The Secret Society of Demolition Writers by Marc Parent Page B

leaving it to him but making it clear she expected him to get a good chunk out of Robinette.
    “We’ll see what he says,” Brian said, not wanting to promise anything or push anything.
    They were quiet for a moment and then she let go of his hand and leaned forward.
    “You know what I want to do?” she asked. “With the money, I mean.”
    “I don’t know. To keep paying the bills?”
    “No, we should get more than just that. I want air-conditioning, Brian. We deserve that. And then we should put in a pool. I want to go swimming at night to cool off.”
    Brian stared straight ahead and off the porch into the distance. He realized that the backyard was just big enough for a pool. Without a word he stood up and went back inside.

Sweet
    EARL STRUGG WOKE TO THE WARMTH of a ten o’clock sun on his face. He rolled away from the building that had been his headboard and looked down the concrete mattress to his parking-meter bedpost. He stretched luxuriously and drew his arm across his eyes like a window shade, to dampen the brightness of the morning sun. And he listened.
    Mornings were usually the quietest, though he couldn’t always count on it. The voices, like their declarations, were unpredictable. Earl Strugg never knew when they’d come or what they’d say, but mornings were usually the best. Mornings were clarity’s prime time—no
kill my budga-freekack
, or
rubber freaker
nose bicker-knobfucker
—no howling or moaning. No explosions. No thunderclaps. Just cars honking and a wind in the trees— sweet when it came and he took it when he could get it, mornings usually, but he could never tell. So with his arm drawn like a shade, he listened. As the city roared around him, a slow smile spread across his lips. All the way down through the mind of Earl Strugg, for now anyway, it was quiet.
    Pedestrians cut a wide path around him. Only the tourists were so bold as to attempt a look at his face. What they saw when they did was a spinning maze. Earl’s face whirled. It spiraled inward—wrinkles like a hundred fine parentheses around halogen blue eyes, a black rim marking the edges of his iris and tiny pinprick pupils and the whole thing turning, somehow, slowly inward. Ripples of skin at his forehead lapped at the banks of a whirlpool of hair that was as fierce and unbound as anything in nature. The left side of his face wore a permanent expression of inquiry—the lasting effect of a mild stroke he suffered several years back. His eyebrow arched high above a stretched open eye and the one side of his mouth screwed impossibly down—like the face you make during an argument when you don’t hear the other person and you want them to say again. The effect of this was that anyone who happened to glance at Earl would almost always do a double take and politely stop to lean in, since it looked like he might’ve just spoken and was urgently waiting for a response. As rag-tattered and difficult to look at as he was, Earl could draw people into his spiral face without even breaking a sweat.
    ON HIS BACK with the shade still drawn, he listened to footsteps falling around his head and felt a sudden urge to shout out a list of U.S. presidents and then another, just as sudden, to stand and sit three times. Instead, he pulled the neck of his shirt and grabbed his shoulder. His fingers found the scab almost entirely on their own, and began where they left off yesterday— probing and digging slowly but surely. He turned to watch them for a moment, his face like a child watching ants.
    From the corner of his eye he saw a pay phone at the curb with its receiver off the hook. The steel cord was dangling, swaying slightly back and forth and he just couldn’t take that. He could take about anything else and often had to, but he just could
not
take that. He sprang up and tumbled over to it on morning legs. He took the receiver into his hand, cleared his throat, and put it to his ear. He said hello two times. Then he said no, and that