Read Online Blue Angel by Francine Prose - Free Book Online

has boxes of them at home, and could give them to Adam to sell on consignment. But that would be too humiliating. He’ll just pretend not to care. So no Christina Stead for him. No Wallace Stegner. No Stendhal. Anyway, choosing a book would represent too great a commitment. His espresso would be cold long before he decided.
    He grabs a copy of Fiction Today . Let’s see who’s doing what. The first story, by a writer whose name he faintly recognizes, describes a father cold-bloodedly executing the family poodle. He skims through it, then begins another story, by another vaguely familiar name, a woman’s this time, and stops when the mother backs her car over the narrator’s kitty. Is this some kind of theme issue? Or didn’t the editors notice? Have his students been reading this? That could explain a lot. They’re too young and sweet to kill off their pets, so they have sex with them instead. He wishes his students were reading this. He slides the magazine back on the shelf and picks up Poets and Writers , paging past the ads for summer conferences (to which he has not been invited) and anthologies (to which he has not been asked to submit), past the interview with the semifamous novelist discoursing on how she warns her students about the perils of putting descriptions of food in their stories.
    He might as well read Angela’s chapter. At least it’s something he has to do. A false sense of accomplishment is better than none at all. He reaches for his briefcase. Now where did he leave it? He hopes not in his office. Did he stop between there and here—somewhere he’ll never find it?
    He runs out to check his car. The briefcase is on the front seat. Back at his table, he takes a fortifying gulp of espresso and finds the tangerine-colored envelope. “ Eggs . A novel by Angela Argo.” He steels himself, reads the first line, then reads on, without stopping.
    Every night, after dinner, I went out and sat with the eggs.
    This was after my mother and I washed the dishes and loaded the washer, after my father dozed off over his medical journals, it was then that I slipped out the kitchen door and crossed the chilly backyard, dark and loamy with the yeasty smell of leaves just beginning to change, noisy with the rustle of them turning colors in the dark. For a moment I looked back at the black frame of our house, the whole place jumping and vibrating with the dishwasher hum. Then I slipped into the toolshed, where it was always warm, lit only by the red light of the incubator bulbs, silent but for the whirring hearts inside the fertilized eggs.
    The eggs took twenty-one days to hatch. I wasn’t having much luck. I blamed myself completely. I believed I was being punished for thoughts I shouldn’t have had, for wanting only to think of them in the warm dark shed, with my eyes shut and the unborn chicks floating in their shells.
    I checked the thermometers on the incubators and put marks on my charts. I began to think I’d made mistakes, put X’s in the wrong boxes. I went back and started again. If the heat varied, the chicks wouldn’t hatch or would be born deformed.
    The eggs were my eleventh-grade biology project. Officially, that is. Underneath those neat charts, those notebooks, the racks of fertilized eggs, my real project was black magic, casting spells for things I shouldn’t have wanted, and longed for, and finally got.
    My father’s patient, Mrs. Davis, had a stroke in her henhouse and died and came back to life in a whirlwind of feathers. She decided she hated chickens and asked my father if he wanted the incubators instead of medical fees. Why would a doctor want incubators? Because I needed a science project.
    From the hospital, Mrs. Davis told her son to kill the chickens. Her grandson—a kid I knew from school—brought us two dozen chickens, plucked, in plastic bags specked with blood. The grandson clutched three bags in each hand,