Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

For Lump.

Forever.

Chapter 1

If youre going to read this, dont bother.

After a couple pages, you wont want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while youre still in one piece.

Save yourself.

There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.

Youre not getting any younger.

What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.

What youre getting here is a stupid story about a stupid little boy. A stupid true life story about nobody youd ever want to meet. Picture this little spaz being about waist high with a handful of blond hair, combed and parted on one side. Picture the icky little shit smiling in old school photos with some of his baby teeth missing and his first adult teeth coming in crooked. Picture him wearing a stupid sweater striped blue and yellow, a birthday sweater that used to be his favorite. Even that young, picture him biting his dickhead fingernails. His favorite shoes are Keds. His favorite food, fucking corn dogs.

Imagine some dweeby little boy wearing no seat belt and riding in a stolen school bus with his mommy after dinner. Only theres a police car parked at their motel so the Mommy just blows on past at sixty or seventy miles an hour.

This is about a stupid little weasel who, for sure, used to be about the stupidest little rat fink crybaby twerp that ever lived.

The little cooz.

The Mommy says, Well have to hurry, and they drive uphill on a narrow road, their back wheels wagging from side to side on the ice. In their headlights the snow looks blue, spreading from the edge of the road out into the dark forest.

Picture this all being his fault. The little peckerwood.

The Mommy stops the bus a little ways back from the base of a rock cliff, so the headlights glare against its white face, and she says, Heres as far as were going to get, and the words come boiling out as white clouds that show how big inside her lungs are.

The Mommy sets the parking brake and says, You can get out, but leave your coat in the bus.

Picture this stupid runt letting the Mommy stand him right in front of the school bus. This bogus little Benedict Arnold just stands looking into the glare of the headlights, and lets the Mommy pull the favorite sweater off over his head. This wimpy little squealer just stands there in the snow, half naked, while the buss motor races, and the roar echoes off the cliff, and the Mommy disappears to somewhere behind him in the night and the cold. The headlights blind him, and the motor noise covers any sound of the trees scraping together in wind. The air is too cold to breathe more than a mouthful at a time so this little mucous membrane tries to breathe twice as fast.

He doesnt run away. He doesnt do anything.

From somewhere behind him, the Mommy says, Now whatever you do, dont turn around.

The Mommy tells him how there used to be a beautiful girl in ancient Greece, the daughter of a potter.

Like every time she gets out of jail and comes back to claim him, the kid and the Mommy have been in a different motel every night. Theyll 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 couldnt 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 Ive 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, theyd got off the highway and bought a can of black spray paint.

Even after all their rushing around, where theyve 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.

Theres 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 lovers shadow on the wall.

The hiss of spray paint stops and starts. Theres a short hiss, after that a longer hiss.

And the Mommy says how the girl traced the outline of her lovers 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.