Fever by Sharon Butala Read Free Book Online Page B

gathering his courage to come and make the final break.
    No, I said to him in my head, I don’t forgive you. Some things are not forgivable.
    Gary came to find me then, took me back to bed with him, and I at last fell asleep curled up against his warm back.
    What does he think he did that was wrong? I had pondered, walking slowly up and down those winding paths. What was his conception of his sin? Was I to forgive him for the women? For his casual and deliberate insults and the way he so often shamed me? Was it for taking my love and abusing it? Was it all of these, or only some, or something else I hadn’t remembered or thought of? I found I could not imagine for what he was asking forgiveness.
    I wrote him a reply. His letter had seemed genuine and I couldn’t bring myself to let him suffer anymore. I forgive you, I wrote. It wasn’t all your fault, and I told him how I used to think there was no such thing as justice, that justice was an artificial, man-made and childish concept that had no place in the history or psychology of humankind. I wrote, I guess I was wrong and I have you to thank for that, but then I crossed that last line out and scribbled over it so he couldn’t read it, and thought with pleasure how he would puzzle over it and try to decipher what I had written and then decided I didn’t want him to see.
    I had even thought, walking up and down those paths, that I would say to him in reply, your apology is too late, I forgave youlong ago, but that seemed cruel, a trivializing of his anguish which I believed to be real.
    But now I see that words like justice and forgiveness have nothing to do with anything, they are only words. I see now that whatever happened between Lucas and me was only life, and while neither of us will ever know why it happened, I know now that neither will I ever recover, as I had always expected to, from what it did to me. Nor, I suppose, will Lucas. If you are in an accident with your new car and are hurt, no matter how well you heal or how much time passes, you always have twinges to remind you of what happened, and though you may get the car’s motor running again, and its body hammered smooth and freshly painted, it is never quite a new car again.

Dark of the Moon
    Janet and her friend, Livie, and Livie’s boyfriend, Nathan, get out of Nathan’s car and then stand uncertainly, listening to the faint laughter and occasional muted shriek coming from the darkness on the far side of the parking lot, across the space that must be grass, between them and the tall black pines whose uppermost silhouette they can see hard against the starry, luminous sky. “No moon tonight,” Livie says.
    “The dark of the moon,” Janet says softly, and shivers. The summer night is cool at this altitude, out here on the edge of the forest.
    “Can’t see a goddam thing,” Nathan says. “Well, let’s strike out. They aren’t going to come for us.” Crickets, or is it frogs, are singing loudly and steadily with an immediacy that the human voices don’t have. The three of them stumble across the gravelled parking lot behind the row of parked cars, trying to find their way in the dark. When they reach the slowly rising sweep of grass—they hear it against their sandals and feel it on their bare ankles—they suddenly see firelight not so far ahead, just inside the forest’s edge. It flickers and glows between the straight black trunks of the lodgepole pines. There must be a clearing ahead. It’sbeen so dry up here that open fires are forbidden except where the park attendants have dug pits and circled them with rocks.
    “Those stars are incredible,” Janet says. The others don’t answer her, which doesn’t surprise her, she’s used to that, and Nathan walks straight into a metal barbecue stand that the park people have fixed in cement in the grass.
    “Uh!” he says. “Damn!” The bottles in the case of beer he is carrying rattle alarmingly. He backs up and feels his way around the