1503933547 by Paul Pen Read Free Book Online

her smile.
    “Because you’re a very clever boy,” she said, answering her own question. She stroked my whole face with the palm of a wrinkly hand. “And that’s why you know you wouldn’t go anywhere even if that door was open. Where would you go?” Mom hugged me again through the soft fabric of the towel. “Where do you want to go?” she persisted. She looked at me with her droopy eye and uneven smile.
    “Nowhere,” I answered.
    Dressed only in my underpants, I went to the kitchen. I could hear the carrot soup bubbling on the stove. I also heard my family talking before I arrived.
    “We’re running out of everything,” Mom said.
    A utensil clinked against something metal.
    “He was supposed to have come yesterday,” Grandma replied.
    When I walked in, I saw my mother standing on tiptoes to reach the top of one of the kitchen cupboards. In addition to the two hot plates, the kitchen had a sink, an oven, a fridge, and lots of cupboards and drawers. They were all open.
    “There’s nothing here,” Mom said, her arm inside the upper cupboard, as if she hoped to find something that was out of sight at the back. “All we have is what’s on the table.”
    She lowered her heels and turned around, then she saw me.
    “Dinnertime. We’re all here now,” she said.
    She approached the table, touched my grandmother’s shoulder, and gestured with her mouth to Dad. They were all sitting there, under the cone of light that the bulb projected onto the table. I saw the strap on my sister’s mask tight against her hair, which was still wet. Grandma and Mom tidied away some packets of rice stacked on the table. As well as cans of tuna, and eggs and potatoes. They put them in the cupboards where they were kept, which were emptier than they usually were.
    “About time you showed up,” my father said. “Why do you spend so long at that window? Do you want to leave or something?”
    “I wasn’t at the window,” I answered.
    “And he doesn’t want to leave, either,” added Mom.
    “He hides things in his drawer,” my brother blurted out.
    “Really? What is it you hide there?” Dad asked.
    My brother wanted to say something else. Before he could, the hot pan of carrot soup appeared on the table.
    “Let’s eat,” Mom said.
    She served our dinner with a ladle, filling the bowls that my grandmother had arranged on the table. She also served a seventh bowl. The one nobody would touch. And which, as ever, would end up in the trash or down the plughole.

7
    The second firefly arrived that night.
    Lying in bed awake, I listened to the lines in the movie my family was watching in the living room. Dad’s favorite. He’d put it on so many times that I knew every word by heart, every pause, every gunshot.
    I whispered the words into the darkness.
    In the basement we had a television, but no antenna and no signal. There were lots of tapes on the big bookshelf in the living room, which we watched on a video recorder that had the word Betamax printed on one side. Dad liked cowboy movies.
    Just like the cowboy would be doing on the screen, I pulled a hand out from underneath the covers, imitated a pistol with my fingers, and fired some imaginary bullets into the darkness. Just then, the baby began crying.
    As if the bullets had reached his crib.
    I heard my mother’s footsteps in the hall. Behind her, my grandmother’s. Since the night he almost suffocated, every time the boy cried they ran to his crib, scared they’d find him turned blue.
    I opened my bedroom door to see what was happening. The TV screen flickered light into the hall. I pictured Dad in his striped armchair. My brother sitting on the brown sofa, laughing when he wasn’t supposed to at a violent scene, or frowning, not fully understanding what was happening behind that window of images. My sister sat on the floor, using the sofa as a backrest, her legs crossed and her interlinked hands resting on her stomach, watching the TV like someone staring at an