A Paradigm of Earth Read Online Free PDF

twins tumbled into her full-tilt on one of their rampages. What was she doing filling with all these beings a house meant to be quiet and insulating?
    Then why didn’t I sell the house and buy some solitary apartment with no room for anyone but me and my cat? her interior voice mocked her . Methinks the lady doth protest too much …
    Morgan settled in the kitchen, where big windows looked out over calm trees in the back yard, the tumbledown garden shed, and the weathered ramshackle fence along the lane. The rain clouds that had threatened all day had loosed into a sheet of soft grey silk whipping across the greenery. The air blowing through the open screen smelled damp and alive.
    Morgan knew she was alive because she slept and woke, ate and shat, still trembled at infinity. But she experienced the rain as everything else, like the cat in the hallway, looking through open doors at the real universe. She was waiting for something to teach her to go there. To invite her to go there. She couldn’t go without leave. She didn’t live there any more.

    Morgan wanted the world to end. She sat on the riverbank in the clear dusk and wished the glittering buildings along the curve to explode, wanted the towers of commerce to topple, not from economic but from physical decay, a decay like that in her heart, she thought, and seeing the towers intact after all that destructive thought she smiled with the same anger at herself, wondering if she would want to be on top of such a falling edifice, thinking it might be an interesting way to die, wondering if any dying can be interesting, wanting the world to die and leave her senseless.
    How maudlin of me, she thought, and the word started her considering Maudlin and Bedlam, their close relationship, the prisons of the mad: she thought of the old English song Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes, for to save her shoes from gravel … .
    Mad Morgan, she thought , how I wish it were so.
    The mad have an easy time of it, she thought; they can let go. They can let the towers of their own minds crumble with no resistance. They are free of whatever damning necessity keeps me sane, keeps me in this prison of my body, this quiet madhouse, this disguise. Where do they get the courage? Just to go crazy, to leave their old world behind, without caring who they leave there crying?
    Like the dead, she thought, they are free to desert us.
    I wonder what it takes to wake me into one of those people who just disappear one day , she asked herself. I quit my job, brought the cat with me, didn’t just go out to the store one night and vanish, sadly missed by loving family, only to be found ten or twenty years later, found by accident, in New Zealand or somewhere, with a new name. Usually also they have a new spouse, more kids, another job, she remembered. Changing your life isn’t easy.
    She thought about the big leather suitcase she packed in her tiny apartment. She thought about the time she spent packing her parents’ belongings, dividing them into categories, what to take, what to keep, what they wanted whom to have, what to give away, what to leave in the basement for her brother Robyn to sort when he had become accustomed to living in the house he inherited.
    She thought that those who desert us leave us a terrible burden of which to dispose. She remembered the cartons and green plastic garbage bags readied for the Goodwill truck to collect, the furniture carried out to its merciful maw by two amiable, slowwitted men who knew how to be kind, so much kindness that she wondered how used they were to taking away the furniture of the dead, comforting the living. How many graveyards did they dismantle every day? She thanked them for their work, and their kindness, then left the ravaged house, put the key back through the mail slot for Robyn, and fled.
    For the first time she thought of it as flight, but she sidestepped that thought too, and stood up from her cramped seat on the bench, went back to the house,