Aftershock & Others Read Free

student in my dreams. I so wanted to attend the university but the Regents wouldn’t hear of it. They were scandalized by my application. No women in the College of Arts and Sciences, and especially in the medical college. Especially not a poor farm girl.
    So I’d hide in the rear of the lecture halls and listen to Dr. Waldman’s lectures on anatomy and physiology. Karl found me there but kept my secret and let me stay. I fell in love with him immediately. I remember that. I remember all our secret meetings, in fields, in lofts. He’d teach me what he learned in class. And then he’d teach me other things. We became lovers. I’d never given myself to any man before. Karl was the first, and I swear he’ll be the only one. I don’t remember how we became separated. I—
    Here he comes. Oh, look at him! I want to run to him but I couldn’t bear for him to see me like this. What torture this nightmare is!
    I watch him enter his uncle’s house, see him light the candles in the entry-way. I move closer as he picks up my note and reads it. But no loving smile lights his features. Instead, his face blanches and he totters back against the wall. Then he’s out the door and running, flying through the streets, my note clutched in his hand. I follow him as best I can but he outdistances me. No matter. I know the route. I sense where he’s going.
    When I arrive at Maria’s house he’s already inside. I lurch to a lighted window and peer within. Karl stands in the center of the room, his eyes wild, the ruddy color still gone from his cheeks. Maria has her arms around his waist. She’s smiling as she comforts him.
    “—only a joke,” she says. “Can’t you see that, my love? Someone’s trying to play a trick on you!”
    “Then it’s a damn good trick!” Karl holds my note before her eyes. “This is how she always signed her notes—‘Your Eva.’ No one else knew that. Not even you. And I burned all those letters.”
    Maria laughs. “So what are you telling me? That Eva wrote you this note? That’s certainly not her handwriting.”
    “True, but—”
    “Eva is dead, my love.”
    The words strike like hammer blows to my brain. I want to shout that I’m here, alive, transformed into this creature. But I keep silent. I have no workable voice. And after all, this is only a dream. I must keep telling myself that.
    Only a dream.
    Nothing here is true and therefore none of it matters.
    Yet I find a horrid fascination in it.
    “They hung her,” Maria is saying. “I know because I went and watched. You couldn’t stomach it but I went to see for myself.” Her smile fades as an ugly light grows in her eyes. “They hung her, Karl. Hung her till she stopped kicking and swung limp in the breeze. Then they cut her down and took her off to the medical college just as she requested. The noble little thing: Wanted her body donated to science. Well, by now she’s in a thousand little pieces.”
    “I know.” Karl’s color is returning, but his flush seems more a shade of guilt than good health. “I saw her brain, Maria. Eva’s brain! Dr. Waldman kept it in a glass jar on one of the lab tables as an example of an abnormal brain. ‘Dysfunctio Cerebri’ his label said, right next to a supposedly normal brain. I had to sit there during all his lectures and stare at it, knowing the whole time who it had belonged to, and that it was not abnormal in the least.”
    “It should have been labeled a ‘stupid’ brain.” Maria laughs. “She believed you loved her. She thought I was your sister. She believed everything we told her, and so she wound up taking the blame for your uncle’s murder. As a result, you’re rich and you don’t ever have to think about her again. She’s gone.”
    “Her brain’s gone too. I was so glad when pranksters stole it and I no longer had to look at it.”
    “Now you can look at me.”
    Maria steps back and unbuttons her blouse, baring her breasts. As Karl locks her in an embrace, I reel