Caitlin Among the Beasts (sample)
I’m screaming. I’m on my hands and knees in the middle of the sunny afternoon and I’m screaming. There are reasons. Swear to God. If I have the right to use that name.
My sister moved to Scarsdale before I even got set up in Brooklyn, but that’s okay; we were never that close. I guess it might have been hot if the Walters girls had crawled the bars together, or done karaoke night, whatever ladies did for fun before she met Rob. We never got our chance, because we’re seven years apart and it feels like seventeen. She’s got kids, for Christ’s sake. She still calls me on the phone. “Are you sure it’s not a bother?” she asked me, the week before the current upfuckery unfolded. What she was proposing was not, in fact, a bother. But I’m sure she never used that word back home on Long Island. Not as a noun, at least. “Because I’m sure I can ask the girl next door to do it,” she went on. “I just don’t know if she’ll have the day to sit around. I think she works.” (Jules knows I’m not working much.) The crisis she’s engaged me to avert: her decorator, or someone else who handles this crap, had to bump his appointment to case their joint for curtains—new, nice curtains, I assume—and they’re gonna be away. “Somebody needs to let them in,” she said. “I don’t want this process to drag on any longer than it has.” “Understood,” I lied. I live in a room without curtains. “You won’t need to do anything. Perhaps just feed the girls’ menagerie, water the plants while you’re there?” “Sure, why not.” We reached a price that would cover my afternoon, plus the necessary travel expenses. A fair enough rate for an afternoon’s apartment-sitting. “I’ll send you the key via Federal Express,” my sister trilled, which is just such a weird thing to say.
Anyway, that’s why I’m on my hands and knees in the tony streets of Scarsdale, screaming like an idiot. That’s the simple version. In the simple version I admit I don’t come off so well.
This concludes the free sample, but you can buy the full story at this link! And you can watch the short film it’s based on for free at . . . |