Read Online Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle - Free Book Online Page A

in the ditch, and the crows that settled there to pick at it until they, too, were flattened by cars, and their bodies swelled and stank in the heat; it was the half-decayed doe we found in the woods with maggots stitching in and out of its flesh, the stillborn foal wrapped in a rotting amniotic sac in the pasture where the vultures perched. We caught a whiff of it, sniffed it out, didn’t flinch, touched it with our bare hands, ate lunch immediately afterwards. We weren’t frightened of death.
    And a few summers later, spinning out of control on a loosegravel road in a car full of boys and beer, we weren’t scared of it then, either, and we laughed and said to the boy at the wheel, Do it again . We only learned to fear it later, much later, when we realized it knew our names and, worse, the name of everyone we loved. At the height of the summer, in the very dog days, I would have said that we loved the ponies, but I realize now we never did. They were only everything we asked them to be, and that summer, that was enough. I don’t know. Lately I’ve been thinking someone should write an elegy for those ponies. But not me.

The Still Point
    I n Thunderbird, Illinois, I get to thinking the world is going to end. During the day it’s cotton candy and caramel apples, the Howler and the Zipper, the looping soundtrack of the carousel. But at night, when I’m stretched out in the back of the truck on the outskirts of Camper City, trying to sleep in the bowl of quiet left by five hundred people gone home sunburned and broke to their beds, the feeling sneaks in and sits down square on my chest: these are the last days. It’s all going to break up. It’s as if I’m eavesdropping on the secret that history has been whispering to itself all along: the punch line, the trick ending, the big joke. I curl up alongside the wheel well, wondering why I’m the only one who hears it. But morning always comes, daylight burning through the windows, the truck hot as a greenhouse, and I slide out barefoot onto the grass for another slow drag around the sun.
    Across the aisle, Dub leans out the door of his camper, shading his eyes and squinting in my direction. “Hurry it up, man, hurry your ass up,” he shouts. “They’re calling for rain today.”
    He steps out of his camper as if he’s lowering himself into a pool, gripping the doorframe and easing himself down on one leg, then the other. It takes a while for him to wade his way over. I pull off my T-shirt and crack my neck. The morning is hot and damp as the inside of a dog’s mouth. All around us, Camper City wakes up slow. Generators hum, people light their first smokes of the day, piss out the door. The Haunted House woman puts on the radio and steps out to do her exercises under the awning of her RV, bouncing in a tank top, touching her toes. Everyone struggles to maintain something of a routine. Me, every morning, I remind myself where we are. Now: Illinois. I say it out loud, to make it official.
    By the time Dub makes it over he’s sweating and puffing, his mouth a deflated O. He presses a hand to my back window to steady himself. “Get a move on,” he wheezes. “We’ll get an early crowd. Rain in the afternoon. They’re all at home right now, glued to the Weather Channel, changing their plans. I guarantee.”
    Dub is always guaranteeing the unguaranteeable: the weather, the whims of people, the quality of questionably constructed merchandise. A born hustler. Me, I couldn’t sell a drowning man a life jacket. We could get no business at all, for what I care. I’d just as soon sit at my table and watch the crows tear around above me, wondering what the hell setdown in the center of their field. But still, I’m pulling on a shirt, lacing up my boots. Illinois. Really it’s just another sky, another field, another morning, another sea of faces to come, blank-eyed, slack-jawed, hands