Удушье (Choke)

Like every time she gets out of jail and conies back to claim him, the kid and the Mommy have been in a different motel every night. They'll eat fast food for every meal, and just drive all day, every day. At lunch today, the kid tried to eat his corn dog while it was still too hot and almost swallowed it whole, but it got stuck and he couldn't breathe or talk until the Mommy charged around from her side of the table.

Then two arms were hugging him from behind, lifting him off his feet, and the Mommy whispered, 'Breathe! Breathe, damn it!'

After that, the kid was crying, and the entire restaurant crowded around.

At that moment, it seemed the whole world cared what hap­pened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.

It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

'Okay. There,' the Mommy said as she wiped his mouth, 'now I've given you life.'

The next moment, a waitress recognized him from a photo­graph on an old milk carton, and then the Mommy was driving the evil little squealer back to their motel room at seventy miles an hour.

On the way back, they'd got off the highway and bought a can of black spray paint.

Even after all their rushing around, where they've arrived is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

Now from behind him, this stupid kid hears the rattle of the Mommy shaking the spray paint, the marble inside the can knocking from end to end, and the Mommy says how the an­cient Greek girl was in love with a young man.

'But the young man was from another country and had to go back,' the Mommy says.

There's a hissing sound, and the kid smells spray paint. The bus motor changes sounds, clunks, running faster now and louder, and the bus rocks a little from tire to tire.

So the last night the girl and her lover would be together, the Mommy says, the girl brought a lamp and set it so it threw the lover's shadow on the wall.

The hiss of spray paint stops and starts. There's a short hiss, after that a longer hiss.

And the Mommy says how the girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked, a document of this exact moment, the last moment they would be together.

Our little crybaby just keeps looking straight into the head­lights. His eyes water, and when he shuts them he can see the light shining, red, right through his eyelids, his own flesh and blood.

And the Mommy says how the next day, the girl's lover was gone, but his shadow was still there.

Just for a second, the kid looks back to where the Mommy is tracing the outline of his stupid shadow against the cliff face, only the boy's so far away that his shadow falls a head taller than the mother. His skinny arms look big around. His stubby legs stretch long. His pinched shoulders spread wide.

And the Mommy tells him, 'Don't look. Don't move a mus­cle or you'll ruin all my work.'

And the doofus little tattletale turns to stare into the head­lights.

The can of spray paint hisses, and the Mommy says that be­fore the Greeks, nobody had any art. This was how painting pic­tures was invented. She tells the story of how the girl's father used the outline on the wall to model a clay version of the young man, and that's the way sculpture was invented.

For serious, the Mommy told him, 'Art never comes from happiness.'

Here is where symbols were born.

The kid stands, shivering now in the glare, trying to not move, and the Mommy keeps working, telling the huge shadow how someday it will teach people everything that she's taught it. Someday it will be a doctor saving people. Returning them to happiness. Or something better than happiness: peace.

It'll be respected.