M31 by Stephen Wright

Author:Stephen Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

SHE CAME TO IN dark water, clawing for air and a strange silver surface rippling far, too far, away. The weight of an ocean pressed down across her, cold salt tide tugging at her belly. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe. Blackness gurgled through an open pipe. Dash unzipped her bag and spit inside. This was every night now. Real as death. But by dawn he was a ghost and at breakfast merely a dream. What was true? She didn’t know.

When she left the bathroom the others were already in place, more or less, around the long table, chewing, sipping, smoking, fluid stems of blue and gray twisting into quick complicated spirals too giddying to consider at this unassembled hour. It was a gray morning, and the early light lay like powder on sleep-wrinkled faces. No one spoke, entertained as they were by the audio portion of The A.M. Show already well in progress behind the closed wall of the mysterious room at the altar end of the house:

“Pick what up?”

“Try using your eyes for a change.”

“That? I didn’t put it there.”

“Oh no, of course not, you never leave anything out for me to trip and break my neck.”

“I see the bullshit’s flying with the crows today.”

“See what you want to see.”

The pale tepid orange juice tasted as if a nail had been dissolved in it. The toast was cold and slightly damp. She went to the kitchen for an apple and discovered the cat on top of the stove, lapping out the bottom of the frying pan. She wasn’t really hungry, her stomach hurt.

From behind the wall:

“Selfish? Selfish?! I’ve devoted my life to that child.”

“Oh, just forget it. I don’t know why I bother. You haven’t heard me for twenty years.”

Zoe reached out, overturned her cup, and began banging her head on the edge of the table, strands of lank hair whipping through the puddles of spilled milk. Dallas tapped a spoon against his plate in time with an irritating rhythm inside Gwen’s head.

“Do something, for Christ’s sake!” shouted Trinity. “It’s your goddamn turn.”

“Shit!” He leaped from the chair, seized his baby sister by the wrists, and dragged her off into The Object, where, using frayed rope the goat had chewed on, he tied her securely to the pilot’s seat, command central to the stars.

When he returned, the voices had stopped. “They’re screwing now,” he said, licking butter off the blade of a knife and looking right at Gwen, and it was scary because there wasn’t any way she could stop his eyes from going in as deeply as they wished.

“Just the image I want to have between me and my cornflakes,” said Trinity.

He shrugged. “It’s what they do.”

“Isn’t it time for you to go to work?” asked Maryse. She poked at the swaddled mess lying motionless in her lap. Only the head was visible, a lumpy, somewhat round object sprouting transparent wisps of crinkly fiber. Eyes and mouth firmly shut, Mignon resembled a soap carving of a baby.

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