Free Bestial Acts by Claude Lalumiere Page A

living-room couch, watching television with the sound on loud. The one bedroom in that apartment was the bedroom of the man and the woman: a strictly forbidden zone. Aydee was allowed to sleep on the couch, but, often, she was forced to seek refuge in the bathroom. She would take off her shoes and lie down in the tub, inhaling the fumes of the various cleaning products the woman used to keep it sparkling white. That night, though, she just stood in the living room, between the couch and the door, watching the man and the woman. Waiting. Waiting for nothing.
    The man was drinking beer; the woman, cola. It was past midnight; the bowl of cocaine on the coffee table was half full. They would still be up for hours, Aydee knew. They might even stay up all night. She was hungry and tired. In the fridge, scrubbed to an immaculate white inside and out, there were only more big plastic bottles of cola and cans of beer. She had tried to drink these before, but the beer smelled like piss and the soft drink felt like exploding sludge.
    Her heart was a tight mess of knots, a heavy weight in her chest. She didn’t cry. She never cried.
    She was hungry. She was tired. Enough; she’d had enough. There was nothing for her here.
    She was ten years old, now. She didn’t need to sneak out.

    Once, I was a ten-year-old boy. Father. Mother. No siblings. No pets. I begged again and again to get a dog or a cat. But my folks were firm on this one. Mom hated animals. She was scared. People can be so stupid.
    The best thing my folks ever did for me was leave me alone. On days when there was no school—the whole summer in fact—I’d wander around the city, and sometimes even a bit beyond. Walking. Riding my bike. Taking the bus. Getting on the subway. The city itself was my best friend.
    I never made any friends at school. I wasn’t picked on either. I was weird, but invisible. I’d learned early on to keep my weirdness to myself. I still remember the first time my mom pleaded with me to act normal, to stop embarrassing her by saying weird things no-one understood. I was only three years old. She didn’t threaten me, but the more she nagged me the less connected I felt not only to her but to everything around me, the more I retreated into my imagination. What was it about me that caused her so much distress? Was I really that different from the other kids?
    It probably took her and my dad a bit over a year to begin to suspect how far I was roaming. They thought I was just playing outside—in the alley, or in the park down the street.
    They made a big fuss at first. They yelled at me, something they rarely did. They made some sort of half-hearted attempt to restrict my comings and goings. For a few weeks they diligently watched over me. They demanded a strict accounting of my time. I was furious for a couple of days, mainly at the realization that they could exert such authority over me. I figured they couldn’t keep that up for very long. I was right. It was clearly more taxing for them than for me.
    That was around the time I turned ten. Around the same time I discovered books. Looking at me now, you’d think I’d dropped from my mother’s womb right onto a messy pile of old, lurid paperbacks and arcane leatherbound tomes. But there were no books in the house I grew up in. The only books I remember from my early childhood are schoolbooks and dictionaries. Except . . . in fourth grade, there was an incomplete set of an old, battered encyclopaedia on top of an old filing cabinet in the back of the classroom.

    Aydee was cold. She was feeling faint, hunger and exhaustion getting the better of her. She didn’t think to beg for assistance, food, or money. Nothing in her short life had led her to expect help from anyone.
    She walked through the streets of the city. There were well-dressed men and women stepping in and out of cars. Brash young folk, not so well-dressed, hurried from here to there, or nowhere to nowhere, huddled in groups,