Read Online Soft Apocalypses by Lucy Snyder - Free Book Online Page B

breaking anything that would smash. My father came in and told me that if I wanted something to cry about, he would give it to me. He twisted my arm right out of my shoulder socket, and that evening he taught me that it was possible to endure incredible pain in perfect silence.
    And so I was perfectly silent as I stared down at the old doorknob, the hooked memories climbing the walls of my skull. If I opened the door, what would I find beyond? But just as my fingers closed around the tarnished brass, I heard my father speak my name, summoning me like a sorcerer calling up an obedient demon.
    “You gonna come say hello to me, Maybelle?”
    “Yes, Dad, I’ll be there in a moment.” My voice sounded like my mother’s inside my own head.
    I turned away from the door and went into the living room like any good daughter. My father was there in his favorite chair, his hair and beard looking a little greyer perhaps but really he was just about the same as when I’d last set eyes on him.
    “How are things out your way?” he asked. His hands were folded in his lap and his soft flannel shirt made him look huggable. Kindly and gentle. He did not look like a rapist. He did not look like the man who had dislocated my arm and threatened to kill me. He did not look like a man who would erase the existence of his own child.
    “It’s very pretty this time of year,” I replied. “Lots of wildflowers.”
    “That’s good,” he said. “A girl like you deserves to live in a place of God’s beauty.”
    “How long has Leanna been sick?” I asked.
    “I reckon she lived with it a long while now. It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “We’re all terrible broke up about it.”
    There was a faint, strange odor in the room that I couldn’t quite place. It mostly smelled like rust and rotten wood, but it also contained a sharp chemical note like burnt plastic. What could it be? Old mold and fungicide? Glue? I looked around at the ivy-colored carpet and the wisteria-patterned wallpaper for signs of water damage or a recent remodeling, but everything seemed just the same as when I called this place home.
    A feline head butted against my calf. I glanced down, and saw a white and gray kitty who looked a whole lot like my old cat Mouser. He rubbed against me, purring, and I picked him up and set him on my lap.
    My head spun as I stared into the cat’s face and realized that he didn’t just look a whole lot like Mouser ... he was Mouser. His mismatched green and blue eyes, the deep scar on his left ear from a fight with a raccoon ... he was the same as he’d been at his prime. But he’d gotten sick with feline leukemia when I was nine, and I’d buried him myself.
    This cat had been dead for a quarter of a century, and yet there he was, purring and kneading on my lap. He was soft, very soft, just the way I remembered. I looked around the room. All of it was exactly the way I remembered.
    A clammy dread filled me. I stared at my father, who was smiling at me benevolently.
    “Where am I? Where am I, really ?”
    “Why, you’re home, Maybelle. You’re home where you belong.”
    I gently set Mouser down on the carpet and stood up.
    “Where are you going?” my father asked. “Sit down, relax. Your mother will bring us some tea.”
    “I have to check on something.” I turned away from him and headed down the hall to Leanna’s old bedroom.
    My father hurried after me. “Now, don’t go in there, she’s resting.”
    “I won’t wake her.” Keeping my mind as neutral as possible, I opened the door.
    Leanna’s room was just the way I remembered it. She lay in bed, fast asleep, looking just the way she had when she was recovering from a bad case of the flu.
    And here, in this careful recreation of my home, she was still a teenager, not a woman pushing forty.
    I turned, dodged past the thing pretending to be my father, and ran to the sewing room.
    As my fingers closed around the brass knob, the father-thing shouted, “No, don’t go