Interfictions 2 Read Online Free PDF

odd angles. Dead. He is dead when the car pulls up in front of his house. Heart beating wild from all his spinning, he is dead, trying to still his breath when the doors slam shut and shoes click up the sidewalk, dead when a man's voice says, “Mrs. Harlyle?” dead when his mother screams, a siren-sound that falls to the ground like leaves. The boy is dead when he opens his eyes, looks at the sky, darkly now. Dead as he lies there, waiting for God, angel, or ghost. Dead as one leaf spiral-lands on his cheek. He sits up slowly. Stands to brush the leaves, sticks, dirt, grass from his clothes before he takes serious steps across the lawn and up the cracked sidewalk, like one returned from a terrible mission. He has seen terrible things. He reaches for the doorknob, opens the door, walks into the room where his mother sits weeping on the couch between the two soldiers. Gone are the golden leaves, gone the innocent dream. She looks at him, and for a moment he is worried that she is gone, too, lost somewhere inside herself, but she pulls him close, smashes his face against her collarbone. She is holding him too tight, he can hardly breathe, though he will not struggle for breath. He will give her everything. Gone is the selfish little boy. “Oh, Johnny,” she rocks him, “pray for your father.” She releases him just enough that he can nod, before she presses him close again.
    Later, he will lie in his room, on his twin bed, listening to the neighbors, his aunts, uncles, cousins, people from the church. He will lie there in his clothes, right on top of the covers, and he will smell the food they bring but forget to offer him. He will stare at the simple walls of his childhood, the window with the drawn blind. He will try to pray for his father but he will find it, too, gone, this belief in God, fallen from him as if he were the tree and God the leaves, fallen in the yard where he has left his childhood, where he was shot down, where he died and no one noticed, no one at all. That boy is a ghost. He rolls on his side. Stares at the wall until sleep comes for him on her silent feet and enfolds him in her dark wings, takes him to that magical place of forgetting. Too soon, morning arrives and he is returned to his little room where, at last, he weeps.
    The Time Between
    They call Johnny “that poor boy.” Teachers whisper his story to each other, and he develops an ability to hear it even at some distance. He likes to swing, he likes to run, but gone is the desire to play war, though sometimes, over the years, when the leaves spiral down around him, he hears gunfire.
    Johnny kicks cherry blossoms while his mother finds his father's name on the wall. “Here is your father,” she says.
    My father is not a stone, he thinks.
    They are in a Chinese restaurant with “a man from Washington,” as Johnny's mother puts it. When the man leaves to use the bathroom, Johnny's mother applies red lipstick and neatens it with her fingernail. She leans across the table to whisper to Johnny, “He's going to help us find your father.” Johnny holds his breath against the terrible scent of his mother's perfume, the plastic smell of her lips, the pork and alcohol. When she leans back, looking pleased as a cat with an overturned fishbowl, Johnny says, “Mom, he's dead.” She slaps him so hard his cheeks burn red for years.
    On her deathbed, Johnny's mother hands him the incriminating evidence. “What do you want me to do with this?” he says.
    "You've always been too timid,” she replies. It's the last thing she says to him before she dies.
    2005
    Johnny is a man on a mission. Every Monday he sends another letter. About once a month he gets a reply. “I am sorry about the loss of your father. He has given everything a man could give to his country. Please accept my condolences.” It is a form letter. Johnny knows this, because on occasion he rents a mailbox under a different