How the Days of Love and Diphtheria Read Free Page A

with black eyes, with blood-shot eyes, these boys with fluids and how they dripped, yellow and red and translucent, these boys and how they piled over each other, how they giggled and sneered, how the boys crowded into the boy’s room tingling all throughout with the longing to grope, to pull and suck and stab the boy atop or alongside or nearby. How the heat of the boys made the other boys dizzy, how they smoked cigarettes and snuck whisky and how the room filled with blue smoke and how they laughed at the mewing of kittens inside the wall, how these boys thumped at the wall with their knuckles, their knives, how these boys wanted to hunt and murder what lived within, how these boys glowed and grew rigid and purple in the light of the burning house.
    How the son watched from the hillside. His bruised throat. How he stood in the center of the cinder yard with calm dead eyes. How one morning the boy woke, and there, the son, dangling from the ledge outside his window. His blue murderous fingers.
    How the mother lost her slender figure, how she resembled a pear, save her sags and folds, which seemed more the melting and collapsing of a large candle, how the dirt did not wash free from underneath, the smell of black and decay, and the walls always lost under dripping tar. Now how the father was too drunk on malt liquor and fuel oil to command the woman to scrub and how the woman was too fat to climb the stepladder, too immense and putrid to stretch her arms over her shoulders, too weak under the layers to scrub. Trapped along the walls, a thousand, thousand flies writhing and buzzing in the tar. How the woman slept now for the fumes of the tar of the always burning house. How her figure bulged on the sofa. How her wheezing trembled the house. How the father slept for his drink or stumbled up the stairs and how he sometimes lost himself along the banister and there he lay howling and moaning through the night. How the boys in their wild masses stampeded over him, how they stole his cigarettes, the last of his cashed disability check, how the boys bought firecrackers and lighters, how they exploded these on the lawn, the glow within the glow. How the father loomed at the boy’s room and the stillness of a hundred boys within. How he slumped against the malevolence of children. How his lips, sodden for the boys within the room, the musk of the boys, the stale heat of the boys. How the father missed the trembling of youthful flesh within his arms, none since this wretched family he built, these black walls, this wife who bulged and wheezed, this house he grew from the timber and soot, this house under the light of the house burning, trapped always under this illumination.
    The man gestured to the skies, Under the shadow of our aircraft, he said, a schoolyard of children became a river of tar .
    How the father leaned in the boy’s bedroom doorway and in his arms, a folded pair of exterminator clothes, dusty and crisp with mold. How the boy’s room was empty save for the boy, the scents and stains, the mounds of translucent fibers. The father’s mouth scarcely moved when he spoke and how his words seemed the words of something less than human, some yawning piece of earth, some dying sludge. “You want to play catch?” the father said. “You old idiot,” the boy said. How the father lurched into the room and how the boy shoved him off, how the father pitched over, flailing. How the father struck his face on the boy’s desk. How the father watched the boy from the floor, his face a sheet of blackish blood. “Too big to play with your old Dad huh,” the father said. “You’re not as big as you think you are.” How the two swaddled their hands in white socks for lack of gloves and now in the basement how the walls sweltered and dripped, how the sound of hands wrapped in socks thumping against warm meat, how white socks clotted black with blood, how the father swung wild for the