Read Online Stunt by Claudia Dey - Free Book Online

you to play with us.’
    â€˜You.’
    â€˜Play with us tomorrow.’
    â€˜Wanna?’
    I can smell their breath. Toothpaste and vanilla. Premature death. Mrs. Next Door sees them and calls out, ‘Bedtime. Now.’ I watch them vanish past her. She forms the curtain to their world.
    The lights of the twins’ house are turned off so quickly. For them, the sky is choked with bombers.
    Where is my sign? My bundle of clues? An arrow. A homing pigeon. ‘It is I, Eugenia, your daughter beloved.’ I mouth this up to the apple tree. Its licked branches against the night sky, the strokes of the first alphabet. I wave two hands in the air,
help,
but the world is unmoved. A mute witness.
    The twins’ house is a black eye now as they are pressed between their sheets and worried into sleep. Mr. Next Door comes out onto the back porch and lights a cigarette. He does not even pace while moths throw themselves at the porch light, suicides fast as fetal heartbeats. I listen to his inhalations and exhalations. They are the breath of a sleeping beast. I crouch to the ground.
    Children lose their minds the way that adults do. Same as adults, we have various strategies to win our minds back. Immaculata told me about a girl who did equations in her head to fall asleep at night. The equations were very sophisticated. The numbers made her less distraught. And they kept the witches away. If you have a million birds flying in your head, it makes a difference if you can name them. All of that skittering. Name the birds. Only then can their calls be separated. Only then can their beaks be blunted.
    You ride the shoulder of the highway, wheels spitting up gravel. A grimace on your face. Beard: hoarfrost. Cheeks more sunken, more hungry than usual, you’re thin as a line drawing. You think to yourself,
I was supposed to be hero to something but I have forgotten what that was.
Me. You were supposed to be hero to me.
    You did not write
eugenia
on the note because you could not. I would have tripped you up. I was your last bit of health. I wouldhave kept you here. When you ride, you hear a sound in the brush travelling, running alongside you. Sometimes you stop to see if it is animal and sometimes you stop to see if it is human.
    Tonight you build a fire in a farmer’s field, and you burn, like diseased livestock, my photograph and my baby hair, and you fall asleep to the smell of me being licked away until I am black curls and ash. But you make the mistake of speaking to me when you are tired, a child who is lost on his way home, all of his landmarks inexplicably gone. You are not able to erase me from your mind. No matter how much your fists bleed from being scraped against rock, I am a noise there. A rattle. With the totems gone, the photograph, the hair, the thing you once wanted to remember and now try to forget is no longer fastened. It is freed and so it takes on a life of its own. I am freed. Framed by empty night, I take on a life of my own. The end of you. The beginning of me.
    Marta stands in our yard in her black pantsuit with its cinched waist, her swollen face too rouged. I gasp when I see her. She came home from your funeral and, with an oven mitt on, loosened all the light bulbs in her apartment. It seemed to be the only thing she could do. She put on blush before leaving again. She wished to be civilized. She put it on in the dark.
    Oven mitt still on, she hands me a rope, coiled into a perfect O, and says with the offering, guttural, ‘A gift. Purely symbolic. Otherwise useless.’ From the story. From the story about the girl who stood above the flood. I loop the rope around my shoulder. It sits heavy as if a ship hangs from its end.
    â€˜Thank you.’ I look up at Marta, her desperate weariness. She has just been pulled to shore. So close to perishing, she cannotafford to be giving anything away. Too much has gone missing already. Habit, she touches her throat. Her locket is not