Waste Read Online Free Page B

and their parents all want to adopt them. You should hear them.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    A body threw itself against the basement door and the chair legs dug into the floorboards.
    â€œYes, yes, I’m sure, grab your bag, let’s go, go, go!” Moses said.
    Out the door and down through the overgrown garden. The dogs overpowered any other noise on the street. Moses could see the cab sitting at the corner, the driver picking his nails and checking his teeth in the rearview. Elvira ran behind him toward the cab, hopping over each crack in the sidewalk. Moses feared she’d roll her ankle, and then it would be cops, and badges, and bars, and a little room, so he grabbed her hand and pulled her along beside him.
    â€œJust take us down to the highway,” Moses said. “I’ve got fifty dollars, right? That’s enough, enough for you?”
    The driver had watched a woman give birth in his car the day before. It still smelled like placenta. He didn’t blink.
    â€œJust to the highway?”
    â€œYeah, yeah, we can walk from there,” he said. “Right, Mom?”
    â€œWe can walk wherever you want, baby boy. We can walk across oceans.”
    The driver turned down their street, passing the silent cop car and the small children who raced their bikes up and down on the sidewalk in the rain. The whole street was coated in orange leaves, the wet rain making them cling to everything.
    As Moses slid down low in the seat, he saw Mrs. Singh peering out from behind her heavy brown curtains. Her window was covered in sticky leaves. She didn’t see him, but she smiled at the police car sitting on the street. Moses watched her close the curtains while Elvira kept talking about her sister and the plums in the schoolyard. The cab turned the corner without using its signal. That was four years ago.

4
    After Jamie Garrison dropped him outside the Dynasty, Moses Moon puked behind the fake Christmas trees that management left outside year round. The smell of lion’s blood and shit still lingered in his senses. He knew if he’d puked in front of Garrison he would’ve never lived it down. He’d heard stories about Garrison beating up kids behind the Zellers when he was in high school, the arms broken over the push bars of shopping carts, the boots to formerly beautiful faces, the jagged snap of fingers in docking-bay doors.
    Before he drove off, Garrison had warned him not to say anything.
    â€œYou don’t even know what a lion looks like, you understand?”
    Everyone called the rambling motel Da Nasty. It leered out over the other smaller buildings on the block, five stories of clapboard and stucco. Moses had moved Elvira from motel to motel over the first few years of their exile, dodging the police and Children’s Aid while riding his bicycle to school. Elvira started collecting bowling balls again, taking them into the shower with her. There were always complaints from housekeeping staff and neighbors concerning missing credit cards and stolen purses. Aliases like Allison Cooper, Joanna Page, Paula McCartney, and Gina Simmons littered the guest books of the tired, neon-coated hovels along the wide strip of the utility road.
    Moses hated elevators. The spaces were too small, the walls always mirrored. Reflection after reflection of his pimply skull refracted to infinity till each pore glared at him. He always took the stairs up to the second floor and walked along the thick orange carpeting running his hand along the wall, looking for an open door, a wallet sitting on a dresser, a purse left in the bathroom. Occasionally he walked in on couples locked in complex positions he’d only seen in the pay-per-view movies. He would only order those after his mother passed out in the other double bed, moaning about her poor doggies and the betrayal of Big Tina.
    â€œMom, you around? I didn’t end up bringing back any food yet.”
    The room still smelled liked