The Best American Short Stories® 2011 by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

open. I held my hand up as if to say "Stop." Cut it, I said.
    Put your hand down, Mom said. You're scaring him.
    Carnie continued to scream. It was a pleading, horrifying sound, like an alarm. He cocked his head and danced across his bar, shrieking. Ike began to cry.
    Never mind, Mom said. I'll do it.
    She thrust Ike in my arms and marched toward the cage. When she opened the door, Carnie scampered onto her finger, and she brought him to her shoulder. He was silent. Mom pulled the newsprint from the bottom of his cage with bare hands. Dried birdshit fell to the carpet; she didn't seem to notice.
    Let me help you, I said. Sit down. I can do this.
    Sit down, Carnie said. Sit down. Sit down.
    Mom ignored me and moved to the kitchen, stuffing the soiled papers into the trash can.
    You should wash your hands, I said.
    Don't tell me what to do, she said.
    Sit down, Carnie said. Sit down.
    I found Carnie's high-volume pleas disconcerting and worried they agitated Ike, who clung to my shoulder. There were things, once, that I thought I deserved. My parents' money, and certainly their unconditional love. But as years passed, our love had turned into a bartering system, a list of complicated IOUs.
    I'm sorry, I said. I don't know about birds.
    You'll learn, Mom said. Soon.
     
    Ike and I arrive in Myrtle Beach at eight P.M. I know the zoo will be closed at this hour, so we find a Day's Inn. There's something about the hum of an ice machine and waterlogged AstroTurf that takes me back to childhood.
    Ike face-plants onto the bed before I can remove the comforter.
    Wait a second, baby, I say. Let me get that dirty thing off.
    We get in bed and flip channels. Ike holds the fabric of my pajama legs with one hand, wraps the other around a blanket my mother crocheted for me when I was in college. His travel blanket. I'm racked with sadness every time I see it: the coral and black starbursts, the tight knots.
    I remember a hotel I stayed in with my mother during her own mother's funeral. Downtown Norfolk, 1986. There was a rotating bucket of chicken on a sign pole below our window. I watched it spin. Even when the lights were off and my mother cried into her pillow, I watched that bucket of chicken rotate like the world itself.
    At the time I thought that moms were not allowed to be sad, that surely women grew out of sadness by the time they had children.
    Mom, Ike says. I don't want to move.
    His eyes flicker and he fades. The news is on. A lipstick-shellacked anchor tells of a new breed of aggressive python in southern Florida that strangled a toddler in his sleep. Maybe one will come to our hotel, I think. And I will have to fight it off with my pocket knife, club it with the glass lamp on the bedside table, offer it my own body.
    On our second date, Ike's father showed me a video of an infant in Andhra Pradesh. The child had rich brown skin and curious eyes. He pulled himself across a grass mat while a cobra, hood spread, hovered above the boy's soft body. The baby grabbed after the cobra's tail while the toothless snake struck him repeatedly on his downy head, snapping down upon his body like a whip.
    This, Ike's father said, is how you cultivate the absence of fear. Don't you wish someone had given you that gift?
    Fear keeps me safe, I said.
    Snakes. Why do I think of these things before I try to fall asleep?
    I put one arm across Ike's chest so that I will know if he moves. I can feel the pattern of his breath, the calm and easy way he sleeps, the simple way he dreams.
     
    When I moved out, Mom had said, I need you to take Carnie.
    It was the hundredth time she'd asked. We had her bills and bank statements spread out on the coffee table. Her eyesight was failing and we knew she couldn't live alone much longer. It was time to plan.
    Carnie hung upside down in his cage. Empty seed casings and shredded newspaper littered the floor. Occasionally he pecked his image in a foil mirror, rang a bell with his beak.
    I don't want the bird, I said.