Free Threshold by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page B

hates the way she can flinch without moving a muscle, flinch with words like she’s afraid he’s going to hit her when he’s never laid a hand on her. “All I was saying—”
    “All you were saying, Sadie, is that you’re just too goddamned simple or shallow or selfish or whatever to figure out why someone who’s lost everything, everyone she ever loved or gave two shits for, why someone like that can’t stop being miserable for five minutes to smile and make you feel like the sparkling center of the goddamn universe.”
    Not even looking at Sadie in the mirror now, that much a coward, that much a jerk, but everything he needs to see right there in Sheryl’s green eyes, like just exactly how unnecessary that was, like how someone who spends every day hiding in the hooch because he can’t deal with his own life has a hell of a nerve telling anyone else to get a clue.
    “Whatever,” Deacon Silvey says. And he turns away from Sheryl and Sadie and the cold beer he’s hardly touched, stalks past the cigarette machine and out of The Plaza’s crimson door, out of the mustycool shadows and into the merciless heat and sundrowned day he deserves.

    Deacon had just turned nine and the beagle had been missing for three weeks, three stickyhot weeks in the middle of August, too hot to be outside, but him and Davey Barber and some other boys playing football behind Davey’s house, anyway. Someone passed Deacon the ball and he lost his balance, fell and tumbled crash into the puppy’s doghouse. Boys laughing and Deacon disoriented, his right ankle hurting, but he was about to get up and run for the garden hose stretched across the grass for a goal line when he smelled oranges, something like orange peels or raw fish, and he’d never even noticed how the two smelled so much alike.
    “Hey, you okay, Deke?” and more laughter, then, Greg Musgrove calling him a pussy, and “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m fine. Just got my feet tangled up,” but that orangeandfish smell so strong, strong enough it was making him nauseous, making him gag, and he leaned back against the abandoned doghouse, eyes watering and trying not to puke.
    And “Jesus, man, what’s the matter with you?” Davey asked him, but Deacon’s head hurt too much to answer, too much to even think, and if he opened his mouth he knew he’d puke for sure. The football rolling from his hands, bump to the ground, bouncing away, and by then all the boys standing around him while the smell dragged Deacon Silvey down and down, falling like something in a fairy story his mother read to him once, falling and going nowhere fast, and he saw the puppy, the older kids that took it away one night when everyone in Davey’s house was asleep, and “Oh,” he said. “Oh shit,” seeing the rest, seeing it all, but nothing else out of his mouth before he was vomiting, his lunch sprayed all over the nearest pair of sneakers, and someone was running for Davey’s mother, shouting, scared, and the world folded up like a crumpled paper cup, and Deacon tumbled into the black space left behind.
     
    Straight to the hospital in an ambulance that time, paramedics and a stretcher and everything; not that he remembered the ride, the sirens blaring, or the emergency room, nothing but black and dreamless sleep until he opened his eyes in a white room that smelled like medicine and Pine-Sol, and his mother was crying.
    “They killed it,” he said, words all croaky because his throat was so dry and sore, but needing to talk before he forgot, and his father turning away from the window, then, his father looking angry, inconvenienced, embarrassed, something Deacon knew was inappropriate, but his father looking that way, regardless. His mother crying louder, and “Davey’s dog,” Deacon said. “They killed it. It’s in the field.”
    His father took one step closer to the bed, and “Son,” he said, “if you’re doing this just to get attention, you better tell us right this minute.