Bereavements Read Online Free PDF Page A

of old Madrid and who died, a stumbling alcoholic, drunk and disgraced, fatally gored, fearfully tossed, spilling coils of entrails onto the blood-wet sand of that dreary, disgusting ring in Tiajuana.

    If Mrs. Evans had moments such as these, when she felt that nothing short of an identical twin, a doppelganger, Jamie ostensibly reborn, resurrected, could fill her longing, she hoped that “son” qua son, perhaps needn’t be a particular height, color, race, age at all, peculiarly, not even sex. Wouldn’t a loving and beloved “daughter,” if one could fine one, possibly, just possibly do? All of which, in part, accounted for the strange wording of her advertisement, so laconic it seemed a telegram, and perhaps in its urgency and desperation, was.
    Truly, Swingers All had the right words if woefully the wrong means and method!— “a good time and a lasting relationship”—to keep her (but for what meaningful useful purpose, really?) from where she most often wanted and would eventually, inevitably be: “in the dust, in the cool tombs” beside the body of her boy.
    He sends his love.
    Many kisses . . .

    Angel’s card had been first simply because it was there, instantly, before her eyes, impossible to ignore.
    Perhaps that had been part of its sweet, or cunning, purpose. It was not a letter among others, to be shuffled through and opened third, or fourth, or last. I’m first. Or rather, Im first. Most probably, Im firs’ —minus the apostrophe.

    After Angel’s card, the cassette tape was irresistibly next, explored through the envelope with wondering fingers. She wasn’t to hear it—and then with mild chagrin and clear disappointment—until late afternoon of the following day after Dori had returned with the machine to play it, but its hard, flat, mysterious thickness piqued her curiosity.
    As it slid with a plastic clatter onto the polished surface of her desk, she drew back in alarm. Surely the bewildering object had been designed and timed in the next instant to bring the room, the house, perhaps the entire city block, down in smoking ruins about her shattered head!
    Her own stupidity exhausted her! A cassette cartridge, of course, plainly lettered MEMOREX 60. And with her discovery, her hope, not her brain was shattered. She smiled, appreciating the intensity of the death-wish that had been so quick to make a bomb of a spool of black tape. Still . . . Today, even letters were suspect, with dogs trained to sniff out the faintest, subtlest whiff of death, blinded eyes, maimed fingers—though usually the intended victims were controversial figures, heads of state, or important persons of rabid political persuasions. Unhappily, she could think of no one at all, no one who wanted to blow her to pieces.
    Only herself.
    “Now / Hunted by thyself / Thine own prey . . . / Caught in thine own snares / Self-knower! / Self-hangman! . . .”
    How lovely it would be to have a mortal enemy. That surely, as all things must, would imply the reality of its opposite: the power, the capacity to possess a mortal friend: deadly, implacable.

    Now . . . The large manila envelope . . . The one carefully lettered PHOTO DO NOT BEND, so ruthlessly bent by postal employees, it was sitting before her at a ninety-degree angle. She reversed the fold over the edge of her desk, flattening it as best she could.
    Several of the letters she noticed were so plastered with scotch tape, one expected them to be stamped Top Secret, or better, in the peculiar governmental language of the day, Eyes Only. The sender of PHOTO DO NOT BEND, however, had not even bothered to wet the glue on the flap, merely spreading the metal two-pronged clasp that closed it.
    It contained, somewhat warped and semi-creased down the center, an eight-by-ten glossy photo of a boy. No, not a boy at all: a young man, or, as she leaned closer, pushing her eyeglasses more snugly against the bridge of her nose, one not so young, since the face that confronted her had