Read Online Cabin Fever by Diane Awerbuck - Free Book Online
Authors: Diane Awerbuck
Tags: Cabin Fever
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and looked again. The old guy wasn’t there. His empty deckchair didn’t make sense. It was wrong: a pulled tooth, a missed train, an eclipse. The propeller on the plane spun. The rotation made Tony feel dizzy.
The gunshot was very loud in the underground parking lot, startling him away from the sound and towards the trees and the retreating deer. For a few seconds – one, two, three – he knew that his fingers would slip and he would topple over the side without the consent of his tendons. He saw his unlucky spirit self plummeting into the blue of the firs, smelling of resin and crushed out of true by the time he hit the slopes, rolling.
But it was only the echo that shunted along the barrier: it ricocheted off the bodies of the cars and made his teeth ache in his head.
If I don’t turn around, Tony thought, I won’t have to look. He gripped the icy railing, sieving the air for sounds. In the distance people were walking, heads determinedly down.
Tony forced himself to face the scene.
What was left of the old guy was lying in an open parking space between a Range Rover and a BMW , both sprayed with the red end of him, the rain and thunder of dying. From here he was smaller, the bones of his body light and flightless as a bird in a diorama, light and porous as a balsawood plane.
Tony made his way towards the old man’s body, angling his head carefully away. He could not look directly at what lay before him, but then he thought: I’m the only one who looked up. I should do something.
He moved his eyes slowly over the corpse. He was expecting the face to be collapsed and shrunken like the Bushman heads in the museum, but instead the bullet had exploded the old guy’s false teeth, springing the bridge from his mouth in protest. Tony felt the sympathetic set of his own teeth in his gums.
The old man had dressed carefully for his final display, a formal shirt that Tony hadn’t seen before. His collar was buttoned all the way up to his grizzled chin, as if it was only his head that had fragmented, a bunch of flowers in a fist. There was a note pinned to his chest, folded over once like a florist’s card, with its familiar message and foreign script.
Tony saw his own hand reach out. He was hardly even shaking. The paper was crumpled, as if it had been torn from something the old guy had been reading. The writing was a smudged, blocky print. NO ONE WOULD FIND ME .
Behind him, the footsteps and the shouts were beginning. Tony screwed the note into his palm, reducing it to half its size. He looked around. The dentures lay discarded next to the body, bridged with pink and slick with spit. He half-expected the teeth to chatter towards him over the cement, but they lay still. No one would miss them. He closed his hand quickly over the hinged plates and slid them into his pocket. They still smelled of beer. Tony wiped his hands on his jeans. He got up, feeling his joints stretching like perished rubber bands – how long had he been crouching there? – and backed away. One last time his eyes traversed the old man’s body, all the way down to his feet.
They were bare, white and ribbed with tendons, the feet of a plaster Christ on a wooden cross, flung to kingdom come.
There is a Light That Never Goes Out
S OONER OR LATER EVERYONE CAME TO K OTNA H ORA. In the green fields of the new Czech Republic, the empty factories and castles mouldered quietly to themselves. When he looked out from the window of the train Thomas Heber saw that there were graveyards settled between the whispering farm fields. There was no way to tell where the boneyards ended and the fields began: the crops seeded themselves and sprang from the same earth.
Kotna Hora, Kotna Hora – simple to say, even for foreigners, even for those who found themselves on the train from Praha when they had meant to go somewhere else. The travellers rustled their maps and squinted at the legends, angling up to the light the thin paper, thumbed and receding and
The gunshot was very loud in the underground parking lot, startling him away from the sound and towards the trees and the retreating deer. For a few seconds – one, two, three – he knew that his fingers would slip and he would topple over the side without the consent of his tendons. He saw his unlucky spirit self plummeting into the blue of the firs, smelling of resin and crushed out of true by the time he hit the slopes, rolling.
But it was only the echo that shunted along the barrier: it ricocheted off the bodies of the cars and made his teeth ache in his head.
If I don’t turn around, Tony thought, I won’t have to look. He gripped the icy railing, sieving the air for sounds. In the distance people were walking, heads determinedly down.
Tony forced himself to face the scene.
What was left of the old guy was lying in an open parking space between a Range Rover and a BMW , both sprayed with the red end of him, the rain and thunder of dying. From here he was smaller, the bones of his body light and flightless as a bird in a diorama, light and porous as a balsawood plane.
Tony made his way towards the old man’s body, angling his head carefully away. He could not look directly at what lay before him, but then he thought: I’m the only one who looked up. I should do something.
He moved his eyes slowly over the corpse. He was expecting the face to be collapsed and shrunken like the Bushman heads in the museum, but instead the bullet had exploded the old guy’s false teeth, springing the bridge from his mouth in protest. Tony felt the sympathetic set of his own teeth in his gums.
The old man had dressed carefully for his final display, a formal shirt that Tony hadn’t seen before. His collar was buttoned all the way up to his grizzled chin, as if it was only his head that had fragmented, a bunch of flowers in a fist. There was a note pinned to his chest, folded over once like a florist’s card, with its familiar message and foreign script.
Tony saw his own hand reach out. He was hardly even shaking. The paper was crumpled, as if it had been torn from something the old guy had been reading. The writing was a smudged, blocky print. NO ONE WOULD FIND ME .
Behind him, the footsteps and the shouts were beginning. Tony screwed the note into his palm, reducing it to half its size. He looked around. The dentures lay discarded next to the body, bridged with pink and slick with spit. He half-expected the teeth to chatter towards him over the cement, but they lay still. No one would miss them. He closed his hand quickly over the hinged plates and slid them into his pocket. They still smelled of beer. Tony wiped his hands on his jeans. He got up, feeling his joints stretching like perished rubber bands – how long had he been crouching there? – and backed away. One last time his eyes traversed the old man’s body, all the way down to his feet.
They were bare, white and ribbed with tendons, the feet of a plaster Christ on a wooden cross, flung to kingdom come.
There is a Light That Never Goes Out
S OONER OR LATER EVERYONE CAME TO K OTNA H ORA. In the green fields of the new Czech Republic, the empty factories and castles mouldered quietly to themselves. When he looked out from the window of the train Thomas Heber saw that there were graveyards settled between the whispering farm fields. There was no way to tell where the boneyards ended and the fields began: the crops seeded themselves and sprang from the same earth.
Kotna Hora, Kotna Hora – simple to say, even for foreigners, even for those who found themselves on the train from Praha when they had meant to go somewhere else. The travellers rustled their maps and squinted at the legends, angling up to the light the thin paper, thumbed and receding and
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