How the Days of Love and Diphtheria Read Free

mother, their warmth?
    How the boy and the father stood at the window watching the burning house, how it shimmered in the waves of heat. How the father said—
    I believe in what comes before innocence. I believe in the wide yawning mouth .
    Now the boy in the dead-son’s bedroom. How he laid on the son’s spaceship sheets, the faint green of the stars decaled along the ceiling. The shapes they spelled in their secret language. How kittens seemed to mew within the walls and how the boy slept, contented by the sound. How the boy read The Art of Lovemaking from the dead-son’s shelf although the words seemed squiggles of worms, how the pictures were black and white photos of bodies, naked men with shaved heads, their ribs and shoulders, the bones jutting, naked men tossed and wrapped into each other, naked men piled and mixed with the dirt while smoke stacks loomed in the dim background. The coils of black smoke. He blushed when the mother asked him what he was reading and he said later it reminded him of her and Father, together. “How so?” But he would not say.
    How the father said, “Do you remember when we played catch outside—”
    And the boy said, “Until we lost the ball—”
    â€œIn the mounds somewhere,” the father said. “And how angry your mother was, how she wouldn’t look at us. We were filthy, I’m sure. But a boy has to play, I said—”
    How he kissed the first girl he brought to his room, the taste of her wires, her blue rubber bands. Her smile and her neck against his kisses, the strawberry of her red hair. How she trembled beneath his weight, under his wetness, his hands. How she was firm and large and seemed as the mother once seemed through the lighted window. “Please, I want to see,” he told this girl. How she caught her hair, her braces, in her sweater. How her teeth chattered and her eyes darted. How the boy, with his lips and his hands, did not care even after her neck gave against his caresses and she seemed to fade in and out of consciousness. This girl, pale and fraught with freckles. And how her undershirt pulled free and how her gray brassiere and his fingers along the edges, the softness. Now pulling and unraveling and unsnapping until these, pink and erect and what he so long anticipated. How she whispered against his embraces that she should leave. How she heard the mewing within the walls, ghosts of kittens long dead, voices of kittens born anew. “There’s nothing there,” the boy murmured against her neck, his hands—. How she pulled free anyhow. How she scurried while he lay, exposed and ready for her. How her soot tracks disappeared against the gusts and fresh cinders. How the boy never saw her again.
    How the son sometimes stood on the hillside. His blue naked flesh. How in the evenings the son watched them from the yard. How they all seemed through the lighted windows. How the son made no gesture but to stand beneath the glow of the always burning house. How the boy locked the windows and propped chairs against the doors.
    How the father told the boy, “Their son died from diphtheria. His mother found him, blue and wheezing. He was still alive when she arranged him in the casket but the boy was dead when the father arrived home, the white lace, his calm blue face. When she said the word he dragged the mother from the house. She’d gone mad, yelling in a language nobody understood. How the long trail of gasoline caught and spread. How it has burned ever since.”
    The man gestured to the razed pines, the scorched stumps. I believe in how easily a forest burns, he said .
    These boys, boys whose names the boy could not recall, these dozens of boys and how they crowded into the boy’s room, these boys with long tangled hair, boys with yellow teeth verging on green, boys smelling of fuel oil, of perspiration, of some rank earth, boys with switchblades unsnapped and glinting, boys