Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn Read Online Free PDF

Margaret's favorite person in the entire world. Her present that year from Aunt Marcia was a pocketknife, because “Girls need them too,” and Margaret slipped it from the small white box and held it to her chest as if it were a piece of gold. She never put it down and when her auntie asked if she would walk her to the car she kept the knife in her right hand and noticed her auntie smile when they held hands and touched the knife together.
    “The world is yours, honeybunch,” Auntie Marcia told her before she jumped—Auntie Marcia always jumped, never simply sat—into her small red car. “You are seven now and next year I want you to tell me all the places you will travel to when you are a grown woman. Start a list tonight and then next year we will go for a ride in my red car together and you will tell me.”
    That night Margaret decided she would have everyone start calling her “Meg,” because she now had a pocketknife and because she was seven years old, and then she started her list. Her parents were woozy with the beer and the shots of whiskey Grandpa Frank had poured, and as she was writing down the word
Africa
the noise started.
    Meg put down her number 2 pencil and she listened. Her parents were in the kitchen and it was hard to hear and it was an unusual sound. No one yelled much, except the boys, around her house and she had never, ever heard her mother raise her voice like she did that night. She stopped writing after the letter
i
because the sound scared her. Her fingers found the cool edge of the red Swiss Army knife that was under her pillow and she touched it like she used to touch her blankie and the doll her mother threw away two years ago.
    “No,” her father yelled. “Goddamn it. No!”
    Her mother cried then and Meg wanted so very much to pull open the longest blade of her knife and walk down the steps and into the kitchen and tell her father to stop yelling, but she was scared. Really scared. She pulled open the blade in the dark, memorizing how she had to touch the long blades first and then the tiny scissors, and she sat there wishing the yelling would stop and that she could finish writing the word
Africa
and that her auntie would pull up in her cool car and jump onto the porch and run up the steps and save her.
    She heard her brothers get out of bed and open their bedroom door. They tapped on her wall and she moved just an inch to tap back. It was their signal, their secret code. She tapped two times which was the signal for A-OK and then she waited.
    Two doors slammed and then everything was quiet, but Meg did not put the knife away. She waited again, heard Grant shift in the top bunk, and she desperately wanted to finish writing. She was thinking of Africa more than the loud voices and she was imagining a line of tents and hats shaped like domes. It was hot and men with skin the color of her brown shoes walked with rifles and there was the scent of smoke everywhere. Night was falling and from the flap of her safari tent she could see a round sun, huge, huge in the sky like the one she saw in
National Geographic
the last time she went to the dentist. Meg imagined herself riding elephants and resting behind a bush as a lion raced to feed off a dead zebra.
    Her mother moved like a lion in that African jungle. She quietly opened the door and looked startled to see her birthday girl in bed, a knife in one hand and a pencil in the other.
    “Honey . . . ?” her mother asked in one word that was at once a question and a way to find out if she had heard.
    Meg did not speak. She closed her knife, put down the pencil and opened the covers so her mother could climb in beside her. They never spoke but her mother pushed Meggie into a ball and curled around her and within minutes was asleep. Meg could feel her breath against the back of her neck and in the morning she would smell like the beer that seemed to pour from her mother's lungs and tangle in her hair. She would also wake with the knife in