Read Online The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott - Free Book Online

showed up at school with her arm in a sling and did not take unnecessary routes to pass by my desk; the next day she was gone. That Sunday a crowd gathered outside the church, waiting to be saved, speculating as to why the doors were locked.
    For weeks and months, the marquee displayed the same message:
WE ARE
NOT PERFECT
JUST FORGIVEN

 
    S ome nights I listen to my ragged breathing and remember: in the space behind my eyes, memories appear Technicolor. Pink and yellow light shines through the visions in my half sleep, as if they were constructed of rice paper, and I try, with such an aching, to replicate the smell of chlorine, to recreate the laughter of those long gone, to set these stories in my head in stone so they can be done with.
    Some nights I remember peaches. Tonight is one of them.
    Jackson had a job at the market one summer. He was seventeen, I was almost. The sunflowers in the front of the store were larger than any I’ve seen since, and the ancient cashier with the cigarette voice was named Paula. No: Linda. She called me rosebud and complimented my wrinkled sundresses. The bathroom was in the right front corner; it had only one stall and I can’t remember what the hand soap smelled of but I promise myself I will before Isleep. Jackson worked four days a week—or was it five—and his work shirt was never clean. It smelled definitively of him, even from where I would stand, across a display of clementines touted for peeling easily. I pretended I was a customer, crossed my arms and sighed over the selection of fruits and vegetables.
    But what’s the difference , I whined as I fingered the donut peaches, and he smiled patiently with the left side of his mouth curving up like it had since we were kids. You see, ma’am, if you can believe it or not, and he’d pause with mock astonishment, these were cultivated especially for a Chinese emperor—and now I can’t remember the name of the emperor but I decide I will, before I fall asleep. Never mind the name. Remember the donut peach. You must, I tell myself. Must.
    They were cultivated for a Chinese emperor, Jackson would say, who loved peaches but disliked the mess, so they designed the pan tao , the flat peach, which fit right in between his mustache and beard. It occurs to me between ticks that he may have made this up. No, no, he couldn’t have. Go on.
    What about this one. I would say, it looks funny. Should the skin look like that? All white like that? Don’t judge a book by its cover, ma’am, and he would laugh politely, this here is the arctic white and I might say it’s finer than the rest of them. Oh, really? Why? Well, first you’ve got less fuzz, he’d say, and I’d acknowledge this with a huh and hand on my hip. They’re just about the sweetest peach you’ll get, but they ripen more quickly, so you eat these guys up once you get home, ma’am.
    I force myself to remember, now lying on my side: freestone: the flesh falls away from the pit when you bite into it. Clingstone: it refuses to.
    Inevitably my peach facts run out and I lie awake, feeling unsettled, knowing that there’s so much I’m forgetting. I get up.
    In the bathroom I undress and examine myself. I arrange myself horizontally in the bathtub, and I turn the shower on and wrap my arms around myself, feel the water from its great height of origin. I try, this time, to remember nothing at all.

 
    T he first time we touched each other, I was seven, Jackson eight. My father, in a particularly good mood, had offered to take the boys off Julia’s hands, take all of us to a swimming spot he knew of. She hated my father, or maintained that she did for a large chunk of my childhood, but there was nothing Julia valued more than a moment away from the physical and psychic tugs that issued from her sons’ mouths day in and day out. ( T is for Tired , read the alphabet book James would be assigned to write in school that year. If we are bad Mom gets tired . It was accompanied by a