Read Online The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness - Free Book Online

George still half-expected them to bleed every time he did it.
    He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He’d never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no emails from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark – fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper – moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut.
    And how they looked on the walls! Lined up according to whatever whim. George’s whim was simple – by author, chronological within name – but over the years he’d also done it by size, subject matter, types of binding. All of them there on his shelves, too many, not enough, their stories raging within regardless of a reader: Dorothea Brooke forever making her confounding choice of husband, the rain of flowers forever marking Jose Arcadio Buendia’s funeral, Hal Incandenza forever playing Eschaton on the tennis courts of Enfield.
    He had seen a story once about sand mandalas made by Tibetan Buddhist monks.
Unbelievably
gorgeous creations, sometimes just a metre across, sometimes big as a room. Different colours of sand, painstakingly blown in symmetrical patterns by monks using straw-like tubes, building layer upon layer, over the course of weeks, until it was finished. At which point, in keeping with Buddhist feelings about materialism, the mandala was destroyed, but George tended to ignore that part.
    What was interesting to him was that the mandala was meant to be – unless he’d vastly misunderstood, which was also possible – a reflection of the internal state of the monk. The monk’s inner being, hopefully a peaceful one, laid out in beautiful, fragile form. The soul as a painting.
    The books on George’s walls were his sand mandala. When they were all in their place, when he could run his hands over their spines, taking one off the shelf to read or re-read, they were the most serene reflection of his internal state. Or if perhaps not quite his internal state, then at least the internal state he would like to have had. Which was maybe all it was for the monks, too, come to think of it.
    And so when he made his very first incision into the pages of a book, when he cut into an old paperback he’d found lying near the rubbish bins behind the shop, it felt like a blundering step into his mandala. A blasphemy. A desecration of the divine. Or, perhaps, a releasing of it.
    Either way, it felt . . .
interesting.
    He’d never considered himself an artist, certainly didn’t consider himself one
now
, but he’d always been a half-decent drawer of things. He could sketch a face with some skill – less so the hands, but who besides John Singer Sargent could ever do hands? – and he’d even, for a period in college, made nude charcoal rubbings of Clare, lounging over a pillow or failing to hold steady the feathered headdress she’d found God knew where. These were usually precursors to sex, of course, though none the worse for that, and perhaps an emblem of their eventual marriage, as she misunderstood the sort of person he essentially was.
    ‘That’s really not half-bad,’ Clare would say, looking over the sketchpad as she pulled his shirt out of his trousers. And what followed was always relaxed and amused and full of the right sort of joy.
    He hadn’t stopped sketching and drawing when they married, even when he started the business and she began moving up the civil service solicitor ladder – she’d be a judge some day, they were both sure of it – but he’d never really
progressed
in the way Clare kept (nicely, encouragingly, full of