The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke

Author:Laura Kasischke [Kasischke, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

They drive until they've gotten to the outskirts of Briar Hill.

There the subdivisions melt into swamp; the swamps turn to cornfields. There are pastures full of sheep who stand stone still, staring at the ground. Some of the sheep have been sheared, and they have stripes and Xs of blood on them.

The girls pass a country church. It's all red brick and stained glass like a church out of an old book, with a cemetery behind it, circled by a black wrought-iron fence. The gate, with its black sword tips, is open.

"Let's go read the stones," one of them says. It's something she used to do with her mother, who'd studied literature in Scotland for a few years before she married her father and became a secretary in the philosophy department. But her mother had still liked old things, maudlin and haunted things, and sometimes she'd take her daughter to some of the older cemeteries in Briar Hill—the ones where the people were buried whose names were the names of streets and buildings now—and they'd wander among the graves.

The girls park in the shade of the steeple, which is sharp and white with a dangerous-looking cross at the top, and they pass through the gate.

Both are wearing shorts and summer tops with spaghetti straps. No bras. One of them wears her shorts low enough that the rose tattooed on her hip shows. They have dark eyeshadow on, and deep-mauve lipstick, and their skin is very white because they never go into the sun without sunscreen on. They've seen the effects of the sun on the faces of their mothers, and it won't happen to them.

Under the girls' feet, the farmers and the German immigrants and their wives and children are bones and teeth in boxes.

Neither girl has ever spent much time in the country. Never gone camping or spent the summer on a farm...

The dead in this country churchyard could not have imagined these girls any better than these girls can imagine the dead.

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