Mary Coin Read Online Free PDF

out again, too, their mouths as soft as bruised pears, their awareness adjusting to their sudden exposure. She watched the boys she’d known at school, too. They were nearly men now, a state of almost, which made what they had been and what they were becoming tantalizingly present at the very same time. The being of a thing was most powerful when it was seconds from extinction. A flower about to drop from its stem, a shot rabbit twitching its last
.
She studied the way these boys walked down the street, their inward-turning toes lending their movements the same lumbering intensity of a baby just learning to walk.
    But it was Toby Coin who drew her eyes the most, as if he were one of the trick cartoons in the newspaper where a woman’s hat was actually a bird or a white man had one Chinaman eye. The fact of Toby’s survival in the face of lifelong weaknesses suggested a persistence she craved more than she desired the obvious strength of the other boys who would start wrestling with one another at a moment’s notice as if they couldn’t think what else to do with all that fire inside them. Toby was like a spindly tree that had miraculously outlasted a tornado, left stripped and bare of leaves but still standing while houses and barns lay in ruins.
    She had touched him once. She was six years old, her father not yet dead of being so drunk he fell off a cart and let a horse crush his chest. A traveling carnival stopped in Tahlequah for a hot August week, and Mary was given enough money for two rides. She joined the line for the Maze of Mirrors, and an Indian with an empty eye sewn up in jagged stitches took her ticket. “Whatever you do, don’t take yer hand off the wall,” he instructed her, “or you might never come out the other side.” Mary stepped into a dark tunnel that was lined with mirrors. Candles had been placed in holders along the ground, and Mary saw herself reflected in their glow. It seemed as if the world contained hundreds of Marys, girls who looked exactly like she did, who had the same cut on their knee from where they’d tripped playing four square, and who wore her favorite blue smock, the one her mother told her she had better keep clean for church. Remembering the Indian’s warning, she dragged her right hand along the wall as she turned a corner. There she was again, only this time she was a hundred short fat girls whose necks had disappeared and whose legs were the size of the feed sack her brothers filled with hay and strung from the barn rafter to use as a punching bag. She didn’t like those girls at all, so she turned around. There she was again, only this time she was as long and stretched out as a string of spit and her head was so small she could not see her eyes. She tried to make her way back to the first room where she had been normal, but the crowd behind her was laughing and screaming and pushing her forward, and when she turned the next corner her hand broke free of the wall. Now there were mirrors on all sides and hanging on the tent ceiling, too, and she could no longer tell which way was forward or what was up or down. She turned around looking for a way out, but she became more confused and scared. Only moments before, she’d been a girl begging a penny ticket from her father, a girl who went to school and fed the chickens, who was a skinny half-breed the white boys called Pocahontas, patting their mouths with their hands, hopping twice on one foot, then the other,
hiya hiya
ho ho.
But now she was too many Marys and she was no one at all, lost and never to come out the other side, just like the ugly Indian had said. She started to cry for her mother, but people moved around her and paid no attention. She began to sink to the ground when she felt a hand grab hers and pull her through the maze. When she finally emerged into daylight, she shut her eyes against the sudden brightness as the hand slipped away from hers. When her eyes adjusted, she saw the sickly Toby Coin look