The Lanyard Read Online Free

and think and wait. He took the time to do all three now, so why wouldn't any other person do the same? Why wouldn't they daydream until they forgot thinking, until they forgot waiting, until they shuffled forward.
    There wasn't much other choice: this trip had not been pre-announced. At least, his mother stayed back at home and hadn't even waved them off as they set out onto the dismantled roads. The boy put his hands onto the window frame as the car crawled down another empty street that curved like a string tied around a blind man's neck, gliding for several yards as it looped around and down, gathering momentum like a flower girl gathering cut heads, before his father tried to start the engine again, pushing the key all the way and holding it through the splutter before he let it come back for a moment and twisted hard, in what had become a gentle trick, an intricate dance, some sort of fine brocade stitched from memory, which the boy liked to picture as a scene out of the hardboiled fiction they sometimes read together, in which somewhere amongst the pipes the ignition tried to speak to the pistons over the snap snap of a cigarette lighter in a dull bar, low voice, raspy, its dry and dusky liquor breath, coughing polite into the back of the hand, offering another sip, a perfumed whiff, as it gradually, gently, repeatedly seduced a smile, then a spark, then a touch, bringing the whole engine to life, like a dog on a chain suddenly kicked.
    When the car was finally running, the boy's father waited; he didn't press the accelerator right away; he let the wheels roll further on their own, all the way down to an adjoining road where he would need horses to get any further, where the tarmac became dark blue, grazed by those many memories of long dead rubber, like a deep ocean of endless depth boiled down. He pushed on the accelerator and leant forward as if to listen to the sound the car made as it half-pulled, half-pushed itself up to the crest at the top of the next road, dropped, and then began to move away from itself.
    All the way along the road the boy tried to look for the glimpses of children he knew were in the area, who he sometimes saw when he was alone in the yard. He wondered if they might not hear the car driving off and come to investigate, jealous of him, like natives watching a steam train, catching sight of the boy stuck inside the car, with his father, and no one else.
    He turned around in the seat, strained for a moment against the belt that drooped across him having lost its spring, no use in a crash, but nothing to crash into here, aside from the couple of rusting vehicles on the sidewalk near where they turned that looked like they hadn't been motioned for years, not worth taking, not even worth trying to see if there was any fuel. He'd learned only polished cars might have reserves, and these were cars that lived off the streets, in locked garages with large white doors under the house, down a step, that could be opened with the rap of an axe.
    "Are you sure we're not moving again?" the boy said.
    "We're not moving."
    "But are you sure ?"
    He crossed hands as he turned the wheel to negotiate a gap in a metal barrier to the other side of the road. The engine sputtered. He responded by wiggling the stick without pressing the clutch.
    "You'd think I'd know?"
    "Swear?"
    "Ok, I swear."
    He swept his brow to get the hair out of his eyes. He checked the mirror. He often checked the mirror.
    "Alright," the boy said.
    The car joined a wider highway. Mountains started to encroach the view from out of the distance -- several peaks had hints of snow on top, which made them look like jagged teeth on a distant jaw snapping across the sky. The boy wondered what the world thought of all these roads, of the concrete ribbons that had been drawn tight all across it. Not just here, but most places, from what he had seen, across it, around it, even beneath it, as if these lanes were built to divide it up, pulling tighter and