Free Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

It licked its nose and then rolled on its back.
    Jack and Tricia Doyle looked up from their chess game and stared at me.
    “I’m just delivering the mail,” I said. “I’m just the mailman.”
    They stared. They didn’t say a word.
    I handed Amanda the mail and stood waiting for my tip. She leafed through the envelopes, tossing them aside one by one. They landed in the bushes and turned yellow and wet.
    She looked up at me, her hands empty. “You didn’t bring anything we can use.”
    • • •
    The next morning I could barely lift my head off the pillow. When I did, the bones near my left temple crunched. My cheekbones ached and my skull throbbed. While I’d slept, someone had seeded the folds of my brain with red pepper and glass.
    And that wasn’t all—none of my limbs or joints were pleased when I rolled over, sat up, or breathed. In the shower, the water hurt. The soap hurt. When I tried to scrub my head with shampoo, I accidentally pressed my fingertips into the left side of my skull and produced a bolt of agony that nearly put me on my knees.
    Drying off, I looked in the mirror. The upper left side of my face, one half of the eye included, was purple marble. The only part that wasn’t purple was the part that was covered in black sutures. Gray streaked my hair; it had even found my chest since the last time I’d paid attention. I ran a comb carefully over my head, then turned to reach for the razor and my swollen knee yelped. I’d barely moved—a minor shift of weight, nothing more—but my kneecap felt like I’d swung the claw end of a hammer into it.
    I just fucking love aging.
    When I entered the kitchen, my wife and daughter clasped their hands to their cheeks and shrieked, eyes wide. It was so perfectly timed, I knew it had been planned, and I gave them a big thumbs-up as I poured myself a cup of coffee. They exchanged a fist bump and then Angie opened her morning paper again and said, “That looks suspiciously like the laptop bag I got you last Christmas.”
    I slung it over the back of my chair as I sat at the table. “One and the same.”
    “And its contents?” She turned a page of the Herald .
    “Fully recovered,” I said.
    She raised appreciative eyebrows. Appreciative and maybe a little envious. She glanced at our daughter, who was temporarily fascinated by the pattern of her plastic place mat. “Was there any, um, collateral damage?”
    “One gentleman may have a bit of difficulty entering a potato-sack race anytime soon. Or, I dunno”—I sipped some coffee—“strolling.”
    “And this is because?”
    “Bubba decided to speed the process along.”
    At his name, Gabriella raised her head. The smile that spread across her face was her mother’s—so wide and warm it hugged your whole body. “Uncle Bubba?” she said. “You saw Uncle Bubba?”
    “I did. He said to say hello to you and Mr. Lubble.”
    “I’ll go get him.” She burst out of her chair and out of the room and the next sound we heard was her scrambling through the toys on the floor of her bedroom.
    Mr. Lubble was a stuffed animal bigger than Gabby. Bubba had given it to her on her second birthday. Mr. Lubble was, as best we could figure, some kind of a cross between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, though it’s possible he represented a primate we were wholly unfamiliar with. For some reason, he was dressed in a lime-green tuxedo with a yellow tie and matching yellow tennis shoes. Gabby had given him the name Mr. Lubble, but none of us could recall why except to assume she’d been trying to say “Bubba,” but, at two, Lubble was the closest she could get.
    “Mr. Lubble,” she called from her bedroom, “come out, come out.”
    Angie lowered her paper and ran a hand over mine. She was a bit shocked at my second-day appearance, which was worse than my first-day appearance when I’d returned from the health center. “Should we worry about reprisals?”
    It was a fair question. With any act of violence, you