Heart-Shaped Box

questions and then offered her the clipboard.

Behind him the little girl screamed, “No! No I won’t sit up!”

“I feel like I have to say something to that girl’s mother,” said the receptionist, looking past Ig at the woman and her daughter, paying no attention to the clipboard. “I know it’s not her fault her daughter is a screechy puke but I really want to say just one thing.”

Ig looked at the little girl and at Allie Letterworth. Allie was bent over her again, poking her with the rolled up magazine, hissing at her. Ig returned his gaze to the receptionist.

“Sure,” he said, experimentally.

She opened her mouth—then hesitated, gazing anxiously into Ig’s face. “Only thing is I wouldn’t want to start an ugly scene.”

The tips of his horns pulsed with a sudden unpleasant heat. Some deep part of him was surprised—already, and he had not even had the horns for an hour—that she had not immediately given in when he offered his permission.

“What do you mean start one?” he asked, tugging restlessly at the little goatee he was cultivating. Curious now, to see if he could make her do it. “It’s amazing how people let their kids act these days, isn’t it? When you think about it, you can hardly blame the child if the parent can’t teach them how to act.”

The receptionist smiled: a tough, grateful smile. At the sight of it, he felt another sensation shoot through the horns, an icy thrill.

She stood and glanced past him, to the woman, and the little girl.

“Ma’am?” she called. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Yes?” said Allie Letterworth, looking up hopefully, probably expecting her daughter was about to be called to her appointment.

“I know your daughter is very upset, but if you can’t quiet her down, do you think you could show some fucking consideration to the rest of us and get off your wide ass and take her outside where we won’t all have to listen to her squall?” asked the receptionist, smiling her plastic, stapled-on smile.

The color drained out of Allie Letterworth’s face, leaving a few hot, red spots glowing in her waxy cheeks. She held her daughter by the wrist. The little girl’s face was a hideous shade of crimson now, and she was pulling with all her considerable weight to get free, digging her fingernails at Allie’s hand.

“What?” Allie asked. “What did you say?”

“My head!” the receptionist shouted, dropping the smile and tapping furiously at her right temple. “Your kid won’t shut up and my head is going to explode and—“

“Fuck you,” shouted Allie Letterworth, coming to her feet, swaying.

“- if you had any consideration for anyone else—“

“Shove it up your ass!”

“- you’d take that shrieking pig of yours by the hair and drag her the fuck out—“

“You dried-up twat!”

“- but oh no you just sit there diddling yourself—“

“Come on, Marcy,” said Allie, yanking at her daughter’s wrist.

“No!” said the little girl.

“I said come on!” said her mother, pulling her toward the exit.

At the threshold to the street, Allie Letterworth’s daughter wrenched her wrist free from her mother’s grip. She bolted across the room, but caught her feet on the firetruck and crashed onto her hands and knees. The girl began to scream once again, her worst, most piercing screams yet, and rolled onto her side, holding a bloody knee. Her mother paid no mind. She threw down her purse and began to yell at the receptionist and the receptionist hollered shrilly back. Ig’s horns throbbed with a curiously pleasurable feeling of fullness and weight.

He was closer to the girl than anyone and her mother wasn’t coming to help. Ig took her wrist to help her to her feet. When he touched her he knew her name was Marcia Letterworth and that she had dumped her breakfast into her mother’s lap on purpose that morning, because her mother was making her go to the doctor to have her warts burned off and she didn’t want to go and it was going to hurt and her mother was mean and stupid. Marcia turned her face up toward his. It was a bright sunburnt red, screwed up into a sickening expression of rage. Her eyes, full of tears, were the clear, intense blue of a blowtorch.

“I hate mommy,” she told Ig. “I want to burn her in her bed with matches. I want to burn her all up gone.”

About the Author

JOE HILL is the author of the acclaimed story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He lives in New England

www.joehillfiction.com

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ALSO BY JOE HILL

20th Century Ghosts (stories)

Credits

Jacket design by Richard Aquan

Jacket photograph by Daryle Benson/Masterfile

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HEART-SHAPED BOX. Copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ePub Edition © JANUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780061998270