Michael Malone - Weebly

Arthur and Lance. The words themselves began to
sound nonsensical to him. Who were these two men,
these props of his age, branches of his root, flesh of his
flesh? God knows. And Beanie, his Eve, his rib. There
was the rub, his rib had broken off, had snapped like a
wishbone—and gotten her wish. "I'm drunk. I'm really
drunk," said Abernathy aloud. He stood, wiped the
water from his desk with his jacket sleeve, and having
turned out his desk lamp, felt his way through the
kitchen. He thought he had better drink some coffee.
But where was it, where was the grinder, and how
exactly did this new automatic dripolator of Beanie's
work? It was too much to cope with. There was
nothing to do with intoxication except put it to sleep.
He'd just take some aspirin, if there were any, and if he
could find them.
Someone screamed. A ululant animal sound that
kept on and on and made no sense in Elizabeth Circle.
A human moan that whined out from the house on his
right, Prudence Lattice's house. Abernathy realized that
he was running efficiently out the door, through thickets
of pine, to his elderly neighbor's smaller yard, running