How the Days of Love and Diphtheria by Robert Kloss Read Free Book Online

floors. How their eyes—.
    How a light flashed and the horizon rumbled with animals. How the boy held this daughter on the back porch and how in that moment he knew what he had lost a thousand years before, and how only now did he ache for what had been. How the sky opened and hummed and the boy knew enough to say with his final sound, “I love you” rather than what he knew, “I should have killed them.” How she could not hear within the sky, broken into lights and impossible colors. How their ears popped and clogged with pus and they were forced to imagine the impossible roar. How the street yawned and expanded with vibrations. How a doe, lost and smoking, skittered past on the street before them. How the girl’s chest bloomed with the life to come. How the boy held this daughter within the smoke and light of a thousand, thousand candles, as the smoldering remains of feathers and trees fell about them.
    How deer, skittish and blind, ran through shop windows and into cars while goats, half-burned, and herds of black sheep once white, lay smoking and blind. How coyotes seemed the hunched figures of bears, and how bears sweltered into deer, and how deer fell with tongues pink and burning, men tripping over them, lamenting the terror visited upon moose. How scorched kittens licked the charcoal bodies of dogs, beavers, goats. How these animals mewed into the vibrations, moaning and melting. How they wailed. How the vibrations caught all within and how those from this city woke in that city and how all cities burned and fumed into one. How withered men who had not walked in years dove out seventh-story windows, crisped to charcoal. How the few remaining survivors fled the towns and cities, blind and smoking, against the tide of a thousand, thousand burning animals. How women found themselves beneath the figures of brown bears yawning and moaning with steam. Brown bears cooked in their own juices and brown bears split open and these women, somewhere crushed beneath. How the hallways of offices and hospitals filled with gusts and moans and animals toppled into charcoal and debris. How the hallways and valleys, the cemeteries and taverns, lit up now with the burst of white light from along the horizon and how none could see your approach.
    How there is no fear in the moment before you disappear. How this daughter, fled now into the particles within.
    I don’t believe in innocence, the man said. I believe in what happens when the sky yawns wide and blue with light. I believe the sounds your fires make when they swallow the forests .
    Now you arrived along the horizon, a dim line of seven figures, vibrating against an open chasm.
    How—
    Finally, in your boots and your exterminator clothes, you surveyed what you wrought. How you swished your boots into the—
    You drew lines in the mounds and how you searched for the last of the women, if only husks of women, if only the charcoal of women, and what you would do with these women if you found them, yet—
    How your horses, their skin and veins—
    How your horses trotted through the soot and burning embers of cities and towns and animals and forests and mothers and children and hospitals and the boy, or you prayed the boy amongst them—
    How there were no women to find.
    How you wandered the ashes of what remained although nothing remained. How the world you constructed hummed with a thousand, thousand silent vibrations.
    How their hair, gone to smoke. Their eyes molted—
    How the only light you saw was the first light you kindled. How you held no new colors in your conception but what power they contained.

IV.

    How within the yawning of the light, the final figments of this boy and girl, the particles of soot and debris, the house they constructed in the mound of dirt and rock along a hillside. How the long green grasses, irises and daisies, bent now and how, as the light broke into a thousand, thousand new colors, the boy dug out the