For All the Obvious Reasons by Lynn Stegner

Author:Lynn Stegner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

ROGUE

It is because she cannot hear the gulls that she wakes. After a minute or two, leaning up on an elbow to search the world beyond the window, she sees that there is water still standing in the street but that the asphalt is patterned with cleanly edged light and shadow. The gulls are down at the beaches, working the broad ribbons of seaweed and oceanic debris thrown up by the storms of the week. The boy is quiet too but it’s the absent gulls that tell her she must do something about him. Maybe do him in, she thinks with a mental shrug that is at once small and operatic, as if she is bluffing herself at a hand of solitaire. The thought flicks away across her mind like a glint of dull light or a colorless bird, and so quickly and sub-perceptibly that she’s not sure it was there at all. “A visitation,” she whispers. Later when he’s at school she will look up the word for its older meanings, but for now it’s the partial mystery, the partially remembered connotation, that tell her it’s right. There is something strange, something dense and dark furled up tight inside her that wasn’t there before yesterday, a new phenomenon, an embryo. All embryos look the same for a long time, unrelated species not differentiating until the developmental equivalent of the eleventh hour. This is what she likes to tell the science class at Woodrow Wilson Junior High where she subs. It helps to keep us humble, she always adds.

But maybe this thing inside her is not new, maybe it has simply never been called upon. It has been sitting in the back row of her own occasional classroom and has always known the answer but never bothered to raise its hand. It has been folded in on itself, afraid of the light of day and the hard eyes of others.

There is a tingling clarity to the light outside, and the air seems to vibrate the way the trees shimmied in the long minutes following the big quake twenty years earlier. Even the eucalyptus trees marching along the north perimeter of the field across the street like a rank of shaggy behemoths home at last from the battle, even they are shining with relief. Shaken up, she murmurs to herself. She is used to keeping her feelings from herself and even now manages to recall from the night before only the crab bisque and Nathalie Gaultier’s gold scarf, the elegant flourish she always manages just before exiting a room. But off to the side there is still that impression of a wrong she is worried about, a wrong that she really cannot abide.

Her feelings, such as they are, feel dull and colorless too, and are taking place on the other side of a screen or a heavy curtain where some sort of procedure is anticipated and for which she has already received the first of several anesthetic installments.

Is there a doctor in the house, she thinks, and the memory of the holiday flight from Los Angeles appears.

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.