Read Online Peripheral Vision by Paddy O'Reilly - Free Book Online

ask. I moved a couple of steps down the room so I could see the monkeys’ faces. They were stretching and squeezing their lips together, opening their jaws, squinting so their eyes were almost hidden. I moved a little further forward. I was almost in their sightline.
    â€˜Don’t do that, mate, please,’ Jay said. ‘It’s better if they get no stimulation here. You do enough stimulation from your end, okay? I’m just trying to keep the fucking things sane for another three months until you’re done with them.’
    My gut turned over, and for some reason I had a vision of my ex-wife with our Pomeranian in her lap. She liked to dress it up in dinky little coats with ribbons and bows. She would never clean up the dogshit in the yard because she said it was too disgusting. After she left I gave the Pomeranian to my mother, who said to me, Don’t bother giving me those stupid coats. Maybe it will remember it’s a dog.
    I took one more step. The eyeballs of the monkeys rolled toward me, their heads constrained from movement. In the paper we had published about our research, we had named them Subjects A through D.
    I wondered what the machines in the secure lab were doing at that moment.

A Short History of Peace
    This house where we live was built for labourers four centuries ago. The storey above us is empty already, the tenants gone last week. The cramped rooms; the worn stone where we step down into the kitchen; the bathroom that juts out from the back wall of the original house where once the workers sluiced water over their sweating scalps from a hand pump in the yard; the patch of dark soil near the back fence where the remains of old fires were tipped by women when they rose at dawn – this house reminds us of who came before.
    Yesterday there was a knock on the front door. I told him not to answer. He said there was no point. They would come again.
    My body too wears my history in its skin and its bones. When I step down from the flagstone into the kitchen, the past reverberates through my joints. I am corroded by time and work and love, shaped into worn-down angles and faint white scars that make me seem like a part of the house, a stone woman who emerged from this wall centuries ago. We are built of this country. The shape of our long narrow land repeats in our anatomy, split by the spine. The body has a left side and a right side but they are not in symmetry. They struggle for dominance. One generation we are left-handed, the next we are only adept with the right.
    The human spine begins with the letter A, the atlas vertebra, which bears the weight of the head. The spine has twenty-six bones, some fused, some singular. In the bed where we lie together I trace his bony back, climbing the ladder in a two-fingered walk. Outside the room, delivery trucks for the factory down the road reverse with the insistent beeping that makes it seem as though they are travelling the length of the street backward. I wish I could hear that sound in my life, the alarm that says we are travelling backward. When travelling the spine of a country, or of a man, with one’s eyes squeezed shut, it is difficult to know whether one is going up or down, forward or backward, into the past or into the future.
    He stretches long like a cat on the white sheets and yawns with a faint yowl of tiredness. I can hear the click of tendons shifting into place over his bones. Two people walk past the front of the house, talking in bright loud musical notes. Their shadows traverse the blinds quickly, like hurrying ghosts.
    It is dusk. The last of the sun is trying to slip into the house through the bands of the blinds. The air inside is heavy and still. We are too exhausted to talk anymore. All we can do is count the body. Listen to the body. Feel the slow measured wash of life through the circulatory system.
    In the morning we sit at the table. The kitchen is in the dark part of the house, the north, with a window