Free Made to Break by D. Foy Page A

many times—that was what I knew. The hurly burly of solitude that took me come each day’s midnight had stripped any cool I might still have owned a long time back. Night after night, in the chill of an empty school, my ambitions fell away like leaves from boughs in autumn. And wandering those halls, moving from bin to toilet to bin, the few kind trophies of memory that did remain floated by as evil nymphs—evil because angelic, angelic because there in the corridors of my past those trophies were safe from deeper ruin. And like angels they were accessible in only the cruelest of ways. What was the good in having something you could never hold?
    Dozing behind the desks in that collegiate gloom, the times of my youth would tiptoe up with a sort of wary glee, now days of drowsing in my grandfather’s swing, now lightning in a field. Grape juice popsicles melted in my hand, beneath the shade of a swaying oak. My young mother would come to playin the wading pool. And rustling leaves, and tinkling ice, and the buzzing of bees, and pie…
    And now? Now I was a shrunken head…
    In the cabin some jazzy swing had commenced. Any other day it would’ve been a finger-snapping bop for Lucky Strikes and gimlets and velvet gowns on creamy skin, spiffed up wingtips and watches on fobs, dipping your darling with her mouth full of giggles and hot white teeth—Bobby Darin crooning for the sharks and the billowing blood. But that was not the case tonight. Tonight was a heckler in the dark.
    I remembered in the midst of my shouting the light I’d seen through the trees when after the wreck Super brought us home. Dinky had said he had no neighbors, but if that were true, what was behind the light? A couple hundred yards down the road, I met another that spliced away, made just of dirt albeit. At first I couldn’t see zilch, much less a would-be light. The wind roaring as it was, the water coming down as it was, not from the sky at the moment, but from the trees, with needles and leaves and dirt, and the groaning of the trees and rush off the mountain of water still in sheets, it was all I could do to keep from turning back. It seemed to me the notion of a boob to walk up that road alone—surely I’d deserve whatever I got. Who knew what I’d find, if not Super or a neighbor then may chance a pissed off lion, as scared as I was scared and hungry as hell besides. And what if I did find a man, but that man was no neighbor or even a neighborly man, but the kind Basil had always feared, the freak in the plastic suit, with six fingers and toes and a penis on his chin, wielding a flamethrower and Sawzall both? Not good, not good, any way you sliced it, not a bit of it was good. On the other hand, who the frick cared what I found? If I did nothing, chances we all croaked up here on the mountain wouldn’t be so slim. Certainly Dinky wasn’t going to mend. Theguy needed a doctor, pronto. Not to mention if I ran off now, down the line I’d have to live with myself, a prospect at its best unspeakably vile. Getting killed was preferable to such a fate, honestly. I hoofed it up the road therefore on a bit less than faith, my adrenalin pumping as I stumbled along. And then I saw it, like before, a single light shining faintly through the trees. So it was actually there. So I had not been totally tripping. And lights meant power, and power, human beings. My eyes swelled bigger, then, I was ready for the worst, though just what I’d do when the worst came down, the best could never say. The road wound toward the light, but dwindled soon to a shabby trail leading higher up the mountain than the light had had me guess. Oh well. I’d gone this far, and now I had to see it through. The trail wended on, this way and that, until abruptly it debouched onto a tiny glade crepuscular with the light of a bulb on a wire through trees about twenty feet up. In the middle of the glade was a grimy tent, that