A Fold in the Tent of the Sky by Michael Hale Read Free Book Online

and a fix of UV somehow connected—at least that’s what the people who ran the place were betting on.
    Betty stopped eating to talk again; she had to force the mouthful down with an exaggerated swallow. “Jeremy was going on and on about meridians or whatever they’re called. Your body having special places on it that control other places? Like rubbing your hand to get rid of a headache? Stuff like that.” She picked up the sandwich—a salad wrapped in a high- fiber flat bread—and peered at the inner workings of it. “I don’t know—your head hurts because your head hurts. Rubbing something doesn’t affect something else.” Her tongue roamed her mouth in search of vagrant scraps of sandwich as she mulled over the implications of what she had just said. Her hand came up to cover her detonating laugh. “Jesus, did I say that? I’m so stupid—” Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling and her cheeks pinked for a moment.
    â€œIt’s like that woman who sued her obstetrician?” She was frowning now, silently snapping her fingers as she dug up this new memory. “’Cause he said her baby was going to be a girl, from the ultrasound? So she and her husband go and buy allthis furniture and stuff? For the baby’s room? All this pink baby furniture, and they spend all this money on pink wallpaper and fancy pink curtains, whatever—making it into this, you know, this—Barbie doll girl’s room? Guess what? Turns out it’s a boy, so they sue the doctor for damages or whatever, ’cause the little guy’s penis didn’t show up on the fucking ultrasound.” She laughed through the last bit, bouncing her torso to underline it. Simon watched her breasts echo the trajectory of her shoulders, then follow through with a slower, more pronounced arc of heavy breast movement.
    Inertial dampers, Simon thought. Breasts made women more graceful; their body-fat percentage made them better swimmers than men. This girl who could float better than he could: her breast the weight of an egg, maybe two eggs, he’d noticed the other night, cupping one of them after she’d taken her top off—she had turned on the desk lamp in her room, angled it against the wall to get the best effect, then pulled her sweater over her head, presenting him with her breasts like someone selling jewelry. The weight of an egg, no, two or three Grade-A-Large eggs, eggs being his unit of measure all of a sudden—the nipple small and gritty under his tongue, the surprise of a seed in a seedless grape. Betty had a ripeness about her, the fleshy newness of eighteen-year-old skin— olive perfection, the plump fold at her waist like the edge of a bolt of silk. Her hair was like a curtain, a straight-cut black proscenium framing her face. Her stark, aubergine lipstick always pulling her mouth to center stage . . . Simon couldn’t see what she was getting at—the meridians, the ultrasound; the connection she was trying to make eluded him. Rubbing something. The penis—maybe that was it.
    â€œYour head hurts because there’s something wrong withyour head. That’s what I think.” Betty licked the ends of two fingers one at a time, picked up her napkin, and dabbed at her eggplant lips. A paper napkin with a coffee cup wearing sunglasses printed on it. “Jeremy said we could come over later if we want to; they’re all going to a reading or something, at the Culch, something about panoramic cameras? Whatever.” Her face wrinkled trying to remember what would be a powerful enough reason for them to go all the way over to the East Vancouver Cultural Center on a night like this: “It’s a lecture about this famous photographer—they’re going to have slides and everything.”
    She reached over and touched Simon’s hand, playing circles round his knuckles with her long fingernails, looking over the new crop of