Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story Read Online Free Page A

the Greyhound bus for Toronto. “Gussied up like a prostitute,” she said without malice. “You know the way she does.”
    “What happened to that puppy?” Marion asked. “The German shepherd?”
    “Oh, it died,” Mrs. Hodgson said. “When I wasn’t looking somebody threw in a dog biscuit laced with, oh, whatchamacallit, oh—” She snapped her fingers. “Arsenic.”
    “But that’s terrible,” Marion said.
    “Yes,” Mrs. Hodgson said vaguely.
    “Did they ever catch the person?” Marion asked.
    Mrs. Hodgson shifted on her stool. “Shut your yakking!” she shouted at the parrot in the cage behind her. She turned back. “Poison’s an awful way to die,” she said. “Contortions andfoaming at the mouth. But falling from a great height, that’s what I’d hate the most. Knowing in seconds you were going to splat. I heard of this man, he was like a mad scientist. He threw live animals from apartment balconies to see how they landed. Naturally, the cats tended to land on their feet, even if they died. But I’ll tell you the interesting part. The higher the cats fell from, the better chance they had of living. Because a cat has to straighten itself out in the air, and that takes time.”
    A couple of weeks later Marion was driving by the pet store and saw a Help Wanted sign in the window. On a whim she went inside and asked about it. It was part-time, Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and seeing as she never saw John before lunch anyway, she decided to take it. She was prepared to be alone in the store (Mrs. Hodgson’s plan was to do bookkeeping and chores at home), but more often than not, Mrs. Hodgson was sitting on the stool when Marion arrived, and she didn’t budge until Marion left. While Marion cleaned cages and fed the fish and birds and played with the puppies, Mrs. Hodgson handled the cash and told Marion—and any customer who happened to be listening—her ghoulish stories. Most of them she read about in
Coroner’s Report,
a magazine that her dead photographer husband had taken pictures for and that she still subscribed to, but she also had plenty of her own stories, many of which concerned animals. Cats put in ovens, dryers and dishwashers. Hamsters sucked up vacuums. A dog tied to the back of a car and forced to run to death.
    One day, after describing the murder-suicide of a husband and wife, she said, “You probably know about that teacher out at Marley Road School, the one that was carrying on with the janitor and he killed her?” Then, before Marion could speak, she said, “What slays me is his name was something-or-other Killer. Bart or Tom Killer. Anyways, her husband was starting to get suspicious, so she decided to call it quits. Which sent Mr. Killer off the deep end. He stabs her forty-seven times I thinkthe number was. Then he drives out to the cemetery on Highway 10, sits himself down on his own mother’s grave, and shoots himself between the eyes.”
    “Good heavens,” Marion said.
    “For a janitor he sure made an awful mess,” Mrs. Hodgson said.
    What struck Marion was Mrs. Hodgson having no idea that she was Ellen Judd’s daughter. She’d thought that everybody in Garvey either made the connection right away or was told about it soon enough. So that was a surprise, Mrs. Hodgson having no idea. As for her mother and Bert Kella being lovers, people had hinted along those lines before, but no one even slightly acquainted with her mother, or with Bert Kella for that matter, believed it for a second.
    Marion decided not to straighten Mrs. Hodgson out. Somebody else would, sooner or later, although that’s not why she didn’t say anything. And it wasn’t because she was too upset or too disheartened, either. Actually—and this was new for her—she felt disdain. “Stabs her forty-seven times,” Mrs. Hodgson said, getting that essential fact so completely and elaborately wrong, and Marion thought, “Nobody knows.” It was a thrilling, lonely