Read Online This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud - Free Book Online

drifted to sleep. Everything was bare. The whole house was bare. Not one stick of furniture was left in the house.
    Inside my body, I was as bare. My brother cried. I hit him. I said: Don’t you cry. We’re the men of this house.
    He said: Where’s Nino? Which was the dog. I took him to look. He was stretched on the lawn. The dew was in small and perfect beads that still clung to the grass.
    There must have been, after all, some hours in which I’d slept, because in that time the world had changed and I wasn’t aware of its changing.
    I did not think, though, that I slept. I could have—each minute—accounted for its passing. I’d shut my eyes. I’d opened them. It was as if it were the moon that I’d opened them upon.
    Perhaps I didn’t sleep at all. Perhaps I’ve not slept my whole life since.
    My mother brought one hand to her chest, and touched her heart, and held it there: We must keep still, she said. We must make very little noise. My brother’s mouth she covered with the back-side of her hand.
    WHEN MY FATHER’S DRUNK three beer, this is the story that he tells. My aunt Emira rolls her eyes and makes a sound through her nose. She says, waving her hand in my father’s direction but speaking to us: “You know your oma.”
    Then she looks across the table, directly. To my brother, and to me, and ignores my father, who, again, begins the story. “In the very early morning …” my father says.
    â€œShe couldn’t hurt a fly.”
    We are eating Christmas dinner. It is March.
    My father’s insistent, but Aunt Emira shakes her head.
    â€œShe could not have shot the dog,” she says. “Listen, I was older.”
    When my father’s drunk four beer he talks like Emira—like a German. Ordinarily, his accent’s unpronounced, andhe can speak in flat Canadian, and no one can tell. But after four beer. “I showed our brother,” he says. “I took him to the yard. There was dew on the ground. We didn’t have shoes.”
    By the time my father’s drunk six beer, his accent is thick. “I remember Nino,” he says. “It was, for him, as if it were a lazy afternoon. The way he stretched out on the lawn, as though resting.”
    Ten beer and my father lets some German words slip in. “I remember it exactly,” he says. “ Irre! I could—each moment—account for its passing.”
    Aunt Emira looks at the ceiling. My father continues: “Inside,” he says, “the house was empty. A shell. Our mother put her hand up to our little brother’s face, and covered it entirely.”
    â€œYou fool,” my aunt says. “You lunatic—fool.” She gets up from her seat and slaps my father’s head so it falls forward to the table and stays down.
    â€œâ€˜Not a stick of furniture in the house,’ the man says. Does that sound right?” She stands, now, above my father—above the slope of his bent neck—and glares down that grade, to the level of the board. “That they took every stick, while we slept? What use would they have had,” she asks, throwing her hands in the air, “of our cheap little things?”
    At twelve beer, my father’s voice, again, shifts. This time to an accent that was—until my aunt came to stay with my father—unidentifiable to my brother and me. We thought it was his own invention. A strange dialect that precededa thirteen-hour sleep. But then my aunt said once: “Sasa, now you sound like our father. You sound like a Croat. How do you do that? You were too young, and didn’t even speak properly then.”
    My father said, “So now you must believe me. That I remember things.”
    â€œYou’re a drunk,” my aunt said. “You’re a fool. You’ve turned yourself into a baby again. That’s how come you remember so well.”
    MY GRANDFATHER BUILT bridges for the