Free Rant by Chuck Palahniuk Page B

curfew bell. The wall, where I’m hitting the bundle of blankets, that spot is smeared with red. The bundle, where it’s been hitting, the blankets are soaked through with red. Dripping red. My neighbor’s still pounding and yelling for me to shut up, but Sandy’s not moving or making any noise. It’s nothing like in Old Yeller.
    Talk about panicking. Now you can see what a thoughtless, bullshit idiot I am.
    Neddy Nelson: Can you shrug off the fact that, before the rabies outbreak, the relatively younger Nighttimer community was about to outnumber the population of the Daytimers? Wouldn’t a good epidemic do to Nighttimers what AIDS did in Africa? Wouldn’t it devastate the political power of a rising community and preserve the existing power structures?
    Galton Nye: We don’t know if she’s infected or not, but we’re not taking our chances. We have our own health to worry about. I’m not saying her mother and I don’t still love her, but the night she walked out with that so-called boyfriend of hers, our daughter was dead to us.
    God bless her, but if our little girl shows up here some night, our door’s staying locked.
    32–In Hindsight
    Ruby Elliot ( Childhood Neighbor): I can tell you, getting abandoned at the Junction Airport by her husband is not the worstest event ever to happen to Irene Casey.
    Glenda Hendersen ( Childhood Neighbor): Basin and Ruby and me, we went through school with Irene, and she was always cutting class. Never did seem to matter, how she come into the world without a daddy. Irene was full of grand plans. Talking all the time about college or the army, anything she figured could deliver her out of town. Sad part is, she never did get beyond the ninth grade. The summer we was thirteen years old, her and Basin, Ruby and me, we ran wild, staying out; then Irene quit coming to the phone. Irene quit—well—everything.
    Ruby Elliot: Between you, me, and the lamppost, it was no surprise to anybody that Irene was expecting. Three months along, folks say, before she married Chet. Story is, out of the blue, Chester Casey walked up on her porch and asked her ma, Esther, Could he have a word with Miss Irene Shelby? Like him and Irene was total strangers. Nobody hereabouts knew Chester from Adam. He come out of nowhere, no job or family, simply showed up in Middleton, saying, “Good morning, Dr. Schmidt…Howdy, Reverend Fields.” Calling everybody by his name.
    Wasn’t until that day Esther even knowed her girl was pregnant.
    Dr. David Schmidt ( Middleton Physician): For better or worse, it was Chet’s child. The age Irene was, we wanted to be certain she wasn’t making another mistake, only looking for some man, any man, to help her raise a child. Chester must’ve been nineteen or twenty years old. We ran your standard paternity test, and every genetic marker pointed to the baby being his.
    In hindsight, every genetic marker pointed at the baby being him. His genes and the child’s were so close, the two were indistinguishable.
    Reverend Curtis Dean Fields ( Minister, Middleton Christian Fellowship): My clearest recollection is, during our requisite premarital counseling, the couple waived any discussion of intimacy. It was my assumption that their squeamishness arose from Irene being so far along. A lecture on contraception would have been locking the barn door long after that particular horse had run off. Whether or not it was due to the pregnancy, I have never seen a couple less physically infatuated with each other. So you know how standoffish they seemed, at their wedding, when I told Chester he could kiss his bride, he kissed Irene on the cheek.
    Dr. David Schmidt: Our gravest reservation had been regarding the possibility that Chester Casey had raped thirteen-year-old Irene Shelby, and circumstances were forcing her to marry her assailant. Small towns have a tragic way of trapping young people and making them answer for small mistakes with the rest of their lives.
    Ruby Elliot: