Free Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor Page A

tells David it’s obvious something is wrong. Can he just fucking spit it out already?
    “Perhaps,” he says, “it might be I’m jealous of the attentions lavished by women on the nobly enfeebled.”
    “Oh Christ.” Estrella rolls over and away from him. “Who’s that? Barthelme?”
    “No, but isn’t it pretty to think so.”
    “Fucker,” she says.
    He grabs her shoulder, pulls her toward him.
    “Oh,” she says, still annoyed, but intrigued. “So that’s how you want to play tonight?”
     
    When they take the cast off, the leg is shriveled and the muscle sags. The black hairs press into the skin. He looks like the recipient of a graft. The doctor uses the word miracle . David finds such word choice unprofessional, as well as, frankly, a bit excessive.
     
    Roger becomes reinvested in the devout Catholicism of his youth. He moves back into his own place, starts going to Pax Christi meetings, works himself back into shape. They seldom see him anymore.
    But sometimes, when David wakes up early enough, he’ll spot Roger out on his morning run: sweaty, renewed. Probably Roger is oblivious to the figure in the window. Does he ever give a thought to what he stole from David when he was healed? David tries to make himself forgive Roger, but he just can’t. After a while he doesn’t even want to.
     
    “I mean you know I would never—”
    “David.”
    “I—”
    “Just stop . Just shut up and let me look at this.”
    Estrella is at the bathroom sink, her right arm over her head, her left hand touching her right breast, prodding it to test its sensitivity, studying in the mirror the crimson bite mark on its underside. It really didn’t bleed that much; a bruise is all it should have been. The skin breaking was a total accident. It’s the middle of the night, another night. David, silenced, finds himself reflecting on how rarely they do anything during the day.
    “Baby,” he says.
    “Don’t,” she says. “I mean it’s okay, it’ll be okay, you know whatever, but right now just don’t.”

SOMEWHERE I HAVE HEARD THIS BEFORE
    S tan was eleven years old and things had gotten so bad between his parents the only thing they could agree on was that he should spend some time out of the house. Since it was coming on summer anyhow, they packed him up just like they’d done in years previous for camp, though this year there was no money for that, no way. They sent him instead to his aunt, his mother’s sister, a distracted woman, twice divorced, who lived in a decent house on Long Island in a neighborhood the long-time residents felt was in decline. Changing was the word they used. They were mostly Jews and what they meant was blacks were moving in.
    Aunt Lisa had long blond hair, split at the ends and graying at the roots. She lit purifying candles, was a sort of New Ager, and had a boyfriend who owned a landscaping business. They smoked pot up in her bedroom, where she thought her daughter and nephew wouldn’t smell it, though both of them did, though only the daughter knew it for what it was. Mandy was fifteen and totally grunge. She hated her mother for a hippie and she hated summer because it was too hot to wear the clothes she liked to wear (she wore them anyway) and because she was in summer school because she’d spent the school year stoned, which is why she had her mother’s number, all right.
    Aunt Lisa’s boyfriend’s fortunes were declining with the neighborhood’s. It was because the new neighbors did their own yard work. Nothing too fancy, just a simple clean yard was what they liked: grass mowed, hedges clipped, done. And for the most part they did it themselves. He talked about his troubles over dinner. “Niggers,” he said—he wasn’t even Jewish—and Aunt Lisa said “Charles,” and that was that.
    Stan was in love, obviously. Mandy had an angular face, boy hips, missile tits, and natural red hair streaked fuck-you blue. She wore torn black jeans and thrift-store tees that