Read Online Stunt by Claudia Dey - Free Book Online Page A

there. She lets her hands fall. Arms still too tired to pat my head. ‘You’re welcome,’ Marta says, walking away, a straight black seam completing the night.
    {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}
    e,
    there are astronauts lost in space. bolts,
gloves and tanks too. they float toward fires.
for days, for decades. sometimes, centuries.
just waiting to catch. everything, all of us just parts,
waiting to fall to the ground.
    bring tobacco.
bring apples.
bring you.
    sssss.
    If Marta’s rope were laid flat on the ground, and there were no apartment towers or highways to negotiate, it could, from our backyard, reach the lake. It is as long as Finbar’s walk across the Niagara Gorge. As long as Finbar’s walk between the skyscrapers in New York City. And as long as Finbar’s last walk on that fateful morning in Florence when the world shook itself free of the thing he loved the most, and he retired into oblivion to feast on his own heart, among other things.
    I sling it round my shoulder and I climb the south side of our house to the roof, where I will tie the rope from our chimney to the twins’ chimney. There, I will take my first walk, a humble length, but in the doing I will be feathered like Finbar, with the world below me, an open mouth, surrounded by water it cannot yet see. And you will clap so loud, a
racket,
that it will be, amidst streetcars, slurs, barrel fires, bottles smashed, sirens, the only sound that will reach me thirty feet above the ground. No matter how far you have gotten, even if you are clinking bronze mugs with Finbar, both of you in your overcoats despite the air outside being, you both agree,
sultry,
I will hear you. Your two half-ruined hands coming together as cymbals.
    Our last night together, before we fished in the sideways rain, I did a handstand on a crane, hundreds of feet above a construction site on Lake Shore, just east of Bathurst, and below, you marched the mud, you snorted and paced, a penned-in rodeo bull, eyes on me, a speck, a balancing speck, and suddenly you hollered, ‘A daredevil, an aerialist, a miracle!’ like a great audience was gathering and they were hungry.
Pow pow.
You startled me with yourcry, I tipped, a silver needle, speedometer, but I steadied myself, my white nightgown another skin, folded loose and sodden against me. My palms firm, they pressed down against the wet metal, making my stamp, my future.
    But for a moment I imagined myself, barrelling toward the ground like the woman in the photograph did, barrelling so fast that even if you did want to catch me, you couldn’t.
    Partway to the roof, I crouch in front of Immaculata’s bedroom window. Between her thumb and forefinger, she holds a mouse by the tail. The mouse is as big as her tongue and brownish. If the mouse were a girl, she would be called plain. Immaculata pets her and places her on her stained handkerchief. Another common lump gone. Immaculata does not feel sorrow. She feels only curiosity, clean curiosity.
    She fills a glass jar with rubbing alcohol. I watch her breathe in the smell of it, a pure antiseptic, unabashed. She is grateful for the authority of a solvent. She holds the mouse up by her tail and drops her into the clear liquid. A small splash. She puts the lid on the jar. There is no sorrow around death for Immaculata. It is only the place where she has the most questions. She lowers her body to the floor and stares, in line with the jar, as if wishing the mouse’s dull brown eyes for her own. The mouse spins weightless.
    I pull myself onto Mink’s windowsill. She stands erect in her nighttime robe rubbing cold cream into her face, which is now a white mask. And then she does two things I have never seen her do before: she pulls out her teeth and she lifts a wig off herhead. Underneath, she has a few strands of long grey hair. Without teeth, her face sinks inward. Without hair, her scalp is a shine, the last strands, crooked and desperate. Cracks on a