Spider on My Tongue Read Online Free

church steeple, red and green roofs, a farmer's windmill and two tall silos further off). And when I reach the edge of the woods, on my way to that village, I can feel them drop away. A few trudge after me for a while, yes, but, after a couple of minutes, I turn and see that they've dropped away, as well. I don't think it's sunlight or, beneath a sky filled with clouds, the daylight that draws them back. I can't say what draws them back. Perhaps they realize I have nowhere else to go, that, before long, I'll return to the little house in the dim woods and, so, to them.
    ~ * ~
8:29 AM
     
    And thank you for the spacing, the asterisks and chapter numbers.
    ~ * ~
8:45 AM
     
    I don't know whose story I'm telling, really—my own or theirs (yours). It would have to be both, of course, since there really is no difference between them (you) and me. How could there be? Is there any real difference between the soil in Montana and the soil in Palermo? Is there any real difference between time that's passed and time that's being measured?
    ~ * ~
8:48 AM
     
    I do not thank the now-late (I assume) Barbara W. Barber for her gift, so long ago. A kiss, a curse, a legacy of nightmare. If only I hadn't boarded that train. If only I'd had the good sense to sit in a different car. If only I hadn't caught her eye. I would have remained blissfully ignorant and unaware. Now I exist at the center of chaos. Now I cannot say that I am one of the dead or one of the living because I can define neither, because it's become so abundantly and horrifyingly clear to me that no one can. Neither they (you), nor I.
    I can not say that I am not a part of the passing misery.
    I can only say that I really do shop for peanut butter and eggs in a tiny village whose name I forget, and that I talk there with a tall, thin, bald man whose conversation is meaningless.
    I can only say that I wake every morning at precisely 5:45 with an oddly dull pain moving through my entire body (and sometimes it doesn't feel like physical pain at all but merely the memory of pain) which subsides, but never vanishes, as the morning progresses, and that these others around me in my little house, and in the dim woods beyond, are as present as air and as visible as darkness.
    ~ * ~
10:21 AM
     
    And Barbara W. Barber wasn't even attractive.
    ~ * ~
12:45 PM
     
    During those first awful years in Manhattan, after Phyllis Pellaprat dissipated, I ran. Of course. You get spooked, you feel threatened, you become paranoid, you run. Oldest human failing in the book. Because when you (they) run, they (you) follow. You run, they follow. They run,you follow.
    And there they (you) are—at the corner, around the block, asleep on an awning, under a table, sitting at the table and enjoying a stiff drink, piloting yellow cabs, grinning vacantly, or rabidly, from behind windows and locked doors, begging for change, giving change, holding hands and kissing and playing hopscotch, screeching like owls selling puppies on busy streets, asking, endlessly, for an elevator to be held.

These are the things I knew about Phyllis Pellaprat after our first
week together, at Art DeGraff's apartment: I knew that she was
intelligent, that she was incredibly sensual, that she liked to play
Yahtzee—Christ, she liked to play Yahtzee—and I knew also
that she was not a romantic. This disappointed me because I am
a romantic; I have always been a romantic—the words I love
you fly easily from my lips. And when I said to her, for the very
first time, "Phyllis, I love you," her reaction was not what I had
hoped for.
    —A Manhattan Ghost Story

FIVE
     
July 21, 2006, 5:56 AM
     
    One clear spring morning a year before I left Manhattan, I came home from a quick run for groceries, opened my apartment door, and found the apartment pitch black. I usually left my curtains drawn (mostly because of what lurked beyond the windows, and what peered through them), so, even in daylight, the apartment was often dimly lighted (one sees