After Nothing Read Online Free

study my face. Then he shifted his gaze to the right side of my neck. He kissed it gently. After not very long I thought maybe we were going to have sex again. The sensation of his mouth on that part of my body was definitely making me up for it. But then he stopped kissing me, although I could still feel his breath on my neck, and the firmness of his hand on my hairline, and the pressure of his thumb against my jaw.
    Suddenly he put his teeth in my skin, and sucked on my neck. I flinched. My hand went up to his, and he responded by sucking harder.
    When he was done he kissed where he’d marked me, his mouth gentle once more.
    ‘Feel that? Girl who feels nothing?’ he said in my ear.
     
    Lisa’s room was untouched – or maybe I mean ‘unchanged’. My mom was a robot when she went in there to clean. Anything that she moved to dust around or under was put back in its exact place. Not a single thing had left that room since Lisa had died, except for the clothes she was buried in.
    The stupid thing was, it wasn’t just Lisa’s things from around when she died, but a lifetime of her possessions: clothes and ornaments, shoes, schoolwork, photos and books. There was a plaster Minnie Mouse figurine that she had painted as a child still sitting on her dresser. There were clothes and shoes in her wardrobe that were too small for her before she even got sick. There was even a box of toys in her wardrobe: a naked newborn doll, a faded box filled with paper dolls, a pile of My Little Ponies, a bunch of white Polly Pocket dolls, a child-size music keyboard and a broken Barbie microphone.
    I just felt that the least Lisa could have done was throw out a whole heap of junk before she died. I don’t mean that unfairly. I didn’t want her to have a spring clean on her deathbed. But there must have been a moment, or several moments, when she thought ‘I could make this just a bit easier on everyone else.’ All those years dying, and she didn’t let go of any of the stuff that she couldn’t take with her.
     
    ‘You’re fucked up,’ said Kane to me.
    We were down in his basement room, both getting dressed. Me, into what I’d worn to school. Him, into sweatpants, a tank and a hooded sweatshirt.
    I asked him if it mattered.
    ‘Depends what level you on. My mom was fucked up and she OD-ed. You that fucked up?’
    I wasn’t sure how to answer. Instead, I asked about his dad.
    ‘Never had one.’
    ‘What about your uncle? Where is he?’
    ‘He inside. Be out soon though.’
    ‘He’s in jail?’
    ‘Yeah, what I said.’
    ‘What did he do?’
    ‘He didn’t do nothing.’
    ‘Must have done something.’
    ‘He blocked a cop from hitting him, and the motherfuckers did him for assault.'
    ‘Did your uncle tell you that?’
    Kane looked at me coldly.
    ‘I was there when it happened.’

3
     
    My dad was not the brainless fool my mom said he was. It was just that by the end of it all, he was a defeated man. Every day must have been a battle for him. He was the only source of income in our family, and I have no doubt that as wives go, my mom was an unsupportive bitch. Then there was the strain of Lisa’s slow crawl toward death.
    That was what he was up against. My mom’s hatred, and my sister’s virus, and my sister’s cancer, and my sister’s death. And he managed over a hundred people at work, dealing with all their grievances and tragedies and lies about why they weren’t at work last Friday. Somewhere in all of that were the ingredients that made up the first stroke. And that first stroke paved the way for the second. And that was that. Life defeated him. But that didn’t mean he was a brainless fool. He knew plenty. Even though he was partly paralyzed and couldn’t move or speak that well, he could still think. And he could still feel all the emotions he’d had access to before he became unwell. Like his strokes dealt him some terrible blows, but I think his heart was more intact than Mom’s or mine.
    He had