How the Days of Love and Diphtheria Read Free Page B

boy’s face and how the boy mashed in the father’s throat, his stomach, his kidneys. How the father wheezed and vomited. How the father buckled. How the boy was too quick and the father too drunk. How when the pain was gone the boy took the socks off and so too did the father. How the coal dust and soot filled the father’s throat and how he fell to his knees, wheezing and dripping blood, saliva, mucus. How his face smeared violet. How the old man moaned and wept and how the boy left his father there, blind with blood.
    How his face glowed with a long off yellow. How the father said, “I would burn this house and all of you in it, if I had to.”
    How the boy woke, clasping his throat and gasping. How he believed he could not breathe although he was breathing. How he watched his skin in the bathroom mirror for hints of blue. How the boy slept with the medical encyclopedia under his pillow and how he reread the sections on sanitation and vaccination by the dead-son’s night light. How he wandered the house while his parents slept, gauging the strength of his own breathing and listening to the mother’s wheezing on the sofa. The father’s low faint breaths in the basement. How this infection seemed an infection no fire could eradicate.
    In those days, the man said, the city was reduced to rubble and the horses lost their skin for the fires. The horses in those days wandered pink and exposed. In those days men with skin like blackened alligators rode bicycles along ancient obliterated streets. In those days we watched them on the television news, and from our tallest buildings fell confetti and streamers. Our women kissed our men openly on the roads, in celebration .
    When the boy left, the father was asleep in the basement, his face crusted with black blood and flies. When the boy left the mother was asleep on the sofa. Her face and arms lost in immense putrid folds. When the boy left he took only a soft apple and the medical encyclopedia, until the mewing of the kitten inside of his walls became too great. How the boy opened the plaster along the cracks as if pulling open a canvas tent or the skin of a large animal, and there the white pink thing, trembling and mewing in his hands. How he stroked her soft white fur and how she mewed in his hands.

II.

    The man gestured to the narrow highways, the long stretches of dirt and dead grass. He indicated the bleached white skulls of horses and dogs. He told us of what you had seen and what you had done. The barns you razed to soil and the crops you brought the torches to, the cornfields you popped and, from the midst of the exploding white, how red and gray pheasants ascended, screaming and smoking, their feathers alight. How blood is a sort of copper. The farm mothers you held down and shoved full of red glistening pricks and knives. How they screamed through the rawhide buckles you clenched in their mouths. How a mound of children is inevitable and their smell is the musk of loam. How you marauded the suburbs and left the intestines of fathers and mothers and children coiled on front lawns. How we cannot always breathe. You spelled the names of a thousand ancient writers with the flames and blood of your conquests. You targeted not priests and kings but the blue fumes of mothers and fathers. You sought out the children and how they would grow into something other and you taught them to be no more. How we grew confused and lost by your light. The man gestured to the footprints along the road, those of a boy and those of a cat. The boy who followed your fires along the hillsides and ravines and the kitten who trotted, faithful and obedient, to the rhythms lost within his wake .
    How the rain pelted the roof and the long off flashing of lights and the kitten asleep on his belly. When the boy woke he woke to the wood smoke you built along the horizon, the hay and dung from barn animals long dead, their fumes mere remembrances trapped within the wood, the