Free Breeds by Keith C. Blackmore Page A

danglers. He pulled the oxygen tube from his pug nose, and jammed a finger up a nostril, performed a quick but vigorous cleaning, and wiped it off on a bedside tissue. He repeated this for the other nostril before he replaced the tube.
    Alvin peeled back a curtain and gazed outside, grimacing at the implications. More snow meant more shoveling. Alvin fucking hated shoveling. These days it took forever to clear his walkway and driveway. If Santa was ever listening, he’d probably long since zoned out Alvin’s incessant chant for a snow blower. Sighing at what appeared to be a day of ball busting, he scratched again at his chin, pulled a loose blanket around his shoulders, and drifted off into a morning stare.
    Alvin Peters was the poster boy for a nuclear-bomb-sized heart attack. At six-foot even, he wore perhaps two hundred pounds more than he should’ve, most of which hung off his gut, forcing him to walk with his spine arched ten degrees backwards, which also lent the façade of pretentiousness. When he was in public, that massive paunch usually jutted over a dam of a leather belt, hanging awkwardly over near non-existent hips. At times, it was said the man didn’t need suspenders––he needed an airlift. Townsmen would mutter behind Alvin’s back that there were a couple of whole roasted chickens in him not touched.
    With a grunt, Alvin got mobile and shuffled across thick mats and cold linoleum, walking a groove to the bathroom. A length of plastic tube snaked along behind him. He moved with all the grace of ancient arctic ice falling into the sea, and if one paused to listen, his joints cracked with the same intensity. Alvin took his time voiding, not seeing his tackle at all when he looked down, taking care of matters by feel alone. When he finished, he slapped water to his doughy hands and face and left his thick turf of black hair uncombed. When he emerged from the washroom, the urge to appease his monstrous belly occupied his thoughts.
    He got dressed, pulling on a comfortable pair of sweatpants that stopped somewhere below his gut, and hauled a triple-X t-shirt over his head. His upper arms were like thighs, while his thighs could have been mistaken for stacked tires. He believed, one day, the friction from his thighs rubbing together would produce smoke. Alvin wondered if he should carry around one of the little portable fire extinguishers, just in case. All he needed was a brush fire between his hams.
    Breakfast. One of Alvin’s eight favorite meals of the day, not counting snacks. Alvin hadn’t always been such a meatball. In high school, he’d been a track athlete and bodybuilder. Had a girlfriend but lost her to university. Alvin didn’t need university. In his mind, it was a money racket. He got by just fine with his high school education, and, for anything he needed to learn, he ordered the books online, and read them in a week.
    He knew he was intelligent. An internet junkie at ten, he quickly taught himself to type, reaching a speed of two hundred words a minute. His aunt, who took on work transcribing medical notes from busy doctors, took him under her wing and introduced him to the self-employed online profession when he was only eighteen. Alvin took to it right away, reading and absorbing the lingo from a medical terminology book in a week, and later transcribing medical notes and research papers with an unprecedented ninety-nine-point-seven percent rate near perfection. He admitted that listening to recordings while his fingers made his keyboard chatter was oddly comforting. Hypnotizing.
    It was then that he started smoking in earnest.
    He took up the habit at fifteen but, upon graduation, only seriously started converting his lungs into shriveled raisins of tar when he discovered that smoking made him work faster and longer . The words truly flowed while he puffed, and after eight years of sucking back three to four packs a day, he chain-smoked his way into the ICU ward in Clarenville. His