Read Online The Invention of Flight by Susan Neville - Free Book Online

in her throat were life, growth in a knot. The only recourse, she decided, was to feel herself as the cancer, to become the cells, cheer as she felt the explosions in her neck, as each cell lit a new cell, eating a vacuum through her body. The grandson in the khaki coat back from Vietnam, short hair he wouldn’t grow so he wouldn’t forget, talked about lighting up an enemy, not death. That lighting up was real toher, but she couldn’t carry it off. She was wherever the cancer wasn’t, it was as simple as that. She couldn’t contain it. She couldn’t ignore it. She wants to tell her children that, that she didn’t will it, that she doesn’t want it to happen to them, but that if it does, they can stand it, that things change form with ease, that they should remember the family. She wants to tell them that, but they don’t want to talk about it, each one of them positive that he is the one human being in the history of the earth who will never ever die.
    The great-grandson on her right leans over to her, blonde hair like John’s brushing her arm, and says, Grandma, I’ll trade you this hot dog for that Jello, and he pushes a plate of kraut and applesauce and a hot sausage with one bite missing toward her. She gives him two red Jello salads and a sweet roll, saying Take this sweet roll and remember that yeast is an animal that causes flour to rise, and the grandson laughs, Funny Grandma, and takes a bite of the roll, dripping caramel on his clean white shirt.

Rapture
    All that Illinois winter she’d been afraid of a coming ice age and now here they were where the last one hadn’t touched, where dinosaurs had fled and shrunk in the comfort, the ease of the life, to ruby-throated lizards which skittered across sidewalks, where prehistoric birds dove at the water for fish and plants looked like ancient and protective clusters of swords. She sits here now, in a fresh early-morning restaurant behind a glass wall looking out on the Gulf, on a small peninsula so she can watch the sun rising higher on the water as if she is in Mexico, not Florida. With clear lime water glasses on the tables, oranges in baskets and some on the ground outside rotting, dolphins arcing through the water, and white birds and sails both the transparency and lightness of communion wafers on the tongue, she feels something rising in her, an excitement, a joy in her that is almost difficult to contain. In Illinois the colors had been drab—wheat colors, dirt colors; here they are outrageous reds, greens, yellows. And here the warm air and moisture bathe her, close in around her like a pot so she feels, strangely, aware that she lives. (Her first memory involves water, warm air, and this same feeling. They’re by a lake, her mother and father and she. The air that day was greenish-gold,mid-summer, a pleasant lake smell of rotting weeds, still water, and gasoline. Her mother had on a black one-piece suit and the legs cut into her thighs and her arms were round and her skin was blue-white. Her father stood in the water by a motorboat and tried to start the engine, but it kept dying. Later they would get it going and he would give her a ride around the lake, and that was exciting and full of action and she remembers the texture of her father’s bare knees and the sticky smell of plastic seats and cool water, but that isn’t her first memory, her first memory is the moment right before the engine starts, and it felt, and still feels, like before that she was unconscious and she chose that moment to wake up.)
    When the waitress comes, her husband orders coffee, eggs, fresh-squeezed juice, a newspaper. She sees Eggs Benedict on the menu, something she’s never had. When it comes and there’s a slice of orange and a stalk of asparagus alongside, she feels dizzy from the happiness, as though the orange and the asparagus are signs, another symptom of the goodness here. She tries to explain this