In Zanesville Read Online Free Page A

details are suddenly visible: the window propped open with a Pepsi bottle, the light switch surrounded by a black
     halo of grime, the crumb-filled toaster with a Wonder bread wrapper melted to its flank. Everything. I swing Miles around
     to the front so he’s facing me, and I’m seeing it all through the blond fuzz of his staticky hair.
    Chuck takes one step, grabs Derek by the upper arm and lifts him off the floor like a stick. Derek is stiff and resistant,
     and his eyes are closed.
    “You don’t know how to make this one mind?” Chuck asks Felicia.
    The evening sun has moved down a notch, glinting off the metal edge of the counter, the sweating can of beer, Felicia’s glasses.
     She thrusts them back up where they belong and continues glaring at Chuck.
    He drags Derek by the wrist over to the stove and turns the burner on.
    “Don’t!” Felicia cries.
    Yvonne turns her back on the scene, opens the freezer and takes out an ice tray.
    Chuck yanks Derek’s hand over the flame and holds it there while the boy struggles, like a worm on a hook.
    “Stop it,” Felicia gasps, crying helplessly.
    The boy’s face is twisted into a breathless grimace; he kicks at his father’s legs and Chuck plunges the hand into the blue
     part of the flame. Derek starts shrieking.
    In the flame.
    The hand is cooking.
    Still in the flame.
    The screams are like sharp blasts from a horn.
    Suddenly, there is a fuming, scorched smell in the kitchen, and Derek collapses on the floor. Chuck strides out of the house.
     When the door closes behind him, a chorus of crying starts up in the back hall.
    Yvonne cracks the ice tray and empties it into a dish towel. A motorcycle roars to life and Felicia stumbles out of the room.
     Yvonne claps her hands once, summoning Miles out of my arms.
    Derek is slumped on the linoleum, the dish towel in his lap, staring at the hand—brick red up to the wrist and strangely tight
     looking, like an inflated rubber glove.
    Yvonne claps again, sharply, and holds out her hands, but Miles grips my waist and won’t let go. She pulls him away, like
     taffy, as he fights to hang on.
    “Me!” he cries out in desperation, searching my face. “Me!”
    I peel his fingers from my neck, one by one.
    His cries, hollow and lonely, follow me as I join my friend outside and walk quickly away, past Lurch, who stands trembling
     next to his doghouse, past Mrs. Vandevoort in her white socks and pruning gloves, and past the blond snake, waiting in the
     green crew-cut grass at her feet.
    We live in a factory town, Zanesville, Illinois, the farm implement capital of the world. This means nothing to Felicia and
     me; we care only about our own neighborhood, everything between our two houses, a handful of potholed streets and alleys lined
     with two-story homes and one-car garages. We have a couple of busy intersections with four-way stop signs, a red brick barbershop,
     a corner tavern, a taxidermist, a family who paved their backyard and painted it green, and ahouse where the garage has been turned into a tap-dance studio. Otherwise, it’s all the same, every block, through our neighborhood
     and the neighborhoods beyond.
    My mother can’t stand the tap-dance teacher, who wears her hair in a tall unstable beehive and has a daughter named Shelley
     who was in my class all during elementary school, a tiny, dazzling creature with kinky tresses and an overwrought personality.
     During our early years, Shelley had wild, seizurelike temper tantrums—she would utter a series of sharp shrieks and then for
     three minutes became a blur of hair ribbons and pistoning Mary Janes. Everyone adored her because she was out of the ordinary,
     but nevertheless she was sent away at some point, to a distant grandmother.
    “They sent that little girl to live on a farm,” my mother said at the time, not to me but to someone on the telephone.
    Shelley’s mom’s studio is where Felicia and I part company to go to our separate houses. Felicia’s