Rattlebone by Maxine Clair

Author:Maxine Clair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Cold, at first I felt a shock of cold, then saw the blur of my mother’s face. As words left her mouth, they went in the direction of an invisible bridge to me, but they traveled on currents that dipped into the dark below and were lost. I could focus a little, but everything my fingers came to rest on—the blanket, her hand—swelled bigger than I could grasp, and I continued to drift.

“I think she’s coming around,” I could hear my mother saying.

I felt the too-cold cloth on my forehead again. Junie and Bea blurred around the soft island of my mother and father’s bed, where I lay.

“Dr. Reed is on his way. Can you tell me what hurts? You never been this sick.”

I touched my head.

“You scared me. You been talking all out of your head like you was having a nightmare with your eyes open.”

Dr. Reed arrived. “B.C. headache powders. Give her a dose every six or eight hours until the headache is gone. If she has one of these fits again, call me. Otherwise bring her in a few days from now.”

For several weeks I stayed home from school. By day, I felt fine. I wanted to go to school. I read my books, talked to Wanda and to Geraldine the few times that she caught the bus to my house. But I hated to see the sun move toward evening. By dusk each day, pressure formed in my head like a storm in the atmosphere. Then, on too many nights, I’d be swept away to the burning house and the green lawn bearing the solitary stump of my mother’s body. Always I would come to myself in some other part of our house, embarrassed not to know how I had gotten there. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would come suddenly awake outside in the yard with my mother or my father shaking me.

“What’s my name!” she would ask. “Tell me who I am! Tell me where we are!” Silly things you say to a crazy person. Once I was myself again, I could say perfectly well who she was and where we were, and usually I just wanted to go inside before lights came on in all the neighbors’ houses.

With me at home feeling weak but calm, my mother also seemed glad for the daytime. She fed me soup and kept me near her, wrapped in a quilt in the easy chair that she moved from room to room. All the while she watched me, as if she believed that some expression or gesture of mine would yield the key to the mystery of those tormented episodes.

“You know, when you’re having one of those fits, you say things that don’t make no sense,” she said.

I sat propped in the easy chair, out of place in the kitchen where she ironed. Neat stacks of finished sheets and pillowcases weighed down the kitchen table.

“All I know is that it feels like I’m dreaming, but not like I’m really asleep.

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.