He jammed his
feet into his sneakers.
He realized that he'd had to step over his brother's body six times to
do this.
He looked at his brother again. He couldn't make sense of what he was
seeing. The abraded belly. The rictus. His balls, shrunk to an albino
walnut, his cock shriveled up to unrecognizability. The hair, curly,
matted all over his body, patchily rubbed away.
He paced in the little run beside the bed, the only pacing room he had
that didn't require stepping over George's body, back and forth, two
paces, turn, two paces, turn.
"I'm going to cover him up," Mimi said.
"Good, fine," Alan said.
"Are you going to be okay?"
"Yes, fine," Alan said.
"Are you freaking out?"
Alan didn't say anything.
George looked an awful lot like Davey had, the day they killed him.
#
Mimi found a spare blanket in the closet, reeking of mothballs and
scarred with a few curdled cigarette burns, and she spread it out on the
floor and helped him lift Grant's body onto it and wind it tightly
around him.
"What now?" she said.
He looked down at the wound sheet, the lump within it. He sat down
heavily on the bed. His chest was tight, and his breath came in short
*hup*s.
She sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder, tried to pull his
head down to her bosom, but he stiffened his neck.
"I knew this was coming," he said.
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