Irma Voth Read Online Free PDF

there staring at them. I felt conspicuous in my long dress. I could feel the bobby pins from my doak stabbing me in the head. I could smell the cow shit on my shoes. I felt like Jonah after he’d been spit out of the whale onto dry land en route to wicked Nineveh. I didn’t know what to say. There were no women in the house.
    Where’s Marijke the German star? I finally blurted out.
    Diego whispered in my ear. She’s in her room, crying. Let’s go speak to her now. We walked down the long hallway to the back of the house. There were six or seven bedrooms that we passed to get to the very end. Diego pointed at each bedroom and told me which of the crew it belonged to. Somebody has painted an upside-down cross on mine, said Diego. Irma, did you know that Saint Peter asked specifically to be crucified upside down?
    Nope, I said. I looked at Diego and smiled. It was a long hallway that led from Biblical times to the present and back again.
    Out of humility, said Diego. To differentiate himself from Jesus Christ. The blood would have pooled in his head. I nodded. But I think, said Diego, that my crew meant it to be the sign of the Antichrist. They’re funny guys.
    Marijke had been given my aunt and uncle’s former bedroom, the biggest one. Even the furniture was the same, and the bedding. My cousins had left in a hurry, apparently, and according to my dad it was because Wilf, the olderboy, was a narco and about to be eviscerated by some rival narcos. My dad thought everyone who left Campo 6.5 was automatically a narco because why else would they be running away if they weren’t narcos. If my dad’s assessment was accurate this place was teeming with narcos, and not just garden-variety narcos but narcosatanics in search of sensations (like Jorge, allegedly), bored with drinking blood from skulls and poised to bolt for bigger thrills while the rest of us were in it for the long haul, working hard and honestly for very little money, the way God meant for us to be. But I didn’t believe it. I think my uncle got a job selling cars in Canada and Wilf wanted to study the violin and my aunt thought it would be cool to get a perm. But who knows. Maybe they’re a family of drug lords now, throwing bodies out of helicopters and bowling with the heads of double-crossers. That would be my father’s theory.
    Marijke was beautiful, strangely beautiful, like Diego had said. Everything about her seemed elongated, firm and far-reaching, like a tower crane or a tall, flightless bird. I imagined cowering under her wing in the rain. She was a Mennonite but she dressed differently than me. She dressed the way I had dressed in Canada, sort of. She had on skinny black jeans, like Miguel’s, and a green T-shirt. She wasn’t crying anymore. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, on my aunt and uncle’s bed, and smoking a slim Vantage cigarette. Diego greeted her in Spanish and kissed her cheek and she murmured something and smiled at me and asked me, in German, if I was the translator. I told her yes and we shook hands and then Diego said he’d leave us alone to talk.
    What did he say? she asked me.
    He just said hello, how are you, I said.
    He’s very polite, isn’t he? she said.
    Yes, I said. She looked around the room and then she walked over to the window and stared out at the yard. She was quiet, looking, and then she turned around and smiled at me again.
    How old are you? she said.
    Nineteen, I said. How old are you?
    How old do you think I am? she asked.
    I don’t know, I said. Thirty?
    I’ll be forty-one in three weeks, she said.
    You don’t look forty-one, I said.
    That’s because something very traumatic happened to me when I was fourteen and as a result of that trauma I was prevented from moving forward, she said.
    Oh, I said. But you will be forty-one in three weeks?
    Technically, she said. On some level I’ve been alive for forty-one years but on other levels I stopped progressing at fourteen.
    What happened to you when