Riverine by Angela Palm Read Free Book Online

neighborhood kids.
    Other families had come and gone. A TV tray was climbing the stairs. Eyes on the road, I tried not to look inside the windows. I walked on, stopping to look up at Corey’s old window. In my pocket, I carried my stone, which had long since been removed from the jar. Curiosity will kill this cat. I could nearly feel the sap beneath my fingernails, transferred from tree bark to skin long ago. Matter cannot be created or destroyed: the sap was somewhere, the families were somewhere, Corey was somewhere. The memories still existed. Though I discovered meditation here, my first way out of that riverbed, I could not knock on the door of any of these houses. I would not be let inside. I could only return in my mind. If I thought of Corey long enough, meditated on the day he’d carried me home that first time my heart failed, my body would follow and leave a gap in the present.

DIY FOR THE FAITHLESS
    When Magic Precedes Belief
    Early memory: It is dark. My father, a welder at Merit Steel, walks into our trailer and sits down on a bench near the shiny aluminum door. Our carpeting is brown and the floor in this room slopes when I crawl toward the window, beneath which brightly colored balls collect during daytime play, as though one end of the home tilts toward the center of the earth. Sometimes I dream of falling through this floor into a cracked-open world exposing a belly full of snakes. My father looks very tired, and his face is reddened and rugged. White strips of tape secure two white patches of gauze over his eyes: never look directly at the flame, unprotected. He wears a navy blue T-shirt and stained, faded blue jeans. He smells like oil and scorched metal. He bends to remove his work boots, which are made of brown leather and tied with yellow industrial-grade laces. I comfort him. I make sure he knows he will be all right. I don’t know how I accomplish this, but I do. I don’t know how I know that his work is difficult and dangerous, but I know. What I don’t know is that my father is only twenty-three years old, trying to avoid falling into a snake pit of his own. He has come so far already. The home he grew up in did not have running water or a bathroom.
    Early memory: I have my own bedroom in a real house, and the walls are painted a soft peach color. There are no pictures on the wall, only the paint. I have a small bed and a pink blanket beneath a high canopy, the shabby quarters of a poor princess. My window is trimmed in white. Outside my white square of window stands a large sycamore tree that sways in the nighttime wind. When I’m scared, I watch the boy in the window across from mine to help me fall asleep. He is my bedtime story, and he keeps the monsters away. I watch him laugh and jump off his bed when he is alone. I watch his brothers beat up on him. I watch his mother scold him. We are both so powerless. I believe that someday he’ll save me and we’ll disappear, wriggling free from this place like little Houdinis. It takes me forever to fall asleep when my boy in the window is gone. One night, a shadow approaches and then comes close to my window screen. A man’s head, looking in. I wake my mother and she calls our neighbor, Wild Bill, our street’s self-appointed patrolman, but they never find a man to go with the shadow.
    Early memory: My imagination reigns for a time and books become reality. When I am seven, our crabgrass yard is my Secret Garden, or I am Matilda, smarter than her parents already, or I am the Little Princess, secret heir to another life, or I walk through mirrors into upside-down lands. I push a glass of milk across the table without touching it. I bend a spoon with my blue eyes. During a tour of an antique jail, I see a stuffed white dog stand up and walk across the small cell. “Is that so?” my grandmother says, looking at the dog, then at me. Then his friend the stuffed raccoon follows him. “I see what you mean,” she says. I recall a favorite line