Read Online Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen - Free Book Online

The Gene for Music
    He wants to know if I am happy here and have I eaten any apples yet. I tell him no, I like to let them fall off the trees and rot. They won’t turn red and the ones I like to eat are red, but these sweeten the air with their decay. They are eaten. They are never wasted. They have their use, when they fall, never far from proverbial tree. Yellow apples falling with brown leaves more slowly onto grass that’s greener than ever. Green in winter, tawny in summer. Don’t burn. Consume yourself more slowly.
    Right now the ground is damp and marshy. In summer there were many fires. Some started maliciously, others were spontaneous. Apple trees are here but he ’s not sure they belong. He dreams of rice growing where they are, a hilarious dream. The blood of agrarian ancestors does him no good. Some of his favorite trees are books. Besides, if he grew rice, which anyone knows he’d never do, where would the squirrels live? The black one was the aggressor, chasing tail. She flicked her tail in his face.
    Squirrels multiply on his tree-filled acres. The sky is clear blue. A cloudless sky with two airplanes flying at different angles. Each is given a line, a path to fly in. The pilots communicate with someone on the ground. They all communicate with precise machines that very rarely make a fatal error. The ground is damp and moldy and a fire not likely to start in the airthis time of year. Spontaneous combustion, midair collision. Try not to burn. Try not to alarm. The phone rang but she didn’t answer it. Later he will ask her where she went and she will say, “To the laundromat or the library, I forget which.” He might seem hurt but his honesty will prevail and he ’ll become earnest and blunt. That’s when he starts to smoke. He’ll want to get to the bottom of it, clear the air, work it through. At times like these he ’s most endearing and yet she ’ll have no place to hide because the house has no walls.
    He can see her from another room. He likes to whisper at her while a record is playing. That’s how cool he can be. He’ll ask which books she ’s been reading. She could give him a list and we could discuss them later. We could gossip about books, which was one of his favorite activities. He didn’t want to forbid her singing in the bathtub, but she would notice that he flinched a little, so she tried not to do it when he was around. She had not inherited the gene for music, just as his blood had distinguished itself from the red stuff of his ancestors. At all times he tried to indulge her, having heard the story of her austere childhood. She in turn would try to soothe and distract him from the score of abandonments that caused him such pain when remembered. They both had violent histories but longed to live in peace and so it was a pact sealed in blood, a sweetheart contract in which there were provisions for each to get theupper hand. Even though she bled every month, she always had someone to blame; while he noted that each time he touched her, her body was there, which had not always been the case with her predecessors.
    She listened to his lists and made her own in secret. A grocery list was necessary because he avoided buying food, preferring to spend cash on inessentials because they bought more satisfaction. “But you,” he told her, “are impossible to satisfy because you never seem to want, except to sleep and eat.” She lives in his house like a sleepy cat though once he joked he might pay to keep her here, because even a woman with no wants must have money to supply her needs.
    He never seems to sleep or eat but lives on a mysterious energy source, adapted for life on her planet. That’s why she can’t laugh at his jokes, because humor is local. He was born far away but feels at home. Or he was born close to home but feels far from there now. Nothing touches him now except her hands, her mouth. He touches