Eat shit, sister!” the driver yelled back, turning the corner.
    Her boots, her legs and her overcoat were splattered with mud. She stood trembling on the curb.
    The city responded to her overtures:
    She emerged from the building at One Astor Place with her big briefcase full of Laban charts; she was adjusting her rain scarf about her head. A well-dressed man with an attaché case thrust the handle of his umbrella up between her legs from the rear. She gasped and dropped her case.
    The city responded and responded and responded.
    Her overtures altered quickly.
    The old drunk with the stippled cheeks extended his hand and mumbled words. She cursed him and walked on up Broadway past the beaver film houses.
    She crossed against the lights on Park Avenue, making hackies slam their brakes to avoid hitting her; she used that word frequently now.
    When she found herself having a drink with a man who had elbowed up beside her in the singles’ bar, she felt faint and knew she should go home.
    But Vermont was so far away.

    Nights later. She had come home from the Lincoln Center ballet, and gone straight to bed. Lying half-asleep in her bedroom, she heard an alien sound. One room away, in the living room, in the dark, there was a sound. She slipped out of bed and went to the door between the rooms. She fumbled silently for the switch on the lamp just inside the living room, and found it, and clicked it on. A black man in a leather car coat was trying to get out of the apartment. In that first flash of light filling the room she noticed the television set beside him on the floor as he struggled with the door, she noticed the police lock and bar had been broken in a new and clever manner New York magazine had not yet reported in a feature article on apartment ripoffs, she noticed that he had gotten his foot tangled in the telephone cord that she had requested be extra-long so she could carry the instrument into the bathroom, I don’t want to miss any business calls when the shower is running; she noticed all things in perspective and one thing with sharpest clarity: the expression on the burglar’s face.
    There was something familiar in that