Read The Convulsion Factory for Free Online

and it’ll only take a second.”
    “I never sign anything without reading it twice,” says Dad, words to live by, he’s using that particular tone of voice. “You’ll have it by tomorrow. Now … please?”
    Alex bows out. He’s had his eyes crossed the whole time to see if the old man would notice, and it’s a bet he would’ve won. Tom Cruise would have noticed. Have to be alert to be a fighter pilot.
    He checks on Mom and finds her zonked in the living room and so he lifts the half-smoked cigarette from her fingers so she won’t set the couch on fire. As she sleeps, gravity plays mischief with her face, but that’s for somebody else to lift.
    When he returns to MTV, Michael Jackson is history, so he watches some more and calls a couple friends to see what’s new in their lives since school was out, and pretty soon he’s tired and it’s time to go to bed.
    He digs into his sock drawer in the very back and pulls out a small plastic box full of shiny metal. He takes off his shirt and leans back on his bed. A moment later he selects a safety pin from the box and opens it and skewers it through a pinched fold of skin over a left-side rib. He licks the trickles of blood from his fingers and latches the pin closed again and watches MTV to wait until it quits bleeding. Just like after the ninety-odd pins he’s already put there.
    Sometimes they get infected and he’ll wash the area down with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. It burns, but he doesn’t mind, likes it sometimes even, because it means he can still feel something, and it scares him to think of what it might mean if the pain were to stop.
    Just like the blood. His scar tissue has gotten gnarly thick in places, and sometimes he’ll sink in a new pin and it won’t bleed, and this never fails to freak him out. No blood, like he’s dead inside. Somehow this signifies failure. Or maybe he’s like an atrocity-hardened veteran who can’t cry, because no matter what he sees it’s just not awful enough anymore. The body won’t turn loose of the liquids.
    He admires the craftsmanship, though, and likes the way they look down his body in their orderly regimented rows, no haphazard placement. Some have been there so long it looks like the skin is growing around them, trying to swallow them and make them its own. He supposes this is what he wants. The only problem is, he has to watch where he rips his T-shirts, so Mom and Dad don’t see, because it’s his secret.
    He should have thought of this a long time ago.
    He knows that every single pin has its own special meaning.
    One per night … for every day since midwinter that they have never told him anything remotely like they love him.

    *

    Mom eats lunch professionally, he decided this when he was ten. Long elaborate luncheons with other ladies like herself, where they plan benevolent crusades and their slogan is probably something like We Will Stamp Out Social Inequity In Your Lunchtime . He has no idea what they actually accomplish, and wonders if maybe what they do is plan to raise money to give their husbands rides in fighter jets to keep them happy in hopes they don’t stray off looking for the Kelly McGillises of the world as a consolation.
    But whatever inequities they fight, he hopes they don’t eradicate them any time soon, because then what will they do? He can easily imagine some new group springing up to attend luncheons on their behalf and decide what’s to become of these poor displaced crusaders.
    Mom has beat him home from school by all of five minutes, and doesn’t question if he went to the doctor or not. She’s happy and fired up, and he suspects that the main reason she attends the luncheons is so she can examine her own life on a comparative basis and feel reassured that it is superior to most everyone else’s who is there.
    “Another divorce in the works in that group,” she tells him with no small amount of glee, then tells him who. It’s no one he can recall her mentioning