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

hairs bleached white for the horizon.
    How they woke to a roaring and crackling. How the boy screamed and how he lay within the arms of his mother and father. How the roaring seemed larger than all sound. How a thousand planes dealt into the hillside would seem a murmur by comparison. In the place beneath all knowledge, the mother and father knew how quickly something disappears and so they held each other all the tighter to know the moment the other was no more. How the boy hiccupped and feared he could not breathe. How his neck swelled and his skin turned blue. How the boy, through the roaring and crackling, on these bed sheets, and somewhere the eyes of a cat, slivered and yellowed. How the boy said, “mama, I’m going to die,” and how she knew enough to say, “No you aren’t, honey, no, you never will.” How this boy could only stare back at his father and mother and why they lied.
    How the boy lay swollen and blue. How the father tore apart chairs and boxes, how he hammered together a tiny casket. How he wandered those hillsides, black and molted. How it seemed he could climb within, and how he felt he once had. How this son lay in his bed, cold and unmoving save to wheeze. How the air around them burst. How the mother laid the boy’s favorite toy truck in the crook of his arm, and how the horizon opened.
    How the father hugged his son in his casket and whispered to the child of wax how this suffering would end soon. How the boy’s ears leaked for the moaning. How the walls opened and there was white light. How the mother patched these with the boy’s spare overalls. How the overalls flickered into light and flames while she beat them with a broom. How husband and wife finally lay with each other amongst the crackling, coughing for the soot and smoke of the walls and the hillsides, and the entire world obliterated around them. How the funeral of the world they had always known burned into their minds now and how they forced themselves to kiss each other, to wet each other, to remind each of this life they would yet lead, and, how this mother said, if only her voice, lost in the humming, how this glow, all around them, was only the glow of the falling sun, and soon—

R OBERT K LOSS has recent fiction in The Collagist, Caketrain, Gargoyle , & Everyday Genius among others. This is his first book.
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