Liesl & Po Read Online Free PDF Page A

could catch only little, flickering glances of things. There! Her father leading her into the shade of the great willow tree, patterns of green dancing across his cheeks. And there! Liesl laying her cheek on the velvety soft moss that grew above her mother’s grave. And there! If she turned to the left—if she concentrated hard enough—flaring to life in front of her: her father’s kind blue eyes, the comforting roughness of his arms around her, his voice in her ear saying, “Someday I’ll come back here, to lie beside your mother again.”
    “The sun still shined then,” Liesl said. It had been a long time since she had said the word sun . It had a strange, light taste in her mouth.
    Liesl had long ago lost count, but the sun had not come out in 1,728 days. One day the clouds had come, as they often had before. Nobody was especially concerned. The clouds would surely break up tomorrow, or the next day, or certainly the day after that.
    But they had not broken up for 1,728 days in a row. Sometimes it rained. In the winter there was hail and slush. But it was never sunny.
    Over time, the grass had withered into dirt. Flowers had curled back deep on themselves, withdrawing into the ground, seeds that could never bloom. The whole world was a dull gray color, even the people in it—everything the bland pale gray of vegetables that had been boiled into slime. Only potatoes grew with any regularity; and all across the world, people starved.
    Even those who ate well—the rich—were starving, though they could not have said for what, exactly. But they woke with a gnawing hunger in their stomachs and chests, hunger so fierce and overwhelming it crippled them, made them bend over with sudden cries of pain, made them almost nauseous.
    “It was a long time ago,” Po said.
    “Longer.” Liesl felt heavy again. She repeated the word ineffable clearly, three times, in her head, lingering over the gentle slope of the double f s, like the soft peaks of the whipped cream she remembered from her early childhood, and this made her feel slightly better.
    “They brought him here today, you know. I heard the servants talking. Through the radiator.” Liesl pointed to the radiator in the corner. Sometimes, when she got very lonely, she lay down there and pressed her ear to the floor, where a small hole allowed a water pipe to pass through between floors. Through it she could often hear two of her step-mother’s servants, Tessie and Karen, conversing in their bedroom below. “They took his body and they turned it into ash, and they put the ash in a wooden box, and Karen got it today from Mr. Gray. They will bury the box in the backyard.” For a moment she was overcome. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she saw two disks of moonlight staring unblinkingly back at her. Bundle was still in her lap, watching her.
    “If you see him again, will you give him a message for me?” Liesl asked Po.
    “The chances I will see him again are next to nothing,” Po said. The ghost did not want the girl to get her hopes up. It might not even recognize Liesl’s father if it saw him again; by then, Liesl’s father might not recognize himself. He might have begun to blur, letting the infinity tug on him gently from all sides, like sand being pulled by an eternal tide. He might have already begun the process of becoming part of the Everything. He would begin to feel the electri-city from distant stars pulsing through him like a heartbeat. He would feel the weight of old planets on his shoulders, and he would feel the winds of distant corners of the universe blowing through him.
    “ Next to nothing,” Liesl retorted, “but not nothing.”
    Liesl was quite right about this. Nothing in the world is ever really nothing, and everything is possible in some way, and Po knew it. The ghost made a full turn in the air, which Liesl (correctly) assumed meant that the ghost had taken her point.
    “Tell him,” Liesl said, and found that she was