Alyzon Whitestarr Read Online Free PDF Page B

a grip,” I muttered.
    I noticed how silent the house was. I thought of
The Day of the Triffids
, where the main character wakes up one day and can’t hear any of the normal things he would have heard and that’s the signal that the world as he knew it had ended. Only I could still hear cars and even the air brakes of trucks on thehighway that ran past the other side of our neighborhood. The silence was
inside
the house, and it was an incredible relief to hear nothing nearby but my own breathing and the ticking of my bedside clock.
    I padded downstairs barefoot and found I was the only one home. I felt an incredible surge of relief, and something in me that had been coiled tight finally unwound. The minute I relaxed, I realized that I was ravenously hungry. A box from the health-food shop was sitting on the table. Once a week, when she remembered, Mum poked a list under the door of the shop, and they delivered the next day. Among the supplies were fresh mushrooms. I decided to make mushroom risotto for dinner as a way of signaling to the family that I was on the way back, because suddenly it seemed that it might really be so.
    I melted butter and chopped garlic and mushrooms to fry in it, then I stirred in brown rice and vegetable stock. I hadn’t cooked since the accident, and the scent of the fresh mushrooms and garlic was almost intoxicating. I took a long, deep breath and felt like I had never smelled mushrooms before that moment; that all the other mushrooms in the world were pale shadows of these; this garlic, the blueprint for all garlic. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t jolly myself out of the intensity of what I was feeling. It occurred to me, as I dished out a bowlful of risotto, that for the first time I wasn’t resisting the new intensity of my senses.
    I sprinkled on Parmesan cheese and ate a mouthful, concentrating on the taste. The flavor was like a small but potentexplosion in my mouth; it made me dizzy for a moment. I felt like I could eat that risotto and die, because it was so complete in every way that it contained the meaning of life. It was not just the taste of the sauce and the nutty flavor of the cheese. The feeling of soft mushroom and grains of buttery rice against my tongue filled my whole body with pleasure.
    I ate three mouthfuls, and then sat panting, drained by the vividness of what I’d felt and wondering if I would have the energy to get upstairs again. Then I heard music from one of the neighbors’ houses. It was a piece Serenity had played over and over on her cello when she was learning it a few years back.
    I closed my eyes and focused until the music seemed to grow louder. I felt like I had never heard that song properly before. Every note sounded itself out separately, just as the rice grains had done in my mouth. It was like I was going into the song and it was being magnified in me tenfold, a hundred fold, a thousandfold its usual self. I felt like I could listen to the music forever and ever, it was so complex. Following every nuance and flourish, I was on the edge of understanding why Serenity had loved it so much, and the thought drifted into my mind that, if I understood, it would tell me something about Serenity and the darkness she was building around her.
    The music ended, and an announcer introduced the latest hit track from the Rak. Electronic music chewed into the bright day, ratty and savage. It was like something alive trying to gnaw its way into my skull. It made me think of a phobiaI used to have when I was little. An older kid had told me that earwigs got their name because they liked to crawl into a person’s ear and gnaw at their brain to make a little cave for an egg sac. I used to stick plugs of Plasticine into my ears at night, until one melted and the doctor had to remove it.
    The memory had taken me away from listening for a few seconds, and the music had faded, but as I listened again, it grew louder and more brutal and vicious until I began to feel