Funerals for Horses Read Online Free PDF Page B

earshot of every living thing except me—and the pieces of people I’ve carried along.
    “Ella.” His voice clarifies my reasons for calling. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.”
    “Well, you might not,” I say. “After this.”
    I want to tell him that my new earth is dry, the sky too wide. I want to tell him I know what I have to do now, but it’s hard. Because I can’t take any comfort with me, not even my friendly old truck, which is why I need the comfort of his voice on the eve of setting off.
    Instead I say, “I’ve decided Simon’s alive.” I don’t know that he is, I’ve simply decided it, and I’m sure Raphael hears that in my voice, although he knows me well enough to guess it. “I’ve decided he walked out of this place on his own feet.”
    “Naked?”
    “Naked? I don’t know. Maybe. Or in a change of clothes.” Raphael doesn’t ask why my brother would do that, which is a blessing, because there’s no reason I can offer. Still, I’ve decided.
    For a moment Raphael asks nothing at all, and I watch the hot wind swirl a weak dust devil in the brown, empty soil of nowhere.
    Then he says, “So what will you do?”
    “I’ll start walking,” I say, as if it’s so simple I can’t imagine the need to spell it out.
    “Good luck,” he says, but I hear what he doesn’t say, too. Still, you can’t judge a man by what he doesn’t say, even if you can hear it.
    “I love you, Raphael.”
    “I know that. I never doubted that, Ella.”
    I touch the phone lightly back to its receiver, as if afraid of a spark at contact.
    I climb into the old truck for the last time and head into the dusk. Before I park it one final time, I wish it a good life. I wish for it to be stolen by someone who needs it, and I leave the keys.
    I take only the pocketknife that Simon gave me when I was eleven, a sleeping bag with one change of clothes rolled inside, toothbrush, comb, a small picture of Simon, and all the money I own. I also bring Simon, a piece of Sarah, DeeDee, and what’s left of myself, but these things don’t weigh me down.
    I camp the night within the rectangle of stakes and ask my dreams to point me.
    I have no dreams.
    I clutch the sleeping bag around my neck in the night, awakened from time to time by a sharp, chill wind across my cheek. The ground pinches my hip and I toss around.
    In the morning I am hungry and thirsty, and I have no plans for these needs. In fact, I have no plans.
    I lie still as long as I can, and I notice a brown rabbit watching me from under a bush. The same rabbit, or another one, I don’t know. This land must contain a million rabbit lookalikes.
    When the hawk screams I sit up.
    I watch him perch in the tree above me and crook his neck to stare, watch his round black eye contain me doubtfully. Still, I think he doubts me less than I doubt myself.
    He glides away on a cushion of air, and I stand and take a few steps after him, and as I do, I am surer than ever that my brother Simon continued from this place.
    My challenge is to continue in the same direction.
    The hawk lights in a tree and waits while I pack my only remaining physical symptoms of life.

THEN:
    One advantage to living with our father was a freedom to stay home from school unnoticed. We’d trudge out of the house at the regular hour and head anywhere else. He’d set off for work a minute later, leaving us free to come home, usually to take the sleep we missed at night. Simon forged beautiful notes.
    On Jewish holidays we simply slept in.
    “Why aren’t you in school?” he’d say when we came down to breakfast.
    “It’s Yom Kippur.”
    “You don’t go to temple, you should go to school.”
    Here, oddly, I played spokesperson.
    “Wouldn’t make a difference. They mark us absent all the same.”
    “Why would they do that?”
    “They just go down the list and mark us all off. Feinberg, Greenberg, Goldman, Ginsberg. You have to jump around like crazy to make them see you’re