This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber Read Free Book Online

rust-colored knob with so much reverence was enough to make May choke on her soda. She put the glass carefully on the counter, folded her hands and said that his magic root was nothing but a regular piece of ginger, and she could make him a cake of it for Christmas if he liked and then he could dance even faster.
    We don’t know the boy’s response because the soda jerk who’d recorded the conversation until that point moved away so as not to appear to be spying, but if Woolbrink acted in character, he probably made up a lie to cover his embarrassment. Roy Elkhart knew Common was a liar, just as our grandparents did. A boy so bombastic couldn’t always tell the truth. It soon became clear that May liked to hear Common’s lies almost as much as he liked to tell them. According to him, he’d traveled halfway around the world, performing in English taverns, German cabarets, and even the floating show houses of Venice. May knew that a boy too poor to buy a suit that fit hadn’t really traveled the world, but she stopped calling Common’s bluffs and simply learned to revel in the details of his imagination. We know little of their relationship’s progression, only that they were seen together when Common was in town and that May eventually wore his ring, a boyish bit of junk shop glamour in the form of an oversized diamond made of sugar that glittered madly in the sun.
    In matters of love, the element least understood by outsiders often provides the glue, and there was, in fact, a final mystery to their story, a detail we could
only see dimly. Common Woolbrink once whispered a secret so awful in May’s ear that she didn’t speak to him for nearly three weeks, only returning after a succession of bouquets and promises that he would never tell such a lie again. Apparently he’d gone too far with one of his confabulations, confessing to have traveled beyond the fair stages of Europe. Dancing, he said, was good for more than mere entertainment, and if the right dancer moved backward in a certain way, he could open doors to another place where everything was backward. Smoke was sucked into chimneys. Men returned home before leaving for work. And food was spat onto plates. Everyone there got younger instead of older. When May herself talked to him there, for she existed in that world just as everyone had a double, her teeth were actually on the outside of her mouth. Kissing her, he said, was like kissing a bed of stones.
    May began to watch Common for any sign that his habitual lying was an expression of some mental infirmity, but he never spoke of the backward place or anything like it again. He was courteous and jovial. The lies he told were sweet, not frightening, and when he kissed her, he acted as though he had no memory of their stony kisses in that other world. It was only as he lay on the steps of the Orpheum, red coat darkened with redder blood, that he spoke of it again. Our grandparents crowded around the pair, and the sky must have looked to Common like a dome supported by their curious faces, with May’s own hung closest, a beautiful child in mourning. At a safe distance, some of the stronger men held Roy Elkhart on the ground, and he howled for his hunting knife to be returned. People had to lean in close to hear Common say, “I left them open, May. Every single door is standing wide in there.”
    “Don’t make things up,” she whispered. “There’s not
time for that.”
    He grimaced, one hand fluttering to touch her wrist. “If I don’t shut them, no one will. People are going to fall.”
    May forced herself not to scream. This wasn’t the ending she’d pictured. This wasn’t the way to end. When she looked at blond David Miller on that dimly lit stage, some sixty years after Common was buried, she couldn’t muster such control. She understood the clock-springs of love were more fragile than a young girl could have ever known. “You’re younger by a few years,” she whispered to David Miller,