Well, that number is inspiring… The word of the day is: Impunity
Tremors
He found the text in the back of a used book store just outside of Joliet, Illinois. It was his thing, shopping for weird books on the way back from these trips. He counted it among the few useful distractions he had left. “Books are better than blowjobs” he’d tell himself on the nights it grew cold and lonely in the motel beds; on the nights when he’d been away from her for too long.
Every so often he slipped. He’d find himself in his car on the wrong side of town chain-smoking cigarettes and hoping he’d find one of the women he saw gathering around the alleys attractive. More often than not he’d call his wife and tell her he was tired and he was bored and that he couldn’t put himself to sleep. She would ask him if he’d found a book he liked. Usually he did. They would talk about it a while as he sat in the car watching the women and watching the men drive up in their cars, stopping to pick up a passenger, then gliding further down the block past where the street lamps could shine in through the windows. He’d watch and he’d talk, that trip’s book in his lap opened to a random page near the middle where he could pretend he’d progressed to instead of being where he was; what he was trying to do.
The book–the lie–was freedom. It kept him from feeling the weight of guilt for his thoughts and occasional sin. In the words on the page he found a freedom, even an escape.
So, when he found himself on Blaylock and 189th, watching cars cruise and slow past a trio of black women in high heels he reached for his book and then he reached for his phone.
She didn’t answer right away. Maybe if she had things would’ve been different. Maybe he would never have opened that book–never known what lived inside of it. But she didn’t answer–not right away–and he was bored. He opened the book to a page near the middle and began to read.