Last Things Read Online Free PDF

them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on their slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die
.
    My father closed the book. “I just wanted to alert you, Peter. I thought it would save you the embarrassment of receiving corrective letters.” He held out the book, but my uncle waved it away.
    “I doubt even among my one million viewers there are many ant experts.”
    My mother laughed. “Oh, Jonathan’s hardly an expert. You’re the one who always says he never amounted to much.”
    My uncle got up and announced he was going for a walk. But as soon as he got outside, we heard the car start. It roared out of the driveway and into the street. My father mumbled something and shook his head. I wondered if my uncle might be communicating with him telepathically. Identical twins could do this I had read in
The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained
. Sometimes when my father was talking to my uncle he’d shake his head violently as if a message was coming through.

    The pause button on the TV went off and there was the sound of applause. Alec clicked through the channels one by one. He stopped on a commercial featuring a singing toilet seat and hummed along. “Don’t be an idiot,” Mary said.
    My mother went into the kitchen and I followed her. When my father passed by, she made a face at him. “Without them, they would die,” she said in her silly deep voice. My father laughed, holding his stomach. “Stop that,” he told her, but he didn’t mean it. Every time she said it, he laughed again.

The day he proposed, my father took my mother to see King Tut’s tomb in Egypt. It was their first vacation together. For days beforehand, my father was so nervous he couldn’t eat. On the way to the airport, he fainted and ran off the road. My mother took the wheel and steered them to a stop. In the tall grass, my father lay with his head on the dashboard like a dead man. My mother took the ice from her drink and touched it to his wrists and neck. She pricked his fingers with a safety pin. When my father finally came to, he started the car and drove off without a word. Are you all right, my mother asked him. Just fine, my father said. They drove on in silence. Clouds of dust filled the air. Halfway to the airport, my father discovered his pinpricked hand. I thought I was dreaming, he said.
    In the Valley of the Kings, they waited in line for hours and he took a picture of her posed in profile like an Egyptian queen. Once inside, my mother triedto cut off a small piece of the mummy’s wrapping and set off an alarm. A guard came and escorted her into a back room. When they finally let her go, she was not allowed to keep the Band-Aid-sized piece of cloth she had snipped off with her sewing scissors. Later, beside the pyramids, my father got down on one knee and said, I want to marry you, Anna. You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who never bores me.
    Afterwards, my mother insisted they go dancing to celebrate. They found a little café at the end of a winding street. There was wine there and a small band. An old man taught my mother a complicated Egyptian dance. You are very beautiful, he said. My father sat alone at the bar, watching them. His feet were covered with blisters from the long walk to the pyramids. The band began to play faster, then faster still. My mother came over and took his hand. Dance with me, she said, and my father did. Later, at the hotel, when she took off his shoes, she was surprised to find them filled with blood.
    My mother had a scrapbook that she’d kept from the trip. On the first page was the picture of her as a queen, and a postcard she had saved from King Tut. The postcard showed a pile of gold jewelry and a mummified cat with a pink tongue. It was the sweetest thing you’ve