Read Online This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber - Free Book Online

already on my wrist. A scream would have raised the household, particularly my father, a light sleeper, so I allowed him to pull me. Amon wasn’t gentle. He jerked my body over the windowpane, ensuring that I could no longer hold my balance. Then using all of his force, he lifted me until I was standing barefoot on his muddied boots, both his arms around me. The sensation of hanging in the air with him was dizzying, and my mind scrambled for some purchase in the rational. “You see? ” he said. “It isn’t death. I have enough lift for both of us.”
    “Amon,” I begged. “Put me back. You don’t know how you did this. You don’t know how long it will last.”
    “It’s different this time, Roddy,” he said, as he carefully undid the string of my nightshirt and let it flutter to the dark hedges below. “I can sense it.”
    I could sense it too. I felt my chest fill with stars. My spine bent against the moon. Amon continued to smile as he kissed the hollow of my neck. We made a careful love that night, not as fierce as our previous endeavors. Perhaps it was because he had to keep both hands on me,
and I had to remain standing upon his boots. Or maybe our tenderness was due to the fact that his hovering in the air seemed a kind of rite. We knew better than to defile it. Watching my nightshirt flutter in the shrubbery below, I remember thinking I had received my own understanding of the universe’s magnificent pattern, one that could finally usurp my father’s.
    So began Amon Garrik’s nightly visits to the stone house. He would lift me from my window frame as one would lift a doll from its dollhouse. I rarely slept, as sleep was no longer a worthy experience. My parents became concerned about the shadows pooled in my face, and I learned to use my mother’s powder to cover the darkness beneath my eyes. Amon was learning too—not only to hover in the sky but to walk clumsily, and I walked with him, standing on his boots, facing forward, his hands around my abdomen. We trudged through the night as if stepping through piles of invisible snow, and there was nothing as wonderful as the sensation of tilting with him over an abyss, though of course the abyss was nothing more than my father’s yew bushes and the duck pond with its crowd of decorative French angels.
    Then after nearly a month of these sky walks, there was a night when Amon didn’t arrive, and I sat in my nest of sheets until the sun crested the low hills, bringing with it a confirmation of what I feared. Amon’s rising had finally taken him somewhere I could not go. He’d realized that such power was enough in itself, and there was no reason for him to drag me along, to be hindered by my weight. I dressed hastily and ran to the road that led to the Garrik house, fighting tears and wondering what I might say when Frau Garrik answered the door.
    In a tall patch of weeds, I found him, shirtless and wearing only one boot. His ruddy hair stood on end, and
his skin was streaked with chimney soot. Most troublingly, Amon no longer looked exactly like the boy I knew. It was some other creature I found burning in the button weeds. His body appeared hollow and weightless, as if a strong wind might lift him back to the sky at any moment. I shook Amon, fearing the worst, and when he opened his eyes, I realized how truly different he was. The world inside him had become larger than the world without. There was a whole landscape in his eyes, and a secondary sun hung in his sky. I was but an insect on a branch in that world. “Roddy—” his tongue was salty white. “Something incredible—”
    I didn’t want to know. I feared knowing. “I thought you were dead, Amon.”
    “It was a sort of death,” he whispered.
    “No poetry,” I said.
    He raised himself in the button weeds, and I saw how difficult it was for him to move upon the earth. The gravity irritated him, as he no longer belonged to it. “Listen to me,” he said. “I started out as I always do,