Either the Beginning or the End of the World by Farish Terry

Author:Farish, Terry [Farish, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LEAVE YOUR SLEEP

I changed to my jeans and sweater after work, same black lace-up boots. I put on eyeliner, green, all around, which is how I picture the Spanish dancer. I am someone different tonight. Will life continue its normal progression at school at seven thirty in the morning? And will I continue?

Luke is bundled into a padded olive-drab jacket.

“Let’s walk,” he says, not looking at me.

“The wind bends you sideways,” I say.

He touches my hand. My hand.

“I’ll show you the boat I’m planning to go fishing on.”

“I don’t go on boats,” I say. “I don’t go on water.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always been afraid of water.”

He doesn’t question this. He doesn’t say my fear is unreasonable, just a phobia—here are ten steps to conquer your fear. I like how I say something, and he listens—he accepts it. What would he do if I told him the story about starving a woman? If I could find the words to repeat it. My great-grandmother. But he is the only one I could imagine telling this terror to. Maybe because what he did is raw in his eyes.

I glance at Luke as we walk. He doesn’t wear a hat, and the wind whips his hair.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” he says.

I am uneasy to hear. But I lean my head in to him in the wind that rushes us forward.

“I’ve been out a few months, back from Afghanistan longer, but every night, I’m there,” he says. “Every night I’m on the same patrol. Every night.” He shouts the words in the wind, and somehow it makes them more impersonal. More okay to say. He puts his bare hand on the metal of a guardrail that I know could take off a layer of skin, but he pulls his hand away and does not even grimace. “My head keeps me playing out scenes, trying to change the end,” he says. “With your father I was too busy to think.” The words are stark in the cold air as we march. “This kid dies. I dream it over and over and over.”

We have reached the road before the harbor. I turn down in. He follows. We come to a house with a glassed-in porch facing the breakwater. The fishing boats rock at their moorings across from the breakwater. We hear the steady horn of a buoy. The cold seems to free him to talk. A cocoon of cold.

“You got to be fast when you get them out. No time to stop. No time to ask. No time to say, ‘Fuck, I don’t know what to do.’ You can never hesitate. This guy’s heart will quit. You’re gonna lose him.

“Sometimes I dream I go in ten times, a hundred times. Every time I think this time I’ll save him . . . give me one more time. The kid is screaming.”

“You mean a child?”

“No, young kid, eighteen, a soldier.”

I imagine the fear of closing my eyes to try to sleep when it means you are going to live that again, that second of the possibility that you could save him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.