A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell Read Free Book Online Page A

fled. It’s no easier knowing what to do when you’re dead. What can I say to her? Nothing, nothing. She is dying and so, instead, I simply watch her, spinning around where the moonlight should be, her arms reaching out to catch the stars. The night sky is a thick lavender and the stars are cold and blue. Her breaths make small clouds as they leave her mouth. So this is what laughter
looks
like, I think to myself. She is laughing. She is laughing and I don’t know why.
    She opens the telescope, holds it up to her eye, and peers into the sky.
    “Hey,” she says. “It’s cracked!”

14
    Things do not go so well after that. Ola’s fever returns and increases dangerously, her already disastrous weight falling even further. Lateinto the night, she burns like a log on the white bedsheets, giving off the faintest glow, staining the sheets with a red shadow. I can’t help noticing this curiosity as I pace the three sides of her bed, my arms folded tightly against my back.
    Outside, there is the clatter of a wild rain.
    “Panie Chaim,” she says, waking, making a hoarse effort to talk.
    “Ola, no speaking, sha, save your strength.” The words sound ridiculous as soon as I pronounce them. For what is she to save her strength?
    “I’m burning up,” she says.
    I place a hand on her forehead. It’s like touching a hot motor.
    “I’m on fire,” she says, collapsing into a convulsive fit of coughing.
    “Tomorrow, the doctors,” I say. “Surely they will bring you a little morphine, Ola. Tomorrow.”
    “But I’m on fire now, Panie Chaim. Please,” she says, reaching for my fingers. “Cool towels. Please. I need something to cool me down.” She snatches back her hand to hug herself as she rolls over in bed, suffocating under a heavy blanket of wheezing.
    Like a sleepwalker, I find myself moving through these hallways towards the kitchen and filling up a basin with cold water and small blue sheets of ice, which I chip from the block in the icebox. I drop six white hand towels into the basin, quickly, in order not to freeze my fingertips. Upstairs, at her bedside, I wring them out, one at a time, freezing my hands anyway. She is as pale and as still as a corpse, her little broomstick legs locked tightly around a pillow. I smile, if only toreassure myself, uncertain what this ruined body needs from me. Slowly, I lay a towel against her burning forehead. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, her body relaxing like a tired hound. I swab another towel along her neck and then move it beneath her shift and across the bony coat hanger of her shoulders. She coughs, but not deeply this time, and a small tear escapes from beneath her sealed eyelid.
    “That feels good,” she says. “So cool and good.” She rolls onto her stomach, her arms braided against her chest and her abdomen. Taking a new towel from the icy basin, I swathe it across her back, along the knobby river stones of her spine. Instantly, she pulls a sharp breath in between her teeth. I guide two towels along her back, down her legs, until they are swaddling her feet.
    “Again,” she says, and I repeat the motion with fresh towels, returning their predecessors to the basin. She releases her arms from beneath her chest, and I rub them down with my icy cloths.
    She returns to her back and, raising her shift, offers up the flat expanse of her belly. She is naked beneath the shift and I hesitate before placing the wet towel above her little sex, but feel ridiculous in doing so. I’m a dead man, after all, and old enough to be her grandfather. She’s dying. And besides, my body no longer presses its lecherous claims on me. However, when I take the last of my cooling white towels and position it there with a matter-of-fact, if tender, frankness, her eyes again close and her neck elongates, twisting and growing flush. Her grey skin marbles and stands up in glistening goose bumps. Herchin juts towards the ceiling. Her arms tense, locking at the elbows, and