The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) Read Online Free Page A

grab her mother’s thigh as she twists by. The stink of cigars floats into Mia’s room and she can’t sleep. Even though the house is a separate building to the shop they are too close.Sometimes she gets up and peers through the plastic sheets into the shop. It’s always the same. Her mother cleans dishes, brings drinks, laughs at the jokes. Removes a meaty hand from her waist, wipes her own hands on her apron. She is always the same, giving everything until she closes and falls asleep in her clothes. Unless the tall man has come. On those nights everything is different.
    The tall man is also very thin and he is the only man Mia has ever seen in a suit. He has come for as long as Mia can remember. When she was little, she once asked if he was her father. Her mother crouched down and made her face go old, with eyes hollowed out and skin grey. The way her pupils darted suddenly from side to side made Mia feel cold.
    Your father has gone away , her mother said. He’s not coming back.
    Mia didn’t like the old face of her mother so she didn’t ask again. Sometimes she thinks that the tall man is her father anyway. And sometimes she thinks that her father is dead.
    Mia first hears about the vampires from a boy at school named Álvaro, who is fat and often in trouble. On this day he is in trouble for skipping class and coming back from the jungle with leaves in his hair, claiming to have discovered some secret Mayan ruin. It is a day after a long night at the shop and Mia has gotten in trouble for falling asleep at her desk. They are both in detention at lunchtime, shut together in a small hot classroom to write I Must Nots. After ten minutes the teacher leaves the room to smoke, and the fat boy slides over to sit beside her. He comes so close that the whole side of her is warmed by his body heat.
    They say your mother gives it to them , he says.
    Mia taps her pencil against the desk.
    They say this, but it isn’t true ,he says.
    She looks at him then. His brown eyes are full and shining like the back of a beetle.
    I know it isn’t true , he says. His bottom lip twists slightly and he glances at the door and back. It’s vampires , he says. She is protecting the vampires .
    You’re crazy , says Mia. Everyone knows it . She wriggles away from him, hunches over her lines and presses the pencil so hard into the paper that the point clicks off. She brushes the tiny pile of broken lead onto the floor and it leaves streaks across her work like the claws of an animal.
    I’m telling the truth , he says, catching up to her on her walk home. He is puffing and toad-ish in his oversized t-shirt and in the sun he squints so his eyes no longer shine.
    Everyone knows there are no vampires , she says. Not in Quintana Roo.
    There are , he says. I will show you.
    You’re crazy , she says again, and runs from him, her feet light over the asphalt of the highway. By the time she is home she is so breathless that her chest hurts.
    She doesn’t see Álvaro again for three weeks. His family takes him out of the school for a while. Everyone says it’s because he’s crazy and has gone to a hospital to have his head examined, but when he comes back he claims to have been at the beach. He claims there is a cousin who works in a hotel in Cancún. She got them a cheap room. For evidence he produces his sunburn, a small collection of seashells and a postcard of some flamingos standing around in grey mud. The other boys take the postcard from him, pass it around, and then tear it into tiny pieces and throw it on the floor.
    The day after Álvaro reappears, so does the tall man. When Mia comes home from school the shop is shut and she goes straight to her room to begin her homework. She looks out the window from time to time, but all the trucks roar past and the jungle is quiet. She listens to the whispers from her mother’s room but can’t hear the words. She can never hear the words.
    After a couple of hours it is dark and her homework is