Part 15 (2/2)
”Anything.”
”What did you do with her?”
”What?”
”What did you do with her? You know. I mean, the same things you do with me? Tell me what. I want to imagine it.”
”Linda, really.”
Her voice rose, querulous. ”Well, you said I could ask you anything, so I'm asking you this. Did you ... Did you ...” She tried three times to name something, but she couldn't. Then her shoulders stiffened, she turned her face away, bit her lips, and began to weep.
He stopped seeing April. Once he called simply to ask how she was and she hung up.
He had meant no harm. Only trying to live. Everyone else was just as bad. He knew cases. ... People were bad from the moment they were born. From the moment they reach consciousness they start hurting other people, in their efforts to live.
”Please,” he cried out hoa.r.s.ely. ”Let me live!” Linda stirred. But the mote was merciless. It would never go away. The time was 5:35. Maybe he would die soon. He felt limp enough to die.
Maybe he had never loved anyone enough, and that was his sin. Not his parents, not Linda, not Jack or Sandy, not even April, not even himself. He honestly didn't know. What was enough? Enough for what? That was too easy a solution, too glib, saying he had never loved anybody enough. He was an ordinary man. He could honestly say that he loved his wife and children as much as the next man. It was something more, something beyond everything he had thought of, cosmic, even. But what? What? Light seeped in the window. It was dawn. Surprisingly fast, the room filled with light. As it filled, the mote faded and abruptly disappeared. The air around his bed became less dense. Alexander slept.
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Portions of this work originally appeared in Banquet, Dark Horse, First Annual Fiction Supplement of the San Francisco Review of Books, Forthcoming, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, The Ontario Review, Penmaen Press Chapbook 2, Ploughshares, Redbook, The Real Paper, The Smith, and The Transatlantic Review.
”The Wrath-bearing Tree” and ”Sound Is Second Sight” were syndicated by Fiction Network.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint:.
Portions of ”Terence, this is stupid stuff” from ”A Shrops.h.i.+re Lad”-Authorised Edition-from The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, copyright 1939, 1940, 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright 1967, 1968 by Robert E. Symons. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers; The Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman; and Jonathan Cape Ltd, publishers of A. E. Housman's Collected Poems.
Excerpts on page 77 from ”Gerontion” in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd, London.
Lines from ”Sailing to Byzantium” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publis.h.i.+ng Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publis.h.i.+ng Company, Inc., Michael B. Yeats and Macmillan, London, Limited.
”Get a Piece of the Rock” is used by permission of the Prudential Insurance Company of America.
copyright 1984 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
cover design by Kathleen Lynch.
978-1-4532-8756-9.
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