Killing Maine by Mike Bond

Author:Mike Bond [Bond, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627040327
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Published: 2015-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

PA’s face had grown more haggard and pale; it was not just the awfulness of the memories and the progress of pain and death, even more it seemed a recognition of humanity’s fate, the earth’s, all life’s.

“An incomprehensible mystery, life,” he said. “When I was younger I expected to understand it better when I got old. But I don’t… In some ways I understood it better then.”

He leaned forward, punched his palm. “When you’re young you have sex, life, danger, exaltation, nature, the ocean – maybe that’s understanding life.”

“It doesn’t seem fair,” I said, “to live through all this and not understand, that it’s a dream –”

“– and in the end,” Pa chuckled, “it kills us.”

Rascal the cat leaped up on the table and flopped down beside Pa, one foreleg over Pa’s wrist. “We’ve been together fourteen years.” Pa rubbed the big cat behind the ears. “He knows I’m going. Knew it before I did.”

“I wish I could take him –”

“Old Ambrosio wants him.” Ambrosio was a Filipino taro farmer and fisherman, Pa’s upstream neighbor. “He’s got mice.” He scratched under Rascal’s chin. “We don’t have mice here, do we, Rascal?”

For an instant I imagined this house after Pa and Rascal were gone, the mice, centipedes and scorpions taking over, the place falling apart, eaten by jungle.

“The tragedy of getting old,” Pa added, “Winston Churchill said, is not that you’re old, but that you’re still young.”

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