The Humanity Project Read Online Free

think I’d like to hear more details. I find them interesting.”
    “Yeah, they are. Somebody’s going to make a movie about it all someday.”
    Her new drink came and she latched on to it in a way that made him consider she might have run her ad just as a way to subsidize her bar time. When she put the glass back down she said, “What I meant was, with birds, everything is instinct. Birds always know how to be birds. They don’t all of a sudden start acting like snakes.”
    He was beginning to think she was either drunk or flaky or both. “Yeah, flying snakes, that would be weird.”
    Laurie took a measuring look at the drink before her, as if it was part of the conversation. She said, “Do you come here often? I haven’t, up until now, but I’m considering doing so.”
    “Are you feeling OK? Seriously.”
    “I am seriously, seriously fine.”
    “I think maybe you’ve had enough to drink already.”
    She appeared to give this some thought. “No, but there is a limit to what drinking can accomplish.”
    “You never told me where you were from,” Sean said, mostly as conversational filler. He was getting bored with her. Normal in most respects. Whatever. He was only waiting to finish his beer and call it a night. His back was being tied into knots with ropes of fire.
    “Ohio,” Laurie said. “The Buckeye State.”
    Sean waited. “So, why did you leave?”
    “It became very not grounded for me there. Like those old Road Runner cartoons where he runs off the edge of a cliff and just kind of stands there a second with a stupid look on his face and then gravity catches up with him and he falls and there’s this whistling sound, and then he lands, ka-boom. I just had to get out of there.”
    “Sure,” Sean agreed. As if any of that had made sense.
    “Make a new start.”
    “Sure,” he said again, and this part he did understand, though the closest he was going to come to that was bankruptcy.
    “I’d like it if you talked to me,” she announced. “About anything at all. You have a nice voice, Steve. All low and growly. Sometimes I think that’s the thing I love best about men, their voices.”
    “I’m running a little dry on talk,” Sean said. “Like I said a while ago when I was being interesting, I really messed up my back today and I should probably go home and tend to it.”
    “I have a son just a year older than yours,” she informed him.
    “Yeah?” Now that he’d announced his intention of leaving, she seemed to be making more of an effort. “Where is he, he come out here with you?”
    “No. He’s back in Ohio.” She looked around the room, frowning, as if expecting someone who had not yet arrived.
    “So it’s really not a complicated question, whether or not you have kids.”
    “I don’t know why I said that. It’s more like, he got himself into some complicated trouble.”
    “That tends to come with the territory,” Sean said. “Kids.” They were all spoiled rotten these days, all of them except for his own boy, who was turning out to be the only part of his stupid life he wouldn’t change or unmake and sorry, lady, everybody had problems and so far hers weren’t doing the trick of distracting him from his own. Mostly the house and how long it was going to take to grind through the miserable jerk-off process of foreclosure and sheriff’s sale and whether his ass would be on the street at that point or whether there was anything a lawyer could do, sure, throw himself on the mercy of the courts for being a hopeless fuckup.
    “This is a little different territory,” Laurie said. “Prison territory.”
    If she was expecting him to be all interested and sympathetic, she figured wrong. He said, “Yeah? That’s a tough one.”
    “Excuse me,” Laurie said, hoisting herself off the bar stool with a kind of careful clumsiness. “Be right back.”
    That seemed a little abrupt to him, like this particular incarceration trauma made her have to pee just this instant, but what