Bark: Stories Read Online Free PDF

thought of all the deeply wrong erotic attachments made in wartime, all the crazy romances cooked up quickly by the species to offset death. He turned the radio on: the news of the Mideast was so surreal and bleak that when he heard the tonnage of the bombs planned for Baghdad, he could feel his jaw fall slack in astonishment. He pulled the car over, turned on the interior light, and gazed in the rearview mirror just to see what his face looked like in this particular state. He had felt his face drop in this manner once before—when he got the divorce papers from Marilyn, now
there
was shock and awe for you; there was
decapitation
—but he had never actually seen what he looked like this way. So. Now he knew. Not good: stunned, pale, and not all that bright. It wasn’t the same as self-knowledge, but life was long and not that edifying, and one sometimes had to make do with randomly seized tidbits.
    He started up again, slowly; outside it had begun to rain, and at a brightly lit intersection of two gas stations, one QuikTrip,and a KFC, half a dozen young people in hooded yellow slickers were holding up signs that read HONK FOR PEACE . Ira fell upon his horn, first bouncing his hand there, then just leaning his whole arm into it. Other cars began to do the same, and soon no one was going anywhere, a congregation of mourning doves! but honking like geese in a wild chorus of futility, windshield wipers clearing their fan-shaped spaces on the drizzled night glass. No car went anywhere for the change of two lights. For all its stupidity and solipsism and scenic civic grief, it was something like a gorgeous moment.
    Despite her reading difficulties, despite the witless naming of the cats, Ira knew Bekka was highly intelligent. He knew from the time she spent lying around the house, bored and sighing, saying, “Dad? When will childhood be over?” This was a sign of genius! As were other things. Her complete imperviousness to the adult male voice, for instance. Her scrutiny of all food. With interest and hesitancy, she studied the antiwar lawn signs that bestrewed the neighborhood. WAR IS NOT THE PATH TO PEACE , she read slowly aloud. Then added, “Well duh.”
    WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER , she read on another. “Well that doesn’t make sense,” she said to Ira. “War
is
the answer,” she said. “It’s the answer to the question What’s George Bush going to do real soon?”
    The times Bekka stayed at Ira’s house, she woke up in the morning and told him her dreams. “I had a dream last night that I was walking with two of my friends and we met a wolf. But I made a deal with the wolf. I said, ‘Don’t eat me. These other two have more meat on them.’ And the wolf said, ‘OK,’ and we shook on it and I got away.”
    Or “I had a strange dream last night that I was a bad little fairy.”
    She was in contact with her turmoil and with her ability to survive. How could that be anything less than emotional brilliance?
    One morning she said, “I had a really scary dream. There was this tornado with a face inside? And I married it.” Ira smiled. “It may sound funny to you, Dad, but it was really scary.”
    He stole a look at her school writing journal once and found this poem:
    Time moving
.
    Time standing still
.
    What is the difference?
    Time standing still is the difference
.
    He had no idea what it meant, but he knew it was awesome. He had given her the middle name Clio, after the muse of History, so of course she would know very well that time standing still
was
the difference—whatever that meant. He himself felt he was watching history from the dimmest of backwaters, a land of beer and golf, the horizon peacefully fish-gray, the sky a suicide silver, the windows duct-taped with plastic sheeting so that he felt he was observing life from a plastic container, like a leftover, peering into the tallow fog of the world.
Time moving. Time standing still
.
    The major bombing started on the first day of spring. “It’s