City of God by E L Doctorow

City of God by E L Doctorow

Author:E L Doctorow [Doctorow, E L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 158836190X
Published: 2009-12-03T04:34:22+00:00


SHORT

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142 / E. L. Doctorow

reasonable to mouth the hard wood hour after hour without stopping, except of course when I passed out and slept. When I was fortunate enough to have an actual splinter come away in my mouth, I chewed it for food. For water I had one night the wind-driven rain, like cold needles on the tip of my tongue. As I worked away, I found myself listening to the clacking wheels, applying rhythms to them, making up songs in my head to go with the rhythms, but somehow these songs were in my mother’s voice, or my father’s, and the voices were really more in the nature of evanescent images of my mother and father, and the images more like fleeting sensations of their beings, momentary apperceptions of their moral natures, which caused me to call out, as if they could be brought to resolution as my whole real mother and father. For my trouble I found myself returned to the mindless incessant clacking of the train wheels. I reasoned that if I could gnaw an opening large enough to climb through, they would be happy to greet me, these flange wheels that would flip me along one to the other and end my life sharply and cleanly.

But then someone directly at my back, a girl who had wept and wept the first day so that my shirt was wet by her tears, but had since then only whimpered in a high pitch almost like a cat, and, among the shifting stiffened bodies, had come to hold her arms around my waist, with her cheek pressed between my shoulder blades—this girl, with no warning sound, died, and, the train rocketing around a curve, her legs sank under her, and her arms slid over my hips and down around my knees so that I was pulled by her weight down a few inches to where I found myself looking through the slot through which I had breathed the air outside.

A blur, brush, a woods so close to the railroad embankment that leaves slapped against the siding, a dense woods so thick as to create shadows dark as night. Then suddenly a broad sunlit vista of a green field with a house and barn in the distance. “A farm!” I called. “Now a road. A horse and wagon.” And so I broadcast the news of the world to those who would listen. Birch trees. A brook. Women, children culling potatoes. A river. A stationmaster lighting his pipe. Among the people in my car whom I had seen climbing into it before me were some I knew. When I sensed from the smell of soot and the appearance of a track yard that the journey was coming to its end, it seemed to me important to recall who they were: Mr. and Mrs. Random House Group

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274/Q-30A13632-109

CGI Contact: Ursula Morales

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City of God / 143

Liebner and their son, Joseph,



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