Free The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston

toilet to pay for every square? He doesn’t know why he puts up with me, really he doesn’t.
    Then he winks and says we should go on the grand tour.
    There is the Dewey decimal section. It is a ghetto for old books that couldn’t just be put in the dumpster but weren’t worth the trouble of assigning new numbers and moving to new shelves. There are the shelves of oversize books, exiled from their natural clans by their gigantism. Atlases, anatomy books, fashion portfolios, they are all tossed together and expected to get along. There are even books that defy being books. They are boxes of loose pages. There are others that have a single page folded inside.Unfolded, that page is a map as big as a bedsheet.
    Corey showed me where they kept the little books of pornography—no, no, Corey said they were erotica, not porn—written by famous authors. They were much more interesting than a soap-opera romance or a TV ad selling cars or hamburgers or sex. Erotica, it turns out, is more about imagination than biological plumbing.
    My favorites are the big glossy books of photography. I like the photo of a gray dog with a gray sock hanging from its nose. It’s an elephant. On another page, the same dog is sitting quietly after someone poured a bag of flour or something all over it. There isn’t a single trace of movement, not one paw print, in that flour. There is a woman who disguises herself again and again and makes portraits of each person she seems to be. There is a whole book of portraits of dead Wisconsinites: babies in long white gowns, criminals with bullet holes.
    They are so different from the photographs I know. I know about
National Geographic
and family snapshots, that’s all. Here I am with my second birthday cake. There I am with my dog, Ket, standing in a snowbank. My dad is in the picture too, but only as a pale blue shadow on the snow. You can tell he is the one taking the picture because of the way his shadow elbows are sticking out of his shadow head. Now I am holding a baby Asta wrapped up in her blanket. Where did I ever get a purple sombrero? And whatever happened to it?
    And
National Geographic
is cool, but it’s not the same as these books. I loved looking at the pictures of the woman who rode across Australia on a camel and the X-rays of Egyptian mummies, but this was different. The subject of these pictures was seeing. That’s what they were about, seeing. They were not about dead babies or dogs dressed in golf sweaters. They were about looking and seeing.
    I turn page after big glossy page. This is a whole new world. There are people who make a living just by showing other people what they see.
    When Corey says it’s time to go, I don’t want to. He is pleased. I just want to keep looking at pictures, swallowing up other people’s visions.
    It is better than vodka.
    . . .
    I wanted to go the library again the next day, but Corey had different plans.
    He said I needed a killer-bitch costume for debate. This worried me some, because the other girls in debate did not seem to be wearing black leather or spiked collars. Sometimes Corey’s language was imprecise.
    The next thing I knew, we were standing in his mother’s closet and he was throwing clothes at me. There were no spiked collars involved, but that didn’t make the experience better. Corey pulled a skirt off a hanger and flapped it at me.
    â€œMaybe you could wear one on each leg?”
    He pulled a sweater from the bottom of a neat, rainbow organized pile, “This could stretch,” he said, while he stepped on one sleeve and pulled on the other, “Or not. You know, I think we are going to have to go to the mall.”
    I bent down to pick up the skirt he had tossed on the floor so I could hang it back up. Corey snatched it out of my hands and tossed it high onto a shelf. Then he flipped the whole pile of sweaters onto the floor.
    â€œLeave it,” he said.
    And I did.
    . .