The Melting by lize Spit

Author:lize Spit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Encarta 97

I NEVER REALLY asked for world peace. I didn’t ask for a rosary either, but I got one anyway from my grandpa for my First Communion. Instead of the standard donation to my new bike fund, he handed me a little leather pouch. Inside was a chain with fifty-five beads—between every ten white beads was a blue one.

Praying the rosary was so second nature to Grandpa that he didn’t think to explain to me how to do it. Then again, he didn’t explain how not to do it either.

I started in the morning in the bathroom, on my bare knees. I ran the beads through my fingers like I’d seen him do. On every white bead, I repeated the same wish—to win the annual interschool field-day race. On the blue ones, which were a little heavier and felt like they shouldn’t be used for selfish purposes, I asked for world peace.

I didn’t know what world peace meant in practical terms, but I assumed it was a big job and hoped that God, either out of laziness or pure compassion, would go for the easiest, most profitable option: victory in a national field-day race.

In fourth grade, I stopped praying the rosary. Four interschool field days had come and gone, and I hadn’t won any races—my legs weren’t going to get any longer.

That winter, we didn’t get a TV, but we did find Encarta 97 under the Christmas tree.

“First-aid for school projects,” Jolan called it. He got a microscope for his birthday that year and was still in the phase where he’d only accept information that he’d observed firsthand. While he was out digging up insects in the garden so he could squish them between two glass plates and examine them under the microscope, Tessie and I pulled up an extra chair at the computer and inserted the educational CD-ROM. We scrolled through dozens of articles, took a quiz where you had to match pictures of strange-looking musical instruments to their sounds and cultures of origin and watched video clips. The one we watched the most was a clip about the earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Not only did it show a two-mile bridge falling to the ground, it also explained what to do in the event of a landslide: steady yourself in a doorway or crawl under a sturdy desk.

Finally, I was able to form a clearer image of the world that I hadn’t wished peace for in years. A gold medal for the eight-hundred-meter dash had never seemed so trivial.

Instead of praying the rosary that night, I opened the bedroom window all the way and lay down on my back on top of my duvet with my arms and legs spread out wide. I tried to take in as much of the cold air as possible so I could feel what people in other countries must feel, people in areas devastated by earthquakes, children who didn’t have their own recorder and had to make do with a hollowed-out tree branch.

My first act of solidarity lasted five minutes.

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.