The Blondes by Emily Schultz Read Free Book Online Page A

like a kid chased home after school, up the stairs to the fourth floor before I remembered I was now down on three, and finally managed to get my key into the door, and landed face down on my bed. Through the parted velvet peach curtains, evening bled a gentle stain of light. I must have lain immobile for an hour or more. Then I curled onto my side, and stared at the sky above the courtyard until it greyed and sleep crashed into me.

THERE ARE WORSE CIRCUMSTANCES in which to be born, my little womb-raider. This is what I tell myself. You will not be a child of war, for instance, just a child of plague. You’ll be
Babe of the Plague
, like a character in an old horror movie such as
Children of the Corn
or
Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking
. You see? I still have a sense of humour. If I think too much about the pandemic, I become frightened, and I worry that you can feel my fear, that fear is in the blood. That’s why I’m going to keep my sense of humour, keep talking, keep moving around this little room. Until Grace comes back,
if
Grace comes back—and I wouldn’t blame her if she doesn’t—I have all the time in the world, and nothing left to do but this.
    For a while after I found out about you I was making lists of names—not that I can imagine you ever having a properbirth certificate. And not that I can imagine you being alive long enough to learn your own name. But the lists were a welcome distraction. At one point I toyed with Carlotta, after Karl, but then I decided you should have an identity all your own. When I say your name, I want you to feel there is only love behind it, no conflict. There should be no trace of the dead or the damaged hanging over you.
    Every time I come up with an option these days, it sounds like a dog’s or cat’s name. Or the name of a Southern belle. Or else it’s Scottish, and am I really going to saddle you with my ancestry when I don’t even know my own father? Hippie names are out, because do you want to be named Ocean, Sapphire, or Harmony after age twenty, if by some miracle we all live that long? At that point, you might as well sign up to be a stripper. Gender-neutral names are off the list too, because I can’t think of a single one that rolls off the tongue.
    If you survive, the world you grow up in will be one that has experienced intense panic and distrust, violence and hysteria—though that’s a loaded word. I don’t think I would have used it before this past year. But now? All of us living with a disease that affects only girls and women?
Hysteria
is so bang on.
    As outrageous as the news reports were, and the solutions and proposals of their talking heads, I miss them. We lost our cable signal the fourth week after I arrived here at the cottage. Grace had just finished putting on her makeup and had sunk into Karl’s chair. I remember I was heading into the bathroom when she shouted out, “Fuck me, fucking, come on, you lame little ass-wipe, come on—”
    I came back out immediately to see what had happened. Grace jabbed her fingers over the remote, got up and toggled buttons, but to no avail. The television remained—and continues to remain—blank.
    Grace is so paranoid. Before we lost the signal, she’d already cancelled the mail and her magazine subscriptions, because even though the mailbox is out by the road and therefore safely away from the house, she saw a woman driving the delivery truck one morning. She freaked, saying, “What if that woman becomes contagious? What if she comes up to the door to ask for a signature for something?” And so Grace used the wall phone to call the post office in town.
    Just like that, news of the outside world disappeared and Grace replaced television with drinking. She had a case of wine and a few bottles of whisky stashed around the cottage, as if she’d known that day might come. There are still a couple bottles left, and sometimes I’m
tempted
to take the edge off, let me tell you. But I won’t. I