Read Online The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus - Free Book Online Page B

materials, read quickly in a desperate voice, the transmission flickering in and out.
    There was, it seemed, smallwork to be done now, and this was how to do it.
    Sometimes when Thompson spoke I had to touch the wet belly of the listener to ground the signal. Otherwise it shorted, fell mute. This rarely happened with Burke’s sermons. I used the back of my hand against the listener’s cool, slick exterior, pushed up into the softness until I felt resistance, as if deep inside the listener, if you gouged enough jelly from it, was a long, flat bone.
    Thompson provided the details that would inform my first round of smallwork, the tests and procedures I might perform,
taking matters into my own hands
, to keep Esther close to us.
    When the service finished I unseated the listener and wrapped it in plastic before burying it behind the hut. Back inside I stuffed the cables into the hole and covered up the hole with a floorboard.
    Claire and I made no sign to each other outside, only stared at the yardless plot of dirt that circled our hut. It was our right to ignore what we heard. Burke always said there was no true reaction to the service, no single response. “Bafflement is the most productive reaction,” he said. “This is when the mind is at its best. This is all we are in the face of the Name’s mystery.”
    We walked the perimeter of the hut and finally groped our way into a conversation about the brush, beating it back, knowing that we’d never do it so long as the rules were in place. But we indulged these conversations about gardening anyway, let them fill the air so we could use our voices again, which always sounded so loud and wrong in the air outside the hut, after so much of our own silence. We thought it’d be nice to plant some grass here one day, and we’d better do it soon, hadn’t we, before the grotesque wall of trees crowded in too close. Before the trees grew into the hut itself.
    This would almost make a kind of home for us, wouldn’t it? Just in case? We could do some work on the land, build an addition onto the hut. It would not be terrible. Couldn’t we live here someday if we needed to, if it came to that?
    You weren’t supposed to, but who would know? How could that be bad, to make this place prettier and livable? There is no possible way that could be bad. Making a place nicer was a good thing to do. No one could argue with that. No one would have to know.

9
    LeBov, by radio—broadcasting from a secluded location
for his own protection
—brought his diagnosis public, called out the toxic Jewish child. A disease seeping beyond its circumference, radiating from the head, the face, the mind.
    There are particulars I do not wish to share
, said LeBov. A secrecy that made his claim seem more true.
    It was hard to disagree, but everyone did. They protested out of conviction or denial or fear or real scientific understanding. The diagnostic debate played out with proponents and detractors firing evidence back and forth across the massive pit of confusion we all swam in.
    The culprits, the carriers, the agents of infection, were Jewish children, all children, not just children, some adults, all of us.
    The culprits were infirm only, or maybe just the healthy, or maybe only those who’d eaten dirt, or not eaten enough of it. An autopsy was called on the whole living planet. The expertise in each case was minor and romantic and you could hitch your fate to any of it, so long as you didn’t mind being wrong.
    To challenge matters, a child-free settlement in Arizona produced victims with identical symptoms: facial smallness, lethargy, a hardening under the tongue that defeated attempts at speech. No exposure to a child, let alone a Jewish one.
    LeBov wasn’t bothered. “I’m speaking of the cause,” he said, “and this cause spread fast a long time ago. Our forest Jews know what I mean.
Just ask them
.”
    When the affliction crystallized on a map, colors coding the victim radius, the image