The Funnies Read Online Free

sharply, a near gasp, then let her breath out over several long seconds. Bitty blinked. I dug deep for a sad smile, plastered it on, and ducked away to look for my little brother.

    * * *
    It would be a lie to say the house hadn’t changed at all, though everything was in exactly the place it was when I left home twelve years before. The change was the dirt, a dozen years of it, coating everything like an oil slick. The kitchen and dining room had been kept up okay—I imagined that Bitty or Bobby and his wife had cleaned them from time to time—but the halls were dark and close, and the open closets, their musty contents gloomily bared to passersby, drained the rooms of their light. One of my mother’s final acts of remodeling had been to turn my room into a guest bedroom, so the bright red and green stripes had been papered over with a headache-inducing geometric pattern, and my childhood bed replaced with a carbuncular brass affair that had been in her parents’ guest bedroom years before. It looked all right, actually, and when I peeked into the now-empty closet to check for the crucifix I’d hung there as a child, I found it was still there.
    Pierce’s bedroom had once been a sewing room, and was the size of an unusually large closet. The door was shut. I glanced at my watch: quarter to eleven, almost time to walk up the street to the church. I knocked. “Pierce?”
    No answer. Rose was right: I could smell cigarette smoke. I knocked again. “It’s Tim.”
    Nothing. After a minute I called out again—“Pierce?”—and pressed my hand to the door. Did I open it or not? It depended: on Pierce’s state of mind, on my rights as a former tenant here, on the bonds of brotherhood and the disgrace of estrangement. I could have stood there all day, but it was late and nobody else was going to come get him. I went in. My brother was lying on the bed in a beautiful dark gray suit and the shiniest wing tips I’d ever seen, smoking.
    â€œI knew you’d barge in,” he said.
    â€œIt wasn’t precisely barging.”
    â€œHow long were you out there?”
    â€œSince I said your name the first time.”
    â€œI’ve been listening to you, Tim,” he said, his voice irresolute, teetering in an upper register. “You’ve been out there for fifteen minutes, at least.” He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the floor and hauled himself off the bed. His suit hadn’t a wrinkle on it, though his face bore the red marks of the corduroy pillow he’d been asleep on. Pierce had always had extremely fair skin, and now it seemed nearly transparent.
    â€œI looked in my old room, but I got to yours just now.”
    â€œHey.” His hands fluttered around his head, as if swatting the words away. “Shut up, all right?” He twirled his fingers in his ears, then pulled them out and looked at the tips.
    When Pierce was ten, he looked like he was nineteen. Now he was twenty-eight and he still looked like he was nineteen. He suffered from chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia, an illness he once described to me as a foul brown paste that had been smeared on him and that he couldn’t get off. Now he waggled his hand in the air before me. “You driving?”
    â€œWalking. It’s at St. Lucia, right?”
    â€œNobody walks around here.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œAnd then it’s off to the pyre!” He raised his eyebrows.
    â€œOh, right,” I said. I raised my eyebrows back at him. “Bobby said he’d always wanted to be cremated.”
    â€œBobby’s full of shit, as usual.” He cracked his knuckles. His hands were like mice, skinny, relentlessly in random motion.
    â€œWell, he’s driving us, I guess. Amanda’s car died on me.”
    â€œThat’ll be fun,” he said, slouching past me into the hall. He stopped and looked back. “You’re still living with