Falling to Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

sleeping braid, her ashy feet splayed out where they rested on the heels. When the undertaker had arrived and gone in with his black case and clanking bottles, they’d pulled shut the pocket doors behind him and left Mae to wonder silently how her grandmother would look when he was done with her. They had kept Mae busy with them all that morning, her mother and her aunt, cleaning the house and especially her grandmother’s bedroom, which would be used for the viewing.
He’s giving us time
, her mother had said of the undertaker, but time for what? Dead was dead as far as Mae could tell. She couldn’t fathom the rush to push strange liquids into her grandmother’s veins and build a box for her to lie in while relatives hurried into town on trains, as if her grandmother would somehow become more dead, or perhaps even less so, if everyone took their time.
    Mae closes her eyes and lays her hands on the pantry countertop. She skates her hands out over the surface. The wood is cool, worn smooth with work and washing. When she opens her eyes again, the light falling in from the pantry window seems to her to be the same light she’s seen on the counter and shelves for years. The gray half-light of an overcast day that would be too dim for work except for the familiarity of the shelves and their contents. She stands here in the pantry most afternoons, leaning with her head and shoulder against the window frame, to all appearances avoiding her work but really letting the view of the houses and the cobbled street decide what she will bake that day. She’s never had more than a valance on the window before, but now she knows she’ll need a simple calico curtain to block the window, even though that will also block the light.
    She can hear Lavinia with the children upstairs opening dresser drawers and closets, pulling out linens, towels, and clothing to donate. Mae takes a stack of folded paper bags from the pantry upstairs, and they put the things they’ve piled on Lavinia’s bed into them. There isn’t as much as she would have thought, not as much as she had hoped. Of course, they should pile absolutely everything into those bags, everything but the clothes on their backs. It’s hard to know where the line between thinking of their basic needs and stinginess lies.
    â€œWhat else should we do?” Mae says. They are proceeding on instinct, preparing for a clothing drive before they’ve been told there is one. They’ve seen the smashed houses all along White and Elm, looked from the corner up and down both streets and not needed to walk any further, not needed to wait for someone to come to them and tell them what to do. When Paul had turned to run back toward downtown yelling, “Stay put!” when they were still giddy and wild with laughter at seeing him whole, Mae had stood watching him recede and then, when he was gone from view, looked at the way the storm had reshaped the landscape, as if it hadn’t just smashed the houses, but had somehow blown things further apart. The spaces in front of her, cleared in their brutal way, were more open, and as Paul had receded, the town had seemed to recede with him.
    Now she’s standing, looking at the paper bags full of things that, up until this moment, they had bought or made and laundered and used themselves. She’s aware of her breathing, of her uninterrupted breathing, and the feeling she still has in her legs of wanting to run. She had wanted to run with Paul, to run without stopping, to feel her legs reaching and hear her shoes striking the pavement, to simply run as she had run as a child, with abandon and no thought of destination. The children are all either sitting or leaning on the bed, each of them touching one of the bags in some way, poking the point of the bottom corner or running a finger along the crisp, cut line at the top. They’re looking at the bags, wondering what other possessions