LITMIR.BIZ

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to the TV, so I asked, “What did you do?”

      “Well,” he said and then hesitated before cracking a grin, “I gave them the worst beating of their lives. They cried like babies and ran away.”

      I expected the story to go on, but he yawned and returned his focus to the TV, and I grew so bored of the man’s head droning away on the screen that I left to read at the kitchen table.

      After dinner, I asked my brother what would happen if there was a nuclear war. He focused his large brown eyes on mine and described a future of cannibalistic humanoids in caves who’d hunt down good humans. The monster humans would eat people because there’d be no animals left. The good humans, though, might not eat at all. Given that I had to eat endlessly, it occurred to me that I might become a monster human.

      Later, in bed, I stared at the dim ceiling until the house became quiet and stayed that way for so long I thought I might fall asleep. Then, downstairs, footsteps slowly crossed the wooden floor and just stopped, as if someone was standing and thinking, not sure where to go or what to do next.

      In a dream, I crossed a yellow field, running toward my mother, who was gray, caught in motion, a colorless snapshot—her hand extended, floating before me as I reached. In the center of the sky appeared a black shape like a fighter jet. It began to spin as, from every horizon, darkness rose, and there was no more light.

      ✴

      THE FOLLOWING MORNING, my father was gone, and after breakfast my mother said that we were going into town. A bag held her presents, and if ever there were proof of the nonexistence of Santa, it was this: my mother with her receipts, leading us into the mall to return everything my father had bought her.

      Outside the clothing store, she put my brother in charge while she went inside. My sister sang quietly to herself as we watched the crowds surge past Boxing Day signs.

      A slouching woman stopped and stared. After glancing around, she came closer. She had blond, frizzy hair and a long jacket that reminded me of burlap. She asked if we were alone.

      “Our mother is just over there,” my brother told her, repeating the words that my mother had drilled into us.

      The woman’s big eyes rolled from one side of the mall to the other. Instantly, I knew she’d do something repulsively sexual. Both during school assemblies and by my mother, I’d been warned about perverts.

      She slipped three pamphlets from her purse and gave one to each of us.

      My brother blanched. “We can’t,” he told her.

      “It’s all right. Your mother won’t mind,” she said and hurried off, not having exposed her naked body from beneath the jacket after all.

      His shoulders slumped, as if he’d returned home with a bad grade. The pamphlet showed two abandoned-looking children in saggy diapers waiting in a doorway as Jesus approached along the sidewalk. He’d probably change their diapers. No, whatever he’d do had to be bad if my mother hated Christians so much. Maybe he’d feed them processed foods. She’d never explained why, if proselytizers came to our house, she slammed the door.

      She snatched the pamphlets from us.

      “Who gave these to you?” She made a constricted huff like a growl and went to a trash can and tossed them. As she led us out, she asked if we recognized the woman. My brother said he didn’t, and I could no longer recall her face.

      “Why were you so angry?” I asked her that night as she was tucking me in.

      “I don’t want you to grow up with that garbage in your head. When I was a kid, I had to go to church. I imagined God was some big, mean guy staring down, and I was afraid to do anything, afraid to be myself or have fun.”

      She told me about her father, how strict he was, as if this were also God’s fault. She said she’d wanted her freedom. The way she told me this made me feel that she was still struggling to be free. She seemed about to tell me more, but her expression became pained and she said nothing.

      “Who is God?” I finally asked, just to make her speak. She sighed and explained how some people believed in an all-powerful, judgmental geezer who saw everything we did. Her description was so convincing that I forgot what we’d been talking about before and became a little jealous of this old man’s mental powers. Above all, I was angry at the thought of being spied on, and I told her that I was never going to take a bath again.

      ✴

      MY SISTER WAS lying on her belly with a book, the blinds drawn, her room so faintly lit I didn’t know how she could read.

      “Want to hear a story?” I asked and flopped down next to her.

      “Okay,” she said and turned onto her side. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering her. Vacation had ended and winter dragged on, my parents fighting, all of us busy with our own things, books or music or video games.

      I began to describe a future in which everyone could levitate, but she said, “Tell me about how Bonnie and André met.”

      “Well, she’s from Pittsburgh,” I said and thought of all she’d shared over the years. “Grandma’s mom is German, and Grandpa’s from somewhere else. He made steel. Bonnie didn’t like them because they believed in God, so she ran away to live in nature. Since André grew up really poor, he could do everything—farm and catch fish and even … deliver babies.” This always sounded funny to me, as if he were a mailman, but now the story I’d been struggling to find became clear. It was about my birth, and I repeated the version he’d often told me. “I was born on the living room couch. André delivered me. The cord was around my neck.”

      “What cord?”

      “Babies are born with a rope. Sometimes it feeds them, but sometimes it strangles them. He took it off and blew into my mouth, and then I began to breathe.”

      “Oh,” she said quietly, as if expecting something else. I didn’t know what happened after my birth, and feeling vaguely irritated, I got up and walked away. The next day, after school, she asked me to tell another story, but I said I was busy and left her in the musty silence of the house.

      As I crossed the frozen fields, I wished for spring and that first breathless warmth that was no warmth at all but seemed it after so long in the cold. Dandelions would bloom, like when I was very small and everything was perfect.

      I sat in my favorite place, a grove of large trees where the ground was without weeds—soft and shadowed all summer, though now I stared up through the naked branches at the colorless sky. Everyone I knew had died. The house had burned down. The school had been incinerated. I was the hunter, the loup-garou. The world had ended, but in nature I would survive.

      Eventually it grew late, and my mother’s voice called across the valley from the back porch, my name echoing off the mountains.

      ✴

      THE SNOWMELT CAME suddenly, flooding drainage ditches, covering the fields, water gathering toward our backyard until it shone in a crescent around the slight rise where our house had been built. The sun blazed day after day, and I forgot my boredom.

      I’d read a book about young people who bonded after society’s collapse. The abandoned cities sent shivers up my spine, the vines that grew through cracked concrete and broken windows, the mountains where the youths sheltered beneath overhangs, staring out at the desolate landscape for a flicker of light.

      Reading made me feel as if I’d swigged my father’s vodka. Did my brother or sister experience this? My brother loved video games, and my sister sang constantly so that her location in the house could be determined according to her volume. My mother always told us to read, but did she know that books made me want to run outside and breathe the air rolling off the mountains, smell the wet fields and drying mud, hear the crunch of onion grass under my feet? Stories seemed like paths. If you went outside, there was just the world, but if you went and looked after reading a story, there was a world where anything could happen, as if beyond the mountains were a hundred countries to which I

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