A Wild Swan Read Online Free PDF

spades to them. Have you really actually forgotten that?
    I was trying to be kind. I was trying to be hostly. I took away the love of their goddamned lives. Did my position that night strike you as easy?
    No. You were trying to be generous to them. I know that. I do.
    Okay. Ten minutes. Just ten, okay?
    This really matters to you, doesn’t it?
    Please don’t condescend.
    Could you tell me something to say that won’t offend you?
    It matters to me. Okay, right, I’m a little ever so slightly embarrassed that it matters to me. But it does.
    Tell me something you love about me.
    Come on.
    Be specific.
    Okay. I love the thing you do with your mouth when you’re concentrating. This little squinchy thing, sort of half biting your lip but not exactly, it’s just … squinchy, it’s totally involuntary, it’s so you.
    Tell me another.
    I love it when I wake up before you do, and then when you wake up you have this kind of pure astonished awed expression, like you can’t quite believe you’re … where you are. It fucks with me. It’s what gives me those morning hard-ons.
    Okay. Ten minutes.
    Are you sure?
    Does it bother you, that I like making you happy?
    Ten minutes, then.
    Hey, I’ll go to twelve. For you.
    I adore you.
    Be careful with the lid, all right?
    Aren’t I always careful with the lid?
    Yes. I’m honestly not sure why I said that.
    Are you all right? Is this comfortable?
    I am. It is.
    Do you think …
    What?
    I feel like some kind of creep, now.
    Just tell me.
    Do you think you could cross your hands just a little lower down? More like directly over your breasts?
    Mm-hm.
    Yeah. Perfect. That’s so entirely completely perfect.
    I’m closing my eyes now. I’m going into the zone.
    God, you’re beautiful.
    I wish sometimes I could watch you. Watching me.
    I’d like that, too. But it wouldn’t …
    Of course it wouldn’t.
    Look at your skin. Look at your lips. Look at the petals of your eyelids.
    I’m going to stop talking now. You can lower the lid.
    I’m the luckiest man in the world.
    I’m not talking anymore. I’m going into the zone.
    Twelve minutes, tops. I promise.
    Shh.
    Twelve minutes on the dot. Promise. Thank you for doing this, I know you’re stopping speaking. But, well, thank you. It matters to me, it does. Okay. Twelve minutes and I lay one on you. Then we can order in, okay? Or we can go out, whatever you like. We could catch a movie. But thank you for twelve minutes. I mean, look at you. Sleep like death. Before I even existed. For you, I mean. When I was, okay, I like thinking this way, when I was a dream you were having, when I was a premonition, when I was perfect because I didn’t exist, when I was pure possibility, and, I really hope this isn’t weird, when you were immaculate, and entirely strange, and the most perfect and beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Before I lifted the lid, I mean, and kissed you for the first time.

 
    A MONKEY’S PAW
    Take the Whites, a modest but happy family. A happy-enough family. It’s just the three of them: mother, father, and son. The son works in the local factory. If he’s cross about supporting his parents; if he chafes at his sexless nights or wonders about a youth devoid of carousing and petty criminality; if he’s upset about certain premature afflictions brought on by his labors (that tricky knee, the painful knot at the base of his spine) at the age of twenty-two, he never brings it up. He was not born into a place or time when sons kiss their parents goodbye, gently chide their mother’s hanky-dabbed tears, and stride off into lives of their own.
    They live in a cottage, though it’s not the thatched, tidy dwelling the word “cottage” ordinarily brings to mind. It sags in a slushy, wind-haunted remoteness. The Whites have not been offered much in the way of choices.
    And yet, they