Michael Malone - Weebly

eliminate their enemies, hour by hour. She cannot look
at magazines, where bloated children stretch bowls out
at her from the page, flies on their hands.
She cannot listen to the anger or the ache of those
who would be her friends. It hurts her to think of the
pharmacist, Sammy Smalter. She wants no plants in her
house for blight to shrivel, no pet to lie twitching from
the blow of a car, no love for life to rack her on.
For years she has waited, paralyzed, her heart
stopped, for it all to go mad. For old men and old
women to run howling from their unheated rooms, to
throw slop pails of acid in the indifferent faces of young
passersby. For starving children to leap like rats at
nourished throats. For the dispossessed to rape and
pillage, for the betrayed to take revenge, the unloved to
hurl grenades from windows down on lovers. For wild
dogs to overrun the earth and avenge it.
It was foresighted of the Sisters of Mercy to name
her Judith Sorrow, though perhaps not merciful, for she
had suffered in the Madder orphanage the inevitable
jokes. Now, of course, everyone calls her Mrs. Haig.
She is an attractive woman (as even Luke Packer,