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“Yes, me too, exactly,” I said.

  “I fucked up big-time at Al-Raz,” he said.

  Suddenly I found I couldn’t breathe.

  “My boy Melvin?” he said. “Got a chunk of shrapnel right in the groin. Because of me. I waited too long to call it in. There was this like lady party going on right nearby? About fifteen gals in this corner store. And kids with them. So I waited. Too bad for Melvin. For Melvin’s groin.”

  Now he was waiting for me to tell the fucked-up thing I’d done.

  I put down MiiVOXMIN, picked it up, put it down.

  “Melvin’s okay, though,” he said, and did a little two-finger tap on his own groin. “He’s home, you know, in grad school. He’s fucking, apparently.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said. “Probably he even sometimes rides up alongside you in the forklift.”

  “Sorry?” he said.

  I looked at the clock on the wall. It didn’t seem to have any hands. It was just a moving pattern of yellow and white.

  “Do you know what time it is?” I said.

  The guy looked up at the clock.

  “Six,” he said.

  14.

  Out on the street I found a pay phone and called Renee.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry about that pitcher.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said in her non-fancy voice. “You’re gonna buy me a new one.”

  I could hear she was trying to make up.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t be doing that.”

  “Where are you, Mikey?” she said.

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “Home,” I said and hung up.

  15.

  Coming up Gleason, I had that feeling. My hands and feet didn’t know exactly what they wanted, but they were trending toward: push past whatever/whoever blocks you, get inside, start wrecking shit by throwing it around, shout out whatever’s in your mind, see what happens.

  I was on a like shame slide. You know what I mean? Once, back in high school, this guy paid me to clean some gunk out of his pond. You snagged the gunk with a rake, then rake-hurled it. At one point, the top of my rake flew into the gunk pile. When I went to retrieve it, there were like a million tadpoles, dead and dying, at whatever age they are when they’ve got those swollen bellies like little pregnant ladies. What the dead and dying had in common was: their tender white underbellies had been torn open by the gunk suddenly crashing down on them from on high. The difference was: the dying were the ones doing the mad fear gesticulating.

  I tried to save a few, but they were so tender all I did by handling them was torture them worse.

  Maybe someone could’ve said to the guy who’d hired me, “Uh, I have to stop now, I feel bad for killing so many tadpoles.” But I couldn’t. So I kept on rake-hurling.

  With each rake hurl I thought, I’m making more bloody bellies.

  The fact that I kept rake-hurling started making me mad at the frogs.

  It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

  Years later, at Al-Raz, it was a familiar feeling.

  Here was the house.

  Here was the house where they cooked, laughed, fucked. Here was the house that, in the future, when my name came up, would get all hushed, and Joy would be like, “Although Evan is no, not your real daddy, me and Daddy Evan feel you don’t need to be around Daddy Mike all that much, because what me and Daddy Evan really care about is you two growing up strong and healthy, and sometimes mommies and daddies need to make a special atmosphere in which that can happen.”

  I looked for the three cars in the driveway. Three cars meant: all home. Did I want all home? I did. I wanted all, even the babies, to see and participate and be sorry for what had happened to me.

  But instead of three cars in the driveway there were five.

  Evan was on the porch, as expected. Also on the porch were: Joy, plus two strollers. Plus Ma.

  Plus Harris.

  Plus Ryan.

  Renee was trotting all awkward up the driveway, trailed by Ryan’s mom, pressing a handkerchief to her forehead, and Ryan’s dad, bringing up the rear due to a limp I hadn’t noticed before.

  You? I thought. You jokers? You nutty fuckers are all God sent to stop me? That is a riot. That is so fucking funny. What are you going to stop me with? Your girth? Your good intentions? Your Target jeans? Your years of living off the fat of the land? Your belief that anything and everything can be fixed with talk, talk, endless yapping, hopeful talk?

  The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

  My face got hot and I thought, Go, go, go.

  Ma tried and failed to rise from the porch swing. Ryan helped her up by the elbow all courtly.

  Then suddenly something softened in me, maybe at the sight of Ma so weak, and I dropped my head and waded all docile into that crowd of know-nothings, thinking: Okay, okay, you sent me, now bring me back. Find some way to bring me back, you fuckers, or you are the sorriest bunch of bastards the world has ever known.

  A Note on the Author

  At one point a geophysical engineer, MacArthur Fellowship winner George Saunders is an acclaimed writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children’s books. His work includes the story collections Civil War Land in Bad Decline, a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, one of only three finalists for the Story Prize in 2006 and, most recently, Tenth of December. He has also won prizes for his bestselling children’s book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip and has, most recently, written a book of essays entitled The Brain-Dead Megaphone. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. He currently teaches Creative Writing at Syracuse University, New York, and writes regularly for GQ, Harper’s and the New Yorker, who in 2002 named him one of the ‘Best Writers Under 40’. He lives in New York with his family.

  Also by George Saunders

  FICTION

  CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

  Pastoralia

  The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

  The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

  Tenth of December

  ESSAYS

  The Brain-Dead Megaphone

  Also available in this series:

  Only Goodness by Jhumpa Lahiri

  The Lie by T. C. Boyle

  Finest Wife by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Homesick by Roshi Fernando

  The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss by D. W. Wilson

  Home by George Saunders

  Of Mothers and Little People by Lucy Wood

  Demons by Rajesh Parameswaran

  Which Reminded Her, Later by Jon McGregor

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

  Copyright © by George Saunders 2013

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  This story originally appeared in Tenth of December, published by Bloomsbury Publishing 2013

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN: 978-1-4088-4806-7
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