Mockingbird Read Online Free

threshold of that trailer cinches her stomach into tightening knots every time.
      "Lockdown," she says.
      Into the belly of the silver whale.
      Metal walls. Shore décor: all pastel and wood paneling and 1980s fixtures. She hasn't touched a thing. The only thing she's done to decorate in here is to hang a bird skeleton above the kitchen sink. She guesses it's a crow. She found it dead about three months back, most of its meat eaten by ants, a few feathers still clinging to dead bones.
      Doing any more than hanging that one thing would feel like she owns the place. Like she actually lives here.
      She does, of course. But reality has never been her strong suit.
      "Hullo, bird," she says in her best Mister Snuffleupagus. She taps the crow skeleton – which she crucified on to some popsicle sticks with fishing line and twistties. The dead bird spins lazily in the afternoon light.
      Louis assured her that the bird skeleton was disgusting and that it did not belong in the trailer, much less above the kitchen sink where they wash dishes.
      She told him it's the only thing she wants in this place, it's the only thing she really has in this place, and that were he to try to remove it, she would sit on his chest while he slept and smash his balls flat with a ball peen hammer. Miriam further assured him that this was why that hammer earned that name, because it was for smashing both balls and peens , so he should take great caution.
      They haven't been getting along.
      They'd been lovers. He was gentle and sweet. He convinced her to stay in Jersey. He used some of his saved-up money to buy a place, said they could live there, said it'd be fine because he wasn't here all that often what with his long hauls up and down the East Coast and oh, hey, she could get a job and start to settle down and and blah blah blah normalcy–
      Miriam doesn't want to think about it.
      Her head gash throbs. She touches it with a finger. Sticky. Mealy. Pink fluid, not red, wets her fingertip.
      Can't help poking the wound.
      Once, hope bloomed that she and Louis could make a real go of it. But hope turned to resentment and it wasn't long before the Airstream felt less like a place to settle down and more like a tin-can tomb.
      Now they're roommates. And friends. And enemies. And every once in a while she still gets that urge and she climbs on top of him like a little girl in a big saddle and they share a mercy fuck. Maybe the mercy's for him. Maybe it's for her.
      Who knows. Who cares.
      Louis is gone two weeks out of every three.
      This is one of his "gone" weeks. But it's ending now. He could be home at any point. She smells the air. No Old Spice – the old Old Spice, not the new Old Spice, which smells to her like the urinal cake in a Ukranian bathhouse.
      The longer he stays gone, the less that smell lingers.
      Just when it's all gone she knows it's time for him to return.
      She goes outside to have a cigarette.
       No smoking in the house , he said to her.
       It's not a house , she replied.
       But it's a home , was his response.
      Her answer to that was a gagging noise, finger thrust deep throat.

FIVE
    Tweak
     
    Miriam sits next to the dead marigolds, smoking cigarette after cigarette, thinking that just one more will cure her of the tightness in her chest, will help her breathe a little easier. She flicks ash into the gnome's broken head.
      Hours pass.
      Evening comes. Still light out. Cicadas give way to crickets. A breeze stifles her sweat.
      It isn't long before the first scavenger – an ugly human dingo, a mangy man-coyote – comes sniffing around. One of her neighbors. One she hasn't yet met.
      He's lean, rangy, got a funny tilt-and-bounce to him like he's hearing music nobody else can hear. Long brown hair pulled tight at the sides and bound with a rubber band at the top.
      She sees the marks up his arms where he's been picking. Notes the teeth; none are