Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings Read Online Free Page A

gnash his teeth and say “Jesus Christ, what the hell? What does he think this is? Is he for real? What the hell?” This strain has unsettled his stomach and frayed his nerves. Even if he thinks a tiny gnashing thought, it undoes him completely.
    “C’mon boys, what’s the report? Tell it like you see it boys, keep your eyes peeled!”
    There is a wheeze, a pop and my companion’s tooth lies on my lap in a pool of jellied blood. I pick it up and give it back to him. He swallows it sadly and I hear the clink and settle as it joins the rest of his teeth at the bottom of his stomach.
    “Say, why don’t you take out your camera?” I say in an effort to cheer him up. “C’mon, take a look at that colour. Just look at that.”
    The outside is breaking and streaking in purple, blue, orange and green. The crew points and a group of voices say “Oh!” because it’s just like the brochure, the commercial and what everyone said it would be like. The crew smiles and nods.
    “Look, red! Did you see the red? You should have taken a picture,” I say.
    My companion shakes his head and sighs. It’s no good.
    “Tell me a story,” he says. “Tell me about that girl you were lonesome for.”
    A thick streak of white shoots past the window and somebody in the back hoots and whistles.
    “Well I started feeling lonesome for her after she died. So I brought her home and she wailed, right?”
    “Yeah,” says my companion with a yawn.
    “So she kept wailing—wouldn’t stop until I gave her something to eat. Then she stopped. Then she was quiet and everything was beautiful.”
    “Is that the end?”
    “No.”
    “So what happened?”
    “She ate my watch.”
    “Look alive there boys, look alive!”
    A thick smudge of black pours across the windows and a chorus of groans echo from behind. The crew still smiles, as if they understand our disappointment and wish they could do something about it.
    “You should’ve taken that picture,” I say. “Red is a very rare thing to see nowadays.”
    My companion wheezes as the lights dim. The crew scuffles and sweeps, their eyes peeled like luminous pearls, their smiles glowing like tiny white worms.

 
     

     
     
     
    Even as a child, Stalin Rani bore a striking resemblance to brown wrapping paper. Her body was flat and foldable, her face littered with creases that curled into different shapes when she stood in the sun. Her birth had been celebrated with the bursting of four small firecrackers, three of which never went off.
    She began life by crawling along the sagging walls of her house, poking her toes into corners and listening to her father climb the ranks of the local Communist Party. In the afternoons she sat under a table and assigned colours and shapes to the different voices she heard. Some were dark grey and hard like wet cement. Others were oily and brownish-orange like stale halva.
    When she was six, a tall twitchy man named Shoebox Uncle came from London to stay with them. He had a broken jaw and a grubby mess of gauze that was wound around his face like a scarf. He completely ignored Stalin Rani’s existence and spent most of his time listening to an old radio. Then one day he turned to her.
    “You have a terrible name—what is it again, I have forgotten.”
    “Stalin Rani.”
    “Queen Stalin. That’s almost an oxymoron. Do you know what an oxymoron is?”
    “No.”
    “Do you know what a moron is? Your father, for example, is a moron for naming you Stalin Rani.”
    “Were you really in London?”
    “Why, were you?”
    “What was it like?”
    “London was filled with rain and sugarplum fairies. They had runny skin and carried pink candy guns around their necks. Every Sunday I would go out and collect them in my shoebox. Sugarplums with sugarguns. Say it, sugarplums with sugarguns.”
    “Sugarflums with sugargums.”
    “Sugarguns with sugarguns. Here,” he said, shoving a thick black shoebox into her stomach. “If you ever find any, you can keep them