This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart

Author:Beth Kephart [Kephart, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2016-04-11T18:30:00+00:00

Doublewide and batteries. Peanut butter and spoon. Wallet. Half-bar phone. Comb. Toothbrush. One canister of Vietnamese sand and Mickey’s favorite pair of earrings, color of the sun going up. That’s what she said when we gave them to her, Jasper Lee and me. We’d walked all the way to Main and the How to Live store, Jasper Lee leaning on both painted canes the entire way and then also in the store: She’d like those best. Don’t cry, I told myself. Can’t cry. The candy corn, some photographs, my journal, my pen, the cans of peaches, the cans of fish, the chips. The hairy cactus with a Pepto bow that Eva had given me one Christmas. My iPod shuffle with the Deni-loaded songs. The silver mug Mickey had made for me out of a wedge of porcelain clay. I found a duffel bag, made it fit. I tossed the tartan to the sand below, and the walrus into the blanket, and in the same fashion I tossed the bag of Friskies, and it went down and down like a bomb that didn’t blow, and there Old Carmen stood waiting, my cat in her arms, like she was a friend of mine.

Get what you’ll need.

I had no one. I didn’t ask questions. She had brought a flag with her and it was waving there, and it was not the color of surrender. She had patched together my head.

It was a long way to earth. The deck was dizzy. From where I stood I could see the giraffe still bobbing in the froth, the folding fingers of a music stand, the front chunk of a boat called Mighty something. All up and down the beach were more and more people out wearing what they’d slept in, picking their life out of the sand, out of flattened tires and laundry machines, out of the clumps of junk where the heckling gulls stood, protecting their possessions. Way out north, along the shore, I saw Chang and Mario, tall and short, walking arm over arm, slow and dazed, hardly moving forward, and I wanted to call, wanted to mold my hands into a megaphone—Hey! Hey! Are you all right? Hey! You seen the others? You okay? Who else is there?—but there was a mist between me and them, a mirage rising, and they didn’t see me, didn’t wave, like I stood on the other side of a dream. A wave rolled in carrying a machine on its back. Chang and Mario were gone, a deer standing where they’d been. A baby deer with lots of spots, dipping its hooves into the tide.

“You about ready?” I heard Old Carmen call, her flag still planted behind her and her black box at her feet, and my cat in her arms. I had no idea of next. I had no options. The deck was a prow cutting the air. The lifeline of rope was still tied at one end to the bed, still snaked across the sandy deck to the ledge, still holding.

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