Cursed Be the Child Read Online Free PDF

herself thinking, and wondered why she thought that.
     
    There was a little bird
    An itty-bitty bird,
    And his name was Enza!
    I opened up a window,
    And in he flew!
    In! Flew! Enza!
     
    Vicki lightly applauded. “That’s some song, Missy. They don’t write them like that anymore.”
    “Did you like it?”
    “Sure did.”
    “Want me to sing it again?”
    “Sing it in your dreams,” Vicki said. “Time to take the trail to sleepy town.” She rose.
    “Aw, Mom!” Missy whined. “I want to stay up!”
    “I guess you are chilly after all,” Vicki said. “Your behind must be, anyway, because you’re acting like you want me to warm it for you.”
    Missy sniffed indignantly. “I get it!” She stretched herself out on her back and lay as rigid as a plank.
    In a moment, Vicki had both Missy and Pooh under the covers.
    “You are very mean to me,” Missy said.
    “I try. Kiss?”
    Missy took a second to ponder the question of a kiss for a very mean mother. “I guess.”
    Vicki kissed the child’s warm cheek. The brush of lips she received in return was perfunctory, but was followed a moment later by, “I love you anyhow.”
    “I love you too, Missy,” Vicki said. “Sleep well.”
    She stood watching her daughter as Missy, eyes closed, rolled on her side and curled up, and then she started toward the door. A gleam of light winked up from the floor, slipping just inside the peripheral boundary of her vision.
    It lay on the carpet, Mickey Mouse’s nightlight nose pointing at it.
    A rose, she thought, picking it up. The round glass paperweight rested on the flattened base of her palm.
    She had never seen the paperweight before and wondered where Missy had gotten it. She couldn’t ask. The little girl who’d been “a whole lot awake” was already sound asleep. Perhaps this was a keepsake overlooked by the house’s previous owners when they were packing.
    Whatever, Vicki Barringer did not like the paperweight. That was a feeling she had, not a thought. Sealed in the glass globe, the flower seemed a mockery of what was once alive, as insulting to life as a corpse too perfectly made up by a zealously artistic mortician.
    She put the paperweight on Missy’s table. In the master bedroom, Vicki went back to People magazine but soon discovered she was reading words without comprehending.
    Somehow her feeling of optimism, of the future’s glowing promise, was gone. Her mind was strangely burdened by ponderous thoughts of life and death.
    And a rose.
     
    — | — | —
     

Three
     
    Look at it! He cranked page 68 out of the typewriter, the wrap-up of the dentist office scene, and read it aloud, in a low, flat voice, trying to keep his tone objective:
     
    Mitchell’s eyes crossed as the needle
    approached, and he braced himself for
    the pain. But it wasn’t so bad, not so bad
    that he couldn’t bear it.
    And it came to him then in a moment of
    drifting lucidity brought on by the oceanic
    rushing of the nitrous oxide he’d been
    inhaling that his entire life had been the
    lengthy learning of pain acceptance, that
    he could now withstand any pain, bear up
    and get on, continue with a brute perseverance to live.
 
    Yes, that was writing! That was solid. That was revelation and insight captured in words, and he, by God, he Warren Barringer, author, had written those words.
    Not that it had been easy. Writing was never easy. It was racking your brain to find the right word, then struggling to find the right word to follow it, then hammering your mind still more to find the next right word—and the next and the next and the next.
    Damn, he was writing well, better than he had ever written.
    The house!
    The thought came to him with stunning ice-blue clarity. Tense with concentration, he’d been hunched forward at the edge of his chair but now he slouched.
    The house itself was helping him. It was the source of this new self-confidence, the feeling of inevitable achievement and accomplishment.
    The house was right