The Spy's Little Zonbi Read Online Free

woman she’d described as her Venetian Love Goddess. The family knew her general whereabouts from the postmarks on the homemade pornographic postcards that would arrive in their mailbox. The Post Office would intercept some and they’d be delivered in official-looking brown envelopes also containing dire-sounding form letters regarding federal mail crimes. But more often than not, the five-by-seven inch close-up photos she’d lovingly and carefully mounted on white cardboard would arrive directly. The slightly out of focus images of what appeared to be her vagina filled with things you’d find around the house on the front; little hand written notes on the back.
    â€œ Wish you were here!” and “Thinking of you!”
    The mostly out of focus pictures could have been of the Grand Canyon, or maybe Fidel Castro’s beard. A stainless putty knife protruded in one, a battery operated stud finder in another. She and her Venetian Love Goddess might have been doing home renovations.
    Chase could not go home a failure. Maybe it would have finally killed his father. More likely, his father would have killed him. He had no choice but to ascend the stairs and brave the precarious hallway to beg for his credits.
    ***
    â€œ Can we stop?”
    The sharp female voice in Chase’s ear nearly made him crash into a camo-painted pickup they were flying past at eighty miles per hour. He eased off the gas pedal.
    â€œ I really have to pee.” The bikini girl reinserted her breast into the flag top.
    â€œ We’re almost in Salisbury.”
    â€œ Cool,” she said, and Chase felt a fingernail run along the back of his neck in an elliptical pattern. “You know who you look like?”
    Chase shook his head. He couldn’t see her in the mirror, just felt that sliver of a touch.
    â€œ If you had round glasses and cooler hair, you’d look like John Lennon,” she said, and then her fingernail was gone.
    Near the middle of the last leg of their journey Chase stopped at the 7-Eleven where he found the local newspaper. He opened the crisp edition and spread it on top of all the other bigger papers, which included The Post , The Sun , and The Inquirer . Each were huge and important papers carrying news from their grand and considerable cities, as well as from around the world. The Daily Times was skinny by comparison—skeletal, actually. But Chase sensed every front page story was important to the people in these parts, from grain prices to a new parking meter proposal. Inside The Times was a section listing who was expected to have dinner at a neighbor’s house, right next to a grainy photo of a migrant worker wanted in connection with a shooting. Chase had learned in class how a newspaper was supposed to hold a mirror up to its community. And here was a perfect mirror, however thin and irrelevant it might seem to outsiders.
    These weren’t stories about egocentric professors who held the ultimate power of grades over frightened eighteen-year-olds. Narcissistic, bullshit-laden blathering about recent sabbaticals to their homeland or wherever. These were real human beings, real people. This was real life. And on the front of the second section was a picture of an old man in even older clothes. In glorious black and white he was kneeling on wet grass, with long wild hair, and his tears were caught by the camera streaming down his face. In his bony arms were three dead cats he’d apparently scooped up for the photographer. There had just been a fire and these were the victims. They were his only family, the caption explained.
    Chase refolded the paper and dropped the twenty-five cent issue on the counter with the rest of his drink and candy bar breakfast order, while his passengers climbed over the car doors. It was hard not to watch the girl in the tiny bikini pull off this gymnastic move, not the least bit modest, with an unchecked wedgie exposing most of her lovely rear