Free Bodies Are Disgusting by S. Gates Page A

tonight
would be the one night someone would glance out the window to see
you throwing things out in nothing but your bare skin. With the
slime on your hands, putting your towel on is out of the
question.
    Instead of spreading the slurry in the yard
like putrid grass seed, you open the door just wide enough to scoot
the plate onto the stoop with your toes. As soon as it crosses the
threshold, you pull your foot back, shut the door, and throw the
deadbolt. It's out of your hands now. You can sleep now, you
hope.
    You wash your hands in the kitchen sink, using
the vegetable brush to scrape the sludge off. A few paper napkins
take care of the grungy fingerprints you left on the doorknob and
deadbolt. The towel you take back to the bathroom and throw over
the shower curtain bar. Your dirty clothes get scooped off the
floor and thrown in the laundry hamper. Within a few minutes,
everything looks completely normal. You slither into one of your
favorite pairs of boxers and fall face-first onto your
bed.
    * * *
    You won't hear about the family down the
street that calls animal control when their daughter tries to adopt
a peculiar stray cat a few days later. She will claim–in the
fumbling words of a six year old–that the cat is friendly. She will
argue that it wound around her feet and rubbed against her knees
until she agreed to bring it inside. She will say that she doesn't
mind the way its eyes are a solid, glazed green, or the fact that
its jaw unhinges when it yawns to reveal three sets of needle-sharp
teeth. She will cry when her parents try to take it away, and she
will cry even harder when the cat fights back and bites off the
first joint of her father's pinky finger.
    You'll be too busy to pick up the whispers of
gruesome pet mutilations. The first will be a dog who slips his
leash while walking in the evening and fails to turn up before bed.
His owners will find him on their front step with a smear of blood
trailing behind him. His stomach will have been shredded open and
some of his organs will be missing. The second will be an
indoor/outdoor cat whose owner never neutered him. His owner will
never know what happened, either, but the cat will be found in the
back yard of a neighbor a few doors down, his limbs and tail gnawed
off and eyes missing. There will be a few others before everyone
learns to keep their four-legged family members safely inside at
night, and then the victims turn primarily into wild squirrels,
chipmunks, and non-migratory songbirds.
    You will notice the way that raccoons
start to congregate near your back door, if only in a vague way.
You'll notice one night that they sit on their haunches in a grim
semicircle, their eyes wide and seeming to glow in the dim light.
You'll never think much of it, though, attributing it only to the
fact that they once saw you leave leftovers outside, rather than
the contents of those leavings.
    * * *
    When you wake up that afternoon and drag
yourself downstairs, Simon sits at the kitchen table. "Hey dude,"
he says around a mouthful of ham and cheese sandwich. You grunt
vaguely in response as you shuffle toward the coffee
maker.
    Unperturbed, Simon continues, "So, any
particular reason you left a plate out last night?"
    Your heart jumps up into your throat, but your
hands stay steady as you pour some coffee and add sugar to it.
"There was a little kitten outside last night, so I gave it some
leftovers."
    Simon snorts. "I thought you hated
cats."
    You shrug. "Momentary lapse of reason, I
guess."
    "Hah. That's it, hide the fact that your heart
isn't hardened to cute fuzzy things by using Pink Floyd album
titles. Masterful distraction." But Simon returns to his lunch
without questioning it again. Once he's eaten everything but the
crusts, he takes his plate to the sink and rinses it. You sip your
coffee while he takes the "bread skins" (his term, not yours) and
stuffs them down the drain. With the water still running, he flips
the switch over the sink and lets the garbage