Through the Cracks Read Online Free Page A

when being outside the backroom had been common, a time better suited to toys and make-believe. Adam had put too much effort into not pining for the tiger to let his guard down now. It was too late to love it.
    Monty and Jerry were at the open doorway, waiting to be called in. It took some coaxing to make them jump up onto the bed. They curled beside him on the mattress. The safe, its weight and size, played on Adam’s mind. It was such a big and heavy thing to have been there all this time, lying under the house. The smell of money lingered in Adam’s nostrils. The texture of the notes stayed on his fingertips. There was something real about the safe and those notes. All Adam knew was that the money didn’t exist solely inside the yard. It had a place outside as well. The money
could
jump the fence. It held the promise that it could help him jump it too.

A chicken was squawking. Adam opened his eyes and sat up in bed. The dogs were gone. He scrambled from beneath the blankets. Half awake, he ran through the house. The billiards room door was open. Monty and Jerry were out, down in the yard; they had a chicken pinned to the ground. Adam leapt from the decking. He stumbled, sprinted across the yard.
    ‘No! No!’
    His voice wasn’t strong. It had been broken and husky since screaming at his father. The dogs were tearing at the bird. Adam grabbed Jerry by the scruff of the neck and threw him. The little dog yelped and landed off in the grass. Monty slunk back and cowered. The chicken was alive, flapping, but it couldn’t stand up. There were feathers scattered all around it and spots of blood on the dirt. It stopped flapping and lay there, blinking, one wing tucked under it. Monty and Jerry skulked off, up the steps and inside. Adam saw that the dogs had attacked another chicken. He walked over to it. Then he saw the next injured bird, and the next. Monty and Jerry had attacked all the chickens. Half were dead, half were mauled. Not one chicken had been left standing. Had Adam been wrong to let the birds out? Was it wrong to set a thing free?
See what happens when you think too hard. It hurts.
He turned and saw Monty and Jerry with their noses poking out from behind the billiards room curtain.
    ‘Filthy fucking dirty dogs!’ Adam screamed.
    The words sprung from him, unexpected. They boiled up from a place Adam didn’t like. The dogs ducked back inside. Adam was silent, recovering from what he’d said and the way he’d said it.
    With a shovel he stood over the line of injured birds. He willed the courage to do what he knew he had to. He lifted the spade, over the neck of the rooster. He braced, squeezed his eyes shut, told his arms to stab down, to do it quick. He couldn’t. He lowered the shovel, rested it in the grass, slumped his shoulders and fought the tears.
    Adam walked around to the front of the house and stood on the concrete, listening to the sounds beyond the gate, cars passing in the street. The gate remained chained and padlocked. Adam remembered shutting the billiards room door the night before. He clearly remembered doing that. Monty and Jerry wouldn’t have run around killing chickens if his father were out of the backroom. His father wouldn’t have let the dogs kill the chickens, not even to hurt Adam or teach him a lesson. Someone had been. Someone had climbed the fence into the yard, been in the house.
    Monty and Jerry scurried over the tiles. They disappeared into the front rooms. Adam turned and walked down the hallway towards the backroom.
    He went into the closed-in verandah, got the length of hose. He pulled his arm back, ready, and unlocked the backroom door.
    His father didn’t have the light on, not like Adam would have had. Blackness rushed at Adam. It halted him a moment. He rocked with a wave of fear. Springs on the bed creaked. Adam reached in and turned on the light. His father was in the bed. He was pale and blinking, his legs under the blankets.
    ‘You have to come out and kill