Read Online Where There's Smoke by Black Inc. - Free Book Online

thought and you could end up anywhere. Like watching a fire: its false grabs and reachings, its licks and twists, you stared into the guts of it and came out in the nightlight glow of a shared childhood room, the cheap groan of a bunk bed, you’re awake and listening to the breath snagging in your brother’s nostrils, the low whistle of his open-mouthed sleep, the insideness of his life and its promise of protection from the harmful world outside.
    Where’ve you been. You’re late.
    He’s dragging a suitcase into the street. He makes it all the way out of the driveway, to the cherry tree, before I stop him. The air is full of pollen and sunscreen. He emerges from the concrete tunnel with a rueful smile on his face. He’s bent over me on the couch – he rooted in his terrible motion and I in him.
    I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
    I bite the red cushion. I feel his ribs on my ribs. My body an anvil and he’s beating something upon it, shaping it into a truer shape, seeking to prove it, the strength, the ductility, the temper of his love.

SILENCE 1945
    RODNEY HALL
    A man jumped up on the horizon. Quite suddenly he jumped up where nobody had been before. A soldier, with nothing on his head to protect it. In the afternoon. Behind him mushrooming clouds gathered. And above the clouds three parachutes seemed fixed in the sky. The big guns had already fallen silent and every last aircraft had long since flown away. It was on a ridge above some straight shadows that were the enemy trenches. And up he jumped.
    And there was one who asked: Do we shoot him, Sergeant Potts?
    But Sergeant Potts just spat. On the ground. Because this was something no one could account for; a soldier making a target of himself in full view of the platoon of hidden men in helmets, each one of us with his finger on the trigger and a question in his eyes. Each homesick from too much bitterness and loss. And too much fear felt too soon. Boy soldiers, rookies, with no idea what to do next.
    Someone whispered: It must be a trick.
    Or else a lunatic, another whispered back and opened the wound of a grin in his face.
    Another asked: What will they chuck at us next?
    But Sergeant Potts poked around under the rim of his helmet and scratched his skull.
    All because a man jumped up where nobody had been before. Quite suddenly, dark and small in the afternoon, with nothing to protect his head and only clouds beyond. And three parachutists fixed in the sky while we hid, watching him, a platoon of boys in baggy uniforms, with no idea what to do. And this man, who was our enemy, lifted wooden arms. Slow as a broken windmill he started signalling. One letter at a time he spelt a message in semaphore: ICH HABE HUNGER.

AS A WOMAN GROWS OLDER
    J. M. COETZEE
    She is visiting her daughter in Nice, her first visit there in years. Her son will fly out from the United States to spend a few days with them, on the way to some conference or other. It interests her, this confluence of dates. She wonders whether there has not been some collusion, whether the two of them do not have some plan, some proposal to put to her of the kind that children put to a parent when they feel she can no longer look after herself. So obstinate, they will have said to each other: so obstinate, so stubborn, so self-willed – how will we get past that obstinacy of hers except by working together?
    They love her, of course, else they would not be cooking up plans for her. Nevertheless, she does feel like one of those Roman aristocrats waiting to be handed the fatal draft, waiting to be told in the most confiding, the most sympathetic of ways that for the general good one should drink it down without a fuss.
    Her children are and always have been good, dutiful, as children go. Whether as a mother she has been equally good and dutiful is another matter. But in this life we do not always get what we deserve. Her children will have to wait for another life,