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

hillside with a pickaxe and spade and the girl dried mud for bricks, and the girl gathered eagles’ eggs and caught marmots and prairie dogs with traps of twine and sticks. How in the flash that meant the end of all, they lay before the hearth within this wide belly of soil. How they made love and sang while the sky loomed open and silent save the long off hum of what they called crickets. How they played badminton, how their chests throbbed as they fell into each other, how the man held his hand to the woman’s bulged belly and how, a dim remembered pain. How the child within kicked and mewed, how it hungered for more than boiled roots and sourdough. How the horizon rose clotted with the smoke and detritus of a thousand skins and, within the light of this evaporated world, how the man held his son, writhing and red. How he begged the child to breathe and, once its lungs filled and expanded, how he prayed the child would never stop.
    How—
    How the father held his newborn son in their cavern and how the infant dozed, so terribly light and frail. Now this ache, within, this knowledge of what burned along the edges.
    How the father took his son fishing along the stream and the son, interested only in the texture of the stones, the moss, in the ants along the strands of grass, the water bugs darting and flickering. The son’s pale freckled face, his wisps of red hair. How the father brushed the son’s bangs from his eyes while the son pretended not to smile. How the man and his son ate what they called mayonnaise sandwiches but were mostly goats’ milk cheese and sourdough. How the son sat on his father’s lap and the heat of the boy through his layers of denim and cotton. How the father felt the burn of light in his cornea and the boundaries wilted and blackened. How the father wiped his eyes with a handkerchief while the little boy dozed, slouched and drooling against his father’s side.
    Now the boy asked his mother and father how they met and his parents could not answer. Later, as the father and mother lay in their bed of straw and cotton, how they recalled only the conception of their son, the moment of waking into the light of this prairie, the long green grass and daisies, and if they strained enough, how they knew only an ache, and the sudden flash of a thousand suns.
    How the walls inside the hillside curled and puckered like a burning Polaroid. How fruit jars warped and twisted into flutes while the fluids clouded and blackened. How the parents noticed but pretended these blots were simply shadows. Now always this smell of smoldering and smoke, of meat cooking and burned, no matter how long the door was open, the windows, no matter if they cooked outside or in. How the husband and wife sat in lawn chairs along the hillside, admiring the prairie grasses, the sway of brown and green, the long off bounce of prairie dogs, their chattering. How the light of the falling sun seemed born of new colors and textures and how the landscape seemed to wilt before these red and gold eyes. How the air gusted in a crimson breath and the wife said “it must be a tornado.” How somewhere, dimly remembered, the truth moaned, and how she prayed her husband had forgotten. How the sky opened and the father called the son into the house again. How the boy’s head, his red hair, barely over the tips of the grass.
    How the walls corroded and blackened as if charred. How the father and his son scrubbed with scouring pads and bleach, their hands raw and red. How the father and mother made a game of it, those who cleaned the most won a piece of pie, a raise in allowance. How the boy peeked out the door and how the prairie entire seemed flooded with ash and soot. How they scrubbed.
    How the father wandered the black and flattened fields, as the sky folded and unfolded into new colors, how it vibrated and scorched the perimeter. How the father, his shirt unbuttoned and flapping, his chest and belly, his