Savage Tales

with her brothers and they frowned when they saw the boy come home with her.
    "Who's this runt?" one of them said.
    "He's staying tonight," said Angie.
    "Oh yeah?"
    "Yeah," she said, glaring and looking him in the eye.
    "All right, all right. He can use the couch."
    The boy slept on the couch and in the morning Angie was the first thing he saw. She was over the stove making coffee. She was beautiful, like a heavenly vision, an angel.
    "How old are you?" she asked him, seeing he was awake.
    "How old are you?" he said.
    She laughed. "You're quite blunt, aren't you?"
    "I'm fourteen," he lied.
    "I'm twenty," she said.
    "Gosh," he said.
    He went with her to work again and washed dishes all day, getting meals whenever he hungered and some spare change at the end of the day. He gave some to Angie, who refused, but he insisted for letting him stay at her house.
    "It's all right, really," she said. "It's good to have you around. My brothers like you too."
    "They do?" He couldn't believe that.
    "Well, they will, once they get to know you."
    That night they all went bowling and had a wonderful time. The two brothers drank a lot of alcohol. On the way back to their apartment they spliced through a red light and a large truck hit the car from the side. From the backseat the boy and Angie felt the car spin and blood splatter across the car's interior before it all went black.

    The boy finally awoke with a parched throat and his body felt constricted like in a strait jacket for lunatics. A woman in white looked down through his blurred haze and said, "Take it easy there, young fellow. Doctor, he's coming around."
    A man came and looked at him. "Hi, boy. You're lucky. Damned lucky. Not like those other guys in the car."
    He tried to move his lips and ask, ask, but they wouldn't.
    "I'm sorry, boy. They're dead. Had enough liquor in 'em to put down a legion. Idiots."
    He moaned, not for the brothers, but for Angie, the only friend he had.
    "The girl's all right though," said the doctor. "You two in back were protected and didn't take the brunt of the force."
    The boy moaned again at the doctor's brazen stupidity in leading him to believe Angie was dead.

    They were released from the hospital after a week and returned to the apartment. They each had bruises and were a little sore, but overall were back in fit shape. They returned to work at the diner the next day.
    They didn't speak of the brothers or their situation or what the future might be like. They simply went on like that, for months, until they had a familiarity with their routine and an introverted togetherness that united them in nearly all activities.
    Finally, a few years after being together and growing to know the other's quirks and habits, they returned home from a monster movie one evening and she asked him if he wanted some wine. He had never really tried alcohol since traveling with the hobos, and hadn't enjoyed it then, but something about drinking it with her appealed to him.
    They drank deep into the bottle with a jazz record playing in the background. They had nothing to say, knowing each other too well, and simply ate into time with the music flowing through them.
    Then she kissed him. Or he kissed her. Something happened, mysteriously and in defiance of reason and plausibility and convention. He was almost a man and she was fully a woman and it was enough and they kissed and melted into each other with a fluidity that surpassed poetry and somehow he found himself pulled deeper and deeper into her, and she began to smother him and pull him away from the couch where he had always slept and pull him into the bedroom, where they fumbled like the children they were and undressed and were upon each other and as they began to moan and taste genuine freedom from society's clutches he remembered the sounds he heard as a boy and the words of H.P. Lovecraft and he realized he was a fool and that his mother was simply a whore.

    In the morning they went to work as usual, but could barely look into the other's eyes. Every dish he scrubbed was like magic, and work was no work at all. It was merely anticipation of the night and the connection he hoped would come again, with or without wine.
    And it did come, and they went on that way, for years and years. Richard, the boy, and Angie collected money, talking of a house and children someday in the future, always in the future, but always coming closer.
    One day as they walked home from the diner a man with dark glasses handed