The Happy Marriage and Other Stories by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2023-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

3

Then he was really sick. For two weeks he stayed in bed with a fever and a dark half-awareness of his mother and father coming into his room, and the doctor. It was not time in which he lay, but an uncomfortable timelessness in which he heard things and then lost them so that he did not know any sequence. Once his mother told him about poor Billy Cornwall’s accident. Once she asked him if he had burned all the magazines. Once she said, probably to the doctor, maybe to his father, “It’s this summer. He hasn’t been real well since school was out. Maybe when he goes back in the fall he’ll be himself.” Then he had drifted down into the red-threaded blackness which was sleep, amused because he knew there was little chance of his returning to where school was, in some country oceanic distances away.

Once again Billy Cornwall came with a red star on his forehead, the star shining like blood on his fatty skin, and told him again what he had seen from behind the bush in the back yard—the thing that couldn’t be true because Billy was a liar—and his mother whined, “He hurt me.” Or his father was welding in the shop in the garage and the fire came from his torch like tracers from the guns in movies.

Then in the week when it seemed he was getting better, his mother told him how he had crumpled up on the porch that evening when he got home from wherever he had been.

“Where were you anyway that afternoon?” she asked him. “Boy, was I scared.” The question seemed to touch her curiosity sharply. She asked him several times as though she had forgotten his answer.

“In the park,” he usually told her. She looked at him skeptically, rumpled his hair and said, “Aw, you don’t know where you were. You were delirious or something.” She added with passion, “It was his fault, the things he told you.”

Once, to his terror, he slipped and told her, “Flying.”

“Flying? Judas Priest. Well, I guess you’re not going to tell me. If you know, I mean, and I’ll bet you don’t. What do you mean, flying?”

“I don’t know,” he said, carefully now. “I don’t remember so good.”

“We’ll get you out in the sun today,” she said, “where you can see some sky. You don’t have any tan at all. Fishbelly. If your father would get a car and take us somewhere—I guess I could forgive him some other things.”

She went on absently arranging things in the chest of drawers and organizing her wishes like plans. “We could have a vacation,” she said. “Lots of people with no more money than us have vacations every year.”

“All right, Mom,” he said. “Don’t talk about it.” He could not stand the note of complaint crying through her voice, though he felt guilty not to listen to it, for not being strong enough to listen and console her. “I have to sleep,” he said.

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.