Either the Beginning or the End of the World Read Online Free PDF

deckhand. I remember the message my father left on the phone when the snow started.
    I try to imagine the night of the storm for someone home from a war. The soldier’s eyes said he didn’t sleep. It had started to snow at dinnertime and did not stop.
    My father had called him and the phone rang and rang, maybe six or seven rings.
    Maybe Luke stood in the dark, not answering. Maybe the snow flew into his windows like it did at our house, at right angles into the glass.
    He would have listened to my father’s message, “Sleep in. We’ll wait out the storm.”

WORLD CIV
    Someone on snowshoes had made a path through the woods. The sea smell of low tide washes over me at the river. The rocks appear large on the beach, exposed by the tide. What if the soldier might jump down the rocky bank to the beach? I breathe in very slowly. Would he appear? Pilot scrambles across the stones, chasing a gull. I think of the dog’s owner in a book I once read, Cracker. A soldier trained a dog to detect land mines in Vietnam. Once they even went on a rescue mission to Cambodia. I try to imagine the soldier and his dog—if they took a wrong step, the world could end.
    The soldier doesn’t come, not before I have to run back up the bank and through the white woods to go to school.
    At 7:30 a.m., Mr. Murray will be at his desk. He’s like a clock, and I like school with the steadiness of Mr. Murray. When Mr. Murray walks in, we settle in for the ride. World Civilization. He sits at his desk beside the blowup of a documentary photo my cross-country friend Daniel took. It’s a tug, nearly fogbound, guiding a tanker in the dogleg of the Piscataqua River. On the facing wall is a map of the world as wide as the room without any borders to the countries, just rivers and mountains. Mr. Murray wears a blue shirt, white sneakers, khakis, and sturdy red suspenders with double hook straps. He glances up at the class almost sheepishly, his mouth lost in his white beard.
    I almost laugh. He doesn’t even know Rosa and I are taking him to the civilization of Chincoteague for the spring while my father wrestles the wolf and we eat BBQ at the Motel 6.
    But my mind snaps back to the cold of the beam I might have walked on, balanced over the fast, outgoing water. The bridge, the blue-black river. The snow. The soldier.
    â€œWould you join us, Miss Grear?” Mr. Murray says.
    I look up, startled. I want to get him his coat right now and say hey, Mr. Murray, we’re out of here. We’re getting away from my mother and whatever fire is about to catch over the soldier—he is trouble and you know it—and head down to Chincoteague. With Rosa we’ll howl and sing all the way, 533.4 miles by road my father says. But then I look out our window and think, Jesus, would the moon come, too?
    I remember being on the edge of sleep as a little, little child riding with my mother in a car and seeing the moon keep pace, and hearing my mother singing, light and beautiful, about the rabbit in the moon.
    I make myself sit in my hard desk chair and glance at Daniel, the photographer, and Taylor, whose black hair is teal blue today, and Binny, whose sister waits tables at the Friendly Toast. Mr. Murray hooks his thumbs under his suspenders and guides us back into the last century where I do not want to go.

HOLDING ON
    After school on Friday, I wait down at the co-op for my father to steam in. I wait until the sun is bright pink and just threatening to sink beneath the end of the water. That’s when I see the Karma come around the tip of Four-Tree Island. She’s a steel-hulled boat, a shrimp dragging net rolled up on the steel spool at her stern,her name in red on her black-painted hull. I watch her slow progress through a white mist. On the boat, my father seems like a god. Is Luke his crew today?
    I watch till my father hurls up the line to tie up. I swallow my pride to meet him like I used to meet him in the