The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus Read Free Book Online

feels entirely like the worst kind of shit.”
    Little did she goddamn know.
    “Okay, darling, I’m sorry.”
    And thus a rhetorical marvel was engineered: I apologized to Esther, regularly, for her refusal to be queried on her well-being. I regularly failed to mount cogent justifications for any of the human practices. They turned out to be indefensible to her. In the end I was a poor spokesman for life among people. Such were the victories of language in the home.
    After they’d snuggled and debriefed, Esther trailed Claire out of her room. Esther looked heavily guarded, as if to say, I have been at horse camp and I have changed considerably, in ways you could never understand, so let’s not waste each other’s time, you old asshole. Stay away from me, you tiny, silly creatures, for you have not been to horse camp.
    Out of consideration for her privacy, I did not strive for eye contact.
    Leave the little gal alone, I reminded myself, give her space, even though I wanted to hug the crap out of her and maybe get a smell of those horses I had paid for her to play with.
    Such admonitions against trespass kept me afloat with Esther. But she was adorable-looking, which I wasn’t allowed to mention, and the one thing I most wanted to do, to hold her and tickle her and just be next to her, was the one thing that was definitively not on the table. Not even near it.
    Esther’s usual poker face couldn’t really hide her suspicion. She had deep energy reserves for uncovering contradiction and hypocrisy. When she smelled it she jumped into action. This new bit of news—Mom and Dad are feeling better—was vulnerable to attack, obviously. Clearly she’d been clued in to our ostensible recovery.
    I saw her mind working away at the weakness of everything she’d heard from her mother, the great dismantling project going on not so secretly in the twitches of her face.
    “You’re better,” she announced, unimpressed, as she flipped through the week’s worth of catalogs that had come.
    This bedside manner would help her one day, no doubt. Rhetorical mode number forty-fucking-five. Death through obviousness, insistence on the literal. I will show you that your basic claims about yourself are insane, simply by repeating them back to you.
    Then it graciously changed into a question. “You’re feeling better?”
    I breathed hard from my nose, as if to say: “According to some,” but what came out was a scoff. Sometimes if I took the same sarcastic tone as Esther we’d remain allies for a bit longer, but I always failed when it came to the music of the sarcasm, and even that phrase, “music of the sarcasm,” should be a giveaway that I was out of my league. The acoustics changed every year, or more often than that. Usually I produced the sort of tonal errors of speech that made her seem to hate me even more. I was one of those dads who gladly gave up his own identity in order to act like someone Esther might hang out with at school—as if a wet-faced, overweight, middle-aged man with adolescent speech habits that were slightly out of date did not trip any number of warning signs and send up alarms all over the neighborhood. Sometimes my desire to please meant that Esther still ignored me, but without hostility, and these were the spoils I greedily enjoyed in my role as her father.
    “Dinner’s soon,” I said. “If you want to get cleaned up and … you know.”
    Esther looked at me with what seemed like pity.
    “Oh, I do know,” she said. “You don’t even know how much I know.”
    “Okay,” I laughed, even though I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

7
    At dinner we tried to extract the details about Esther’s trip, but all she did was eat and mumble. The trick was to make this conversation unlike an interrogation, to conceal our basic curiosity, which is what Esther found to be our most appalling trait.
How dare you care about something? Don’t you know what a breach it is?
When we let down our