The Product Line (Book 1): Product Read Online Free

looks down toward his chest at the medical gown he is wearing. His eyes land on the pattern and are able to zoom in on the intricate nature of the fabric, not woven but more like a pressed paper. White, red and black flattened mush, like the homemade recycled paper his daughter made for her fourth-grade science project. How did I remember that? It stings his eyes to look so closely. He throws his head back and closes his eyes again, the fever making him nauseous.
    Clearly I am dead, he thinks. Either hell is a little comfier than the Good Book would lead one to think, or upstairs isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Either way, at least my leg doesn’t hurt. He looks down at his thigh, where the bullet shattered his bone. With the little slack that he has with his hand he pulls the edge of the gown up to look at his leg, which he half expects not to be there. Instead of a gaping, festering wound there is only a small eraser-sized scab. How long have I been out? On the bed beneath his thigh are several different-sized bits of metal. One looks like a bullet, the others like pieces of fragmented old sheet metal.
    As his mind wanders, his tongue explores an irritated section in his mouth where his right incisor used to be, before it was dislodged by some youths “trying to clean up Washington Square Park.” He slides the tip of his tongue over and around. It feels like a hard kernel or sea shell or something. If he didn’t know better he’d think it was the beginning of a baby tooth cutting in.
    Ernie rolls his head to the side, trying to shake off the pain of the fever, and sees that there is a mirror hanging on the wall. As he struggles to focus on the reflection he can quickly tell that the face looking back at him from the mirror is not Ernie. It looks like—heck, it looks like some kind of pretty-boy male model who has had a line of acid painted across his face. He has a full head of hair and sparsely placed luminously white teeth, but everywhere that the sunlight is touching looks like wrinkled old man flesh and skin pitted with acne scars. He looks closer at the hole where his tooth used to be, and indeed there is a small tooth growing down into his mouth.
    Where the hell am I?
    The fever takes him and he fades from consciousness.
     

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 5
     

Marie has always considered herself lucky, despite the heaping portions of difficulty her life serves up for her. Growing up on the edge of Spanish Harlem means that hers is a story of familiar woes. In fact, most the problems she has experienced could have come as part of the “welcome to the neighborhood” checklist. Raised in a single-parent home, check. Crippling financial difficulties from sunup to sundown, check. Alcoholic parent, check. Her childhood worries were nothing novel—what is novel is that she and her father care for each other despite the ever-growing divide between them. This is the rub. This is the reason that she finds herself out walking the streets on her free time from the age of sixteen to twenty-seven looking for her father.
    The thing is, her father isn’t a bad man. She knows bad men. She’s been with plenty of them and seen their marks on the faces of many of her friends growing up. Sure, Ernie is a gross drunk, a walking breathing pile of filth, an embarrassment on every level, but even with all those smudges against him, he is still her father.
    Marie remembers when she was younger, when they used to be so close. Before everything changed. Before her mother gave up her painful battle with ovarian cancer. Long before Ernie started chasing his sorrow with bourbon.
    When she was a kid he would tell her stories at night, fantastical tales of magical kingdoms ruled by the loveliest of princesses, Princess Marie. He would finish her bedtime story, tuck her in with his big strong hands and kiss her on her forehead. He had all his teeth then, and his breath didn’t reek of an open garbage pail.
    What makes her the saddest is to