Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard Read Free Book Online Page B

of the mass. One of the hardest cards to find, and it had to be replaced, at the cost of three months: my brother held it up in front of me early one morning, when I was still in bed, and tore it into eighths.
    #43: Blasting the Bug
    The bug’s leg resting with a casual friendliness on the front of a tank that blasts its compound eye at point-blank range. Two soldiers hurl grenades. One holds out his palm as if to reason with everyone. Everything floats on an undifferentiated red background. We all went out for lunch the day of my brother’s institutionalization, before he was to be dropped off. He answered questions monosyllabically. It was the worst day of my parents’ lives. At some point my father went to pay the check. My mother went to help. I didn’t blame her. My brother and I sat around the ruins of our chili dogs. “I put all my cards and stuff in boxes upstairs,” he told me. “Don’t let them screw around with them.”
    I nodded. That night my mother cried her way around the house and ended up in his room. She was rearranging things, packing things. Was she messing up what he’d organized? I couldn’t go up to find out. At dawn I crept into his room and found his shoeboxes arranged on the floor of his closet. Was that the way he’d left them? Were they all there? I looked at his Martian cards: Eleven I already owned. One I didn’t—#28:
Helpless Victim.
A perverse love scene: a giant insect and young boy lying alongside one another, a mandible poised at the jugular, the boy trying to avert his head, his mouth open in protest. I took the card and closed the box. I’d return it when—or if, I thought, crouching on the floor of his closet—my brother came back.
    #44: Battle in the Air
    A red Sikorsky helicopter, an old S-58, and a fat, ludicrous flying bug the same color. Below, monochromatic suburban homes. An attempt at stylization? Saving on colors? A shot from a rifleman onboard deflects something issuing from the bug: A tongue of some sort? A stream of fire?
    #45: Fighting Giant Insects
    Better production values. The soldiers’ helmets look German. A bazooka in one place draws thick black blood. A bayonet in another draws white. The insect has a body of black fur. How much research was done for this series? Were there things like this in the Amazon?
    #46: Blastoff for Mars
    Without explanation, Earth takes the offensive. In a forest of Cape Canaverals, whole formations of men and tanks clamber up ramps directly into the exhaust cones of liquid-fueled rockets. Other rockets streak by on a diagonal. White smoke billows out in various directions. What are the Martians doing while all this is happening? Where are the giant insects?
Men from the ages of 16 to 45
were given quick physical examinations and enlisted into the Earth
Army.
    #47: Earth Bombs Mars
    The bombardier’s fingers bring back a photo of a family vacation in Montauk. Who took the picture? My mother slung in a low sand chair, squinting grimly out to sea. My father demonstrating how to add a tower to a rambling sand castle. Behind him, my brother and I squatting over something on our scratchy old army blanket: cards, two new packages each, that my father bought us at the drugstore near the beach.
    #48: Earthmen Land on Mars
    Another purple sky. Parachutists coming down, a huge Earth behind them. The horizon curves sharply. The ground is arid and broken by palisades. Martians are running toward us. One who’s being shot in the head from behind is tilting delicately toward the shot. He’s wearing a close-fitting shirt with pointed padded shoulders and bikini briefs. Another, about to run out of the frame, is all brain and bulging eyes. Don’t the Martians have radar? Is this all a trap?
    #49: The Earthmen Charge
    Soldiers with red standard-issue helmets under glass mill around a tank porcelain-white like a Frigidaire. Otherwise they wear regular khakis. Why aren’t