Read Online Almost Everything Very Fast by Almost Everything Very Fast Christopher Kloeble - Free Book Online Page B

one was listening.
    “Julius, those were our things that you threw in the fire.”
    “But that was different!”
    “Aren’t you brave enough?”
    “I don’t want to do it!”
    “I love you. I’ll do it,” said Anni softly, as I screamed, “I’m not going to do it! I hate you!”
    My vision was so blurry with crying that I couldn’t tell Jasfe from Josfer when they stood beside me again, lifted me up and embraced me, kissed me.
    “We love you,” they whispered. “We love you.”
    “Me, too,” said Anni. “Me, too.”
    After the Sacrificial Festival everyone went to bed early. I couldn’t sleep, I thought about how I should have answered my parents, how I wished I’d answered them, and how good it would have felt to say those words. I slipped from the house, walked to the Moorbach, and hung my feet in the water. I plucked marsh marigolds, threw them into the current, and asked myself where their journey would take them. I cleared my throat, and said, “I love you.”
    Maybe that didn’t sound perfect—but then, what did sound perfect? On the way home I imagined how my parents’ faces would look when they heard me speak—first sleepy, then befuddled, and a moment later, happy—and had to smile. As I looked up at the night sky above the village, it seemed to me that this year the sacrificial bonfire was sending up a brighter glow than usual. But it wasn’t the festival. A house was burning. Our house was burning. Josfer and Jasfe’s house, and Anni’s, and mine. I ran toward it. The heat struck me in the face, and I flinched back. The fire had reached the second floor. There were no screams, I listened closely, I knew that in Segendorf people screamed at the slightest opportunity, but in my ears there was only a rumbling like that of a gigantic cooking pot on the boil, the fire whispering and hissing in a particularly hateful language. And I saw and I saw and I saw the flames dance through the rooms.
    Somebody tugged at my sleeve. Anni. She looked at me anxiously, clutching a torch in both hands.
    “I love them,” she said.

PART III
You Are My Mother

Good at These Things
    They set out right after lunch. Albert had trouble keeping up with Fred, who settled immediately into a brisk stride. As always when he left the house, Fred was wrapped in his royal blue poncho, which fluttered behind him like a cape as he walked and intensified his already imposing appearance. His tufted Tyrolean hat sat askew on his head. His bulky, sagging backpack, which suggested a cargo of junk, the encyclopedia doubtless among it, didn’t appear to be hindering him. Albert, on the other hand, had allowed himself to be persuaded into wearing a plastic raincoat, and was now sweating freely beneath a flawless blue sky.
    In a decidedly unsporty tote bag Albert was carrying a few slices of buttered bread, a Tupperware container filled with bananas, a few peeled carrots, a bottle of apple spritzer, Fred’s medication, and a pack of cigarettes. And in his hip pocket, the makeup compact.
    After they’d followed the main street a ways, they curved to the right down Ludwigstrasse, a narrow side street littered with dried cow patties, where at the age of eight Albert had taught Fred to ride his bicycle without training wheels. Albert had run back and forth beside him, pushing him along, encouraging him, nursing his skinned knees after each tumble, and wiping away his tears, until finally, during the May school holidays, Fred had rolled his first few feet sans training wheels, the wind blowing into his proud, radiant face.
    Fred paused beside a garden fence, stretched his arm over the wire, and waited. A white-and-brown-mottled foal broke from the shadow of an arborvitae hedge, trotted closer, and lifted its head so that Fred could stroke it between the ears. Albert watched as Fred tickled it, said hello, and asked how its day was going. He got the impression it enjoyed Fred’s company—it whinnied, as if at any moment it might