Free The Cloaca by Andrew Hood Page B

trajectory from The Basics and The Fundamentals to the final Secret Project!!!!—they had gone around the table for introductions. “I’m fickle Frances,” Frances had offered, “and my favorite food is foie gras.” The kids had really tittered at that one, whatever it meant. “I’m just Derek,” the redhead complained when it was his turn, “and I don’t like any foods that start with d, okay?”
    At the very least, Frances wanted to get a look at the poor woman who had squeezed that impossible skull out of her body. But the lot emptied and there was no sign of Derek.
    In her car she fixed a modest bowl. Pulling out, Frances watched the community centre get small in her rearview mirror, liking the feeling of leaving a place having done something there. Things were changing, it felt like. Finish this class and she could finish any goddamned thing. If Frances could get control of her life metaphorically, then handling the real meat of it shouldn’t pose a problem.
    â€œYou know a gal can’t live on metaphor alone,” one of the teenagers from Bad Service had warned Frances the night of her party. But Frances wasn’t so sure. She had lived alone for a while now.
    She passed him sitting on the curb by the bus stop. Her Honda’s one working brake light turned Derek an evil red. As she backed up, Frances tapped her pipe into an empty coffee cup. “Need a lift?” she called out, leaning across the front seat.
    Frances’s logic explained to her that because she was a woman, and a woman in the same art class as this kid, bringing Derek into her car was not inappropriate and in no way pedophiley.
    After looking down the street for any hint of the bus, Derek stood up like he had no other choice, like he’d been caught running away from home.
    â€œI know that smell,” Derek said at the open window. He stared cruelly at Frances, half in the dark of the night, half in the light of her car, that same head-exploding intensity from class. Finally he said, “You don’t need those to see.”
    Frances took off her glasses and handed them across the seat to Derek, who put them on and looked around, then took them off and looked around, then put them back on and burned at her through them.
    â€œI could tell the way you looked through them in class that you didn’t need them. People who need glasses don’t like wearing them. That’s how you can tell. If they didn’t have to then they wouldn’t.”
    â€œMaybe I like the look of them,” Frances said.
    â€œSo say I think wheelchairs looked really cool,” Derek started, sounding out his idea, “and what if I just started going around in a wheelchair because I liked the look of it? Because I liked how it looked on me?”
    â€œI don’t think that’s the same thing.”
    â€œI don’t know if it is,” he said, getting into the car. He looked at himself in the side mirror, then handed the glasses back to Frances. Opening the glove compartment to stow the glasses, her knuckles brushed Derek’s crotch. Frances flinched, but the boy didn’t seem to notice. His thighs were soft and white in a way that made her want to slap them raw and purple.
    â€œSorry about the state,” she said when Derek began to collect the mess of library books from around his feet, piling them on his lap. The books were at various stages of overdue, from really to extremely to shockingly, but Frances kept paying the fines. Her interest in astrophysics, or the Bolshevik Revolution, or post-colonialism, or masonry would be repiqued every time the library phoned asking for their books. “ I know it would be cheaper to just buy them,” Frances sassed back when the librarians phoned. “Don’t you think I don’t know that?”
    â€œYou’ve read all these?” Derek asked.
    â€œYou betcha.” Frances pulled away into a red