The Man Who Owned Vermont by Bret Lott

Author:Bret Lott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press

Paige and I made love that night, upstairs in a bedroom darker than the night outside so that I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see her below me as we moved together. Insects and the air around were the only sounds, and our movement. The windows were open, and the warmth of Paige and the cool night gave me a chill from my legs to my neck, through my whole body. I wondered if, too, the semen I gave to Paige that evening weren’t cold as well, cold and dead inside her womb, that womb already waiting to try for another child.

Afterward we pulled apart. Paige reached up to me, brought my head to her breast, and held me there while she cried.

“What?” I said.

She said, “Nothing,” and I knew she was right in this.

I put a hand to her face, felt where tears had slipped down. She turned from me, pulled the sheet up around her and held it tight against her body. I rolled over onto my back, put my hands behind my head.

When she had fallen asleep, I sat up in bed. I turned and put my bare feet on the floor, then stood and went toward the window, the only piece of light in the room. The floor moaned beneath my weight, but Paige did not awaken.

I put both hands on the sill. The window was old, divided into twelve panes. I looked through the glass, saw that each pane was the original, trees and stars and black hills all bending and rolling as I moved my head back and forth behind the glass.

Here was the view again. The meadow down there, fireflies gone, more stars above now. I stared through the old glass at the older trees and even older hills and at the ageless stars, and then I thought of Paige behind me. I thought of my own fresh seed inside her, thought of it slipping from between her legs while she slept so that it would be of no use to her, which was, I realized, as I wanted it.

I looked down into the meadow then, and saw a child there in the high grass just beyond where Larry and I had stopped mowing.

I blinked, rubbed my eyes, swallowed. I looked through another pane of glass, then another and another, hoping it was only bubbles in the glass, waves thicker in one place than another. But nothing changed.

A child played down there in the yard. I could not tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it was there, moving around, jumping, dancing, its hands now above its head, now moving in a circle, its hands on its hips. A small child. There.

I thought I was drunk, or that I was going mad. Then I thought, Why not? Why couldn’t I have this ghost? Why not let me have this child here in the woods? Maybe that was the child I’d killed already, I thought, the child I’d caused us to lose.

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.