Mouthing the Words Read Online Free PDF

offering me no satisfactory explanation. “But you can spend as much time here as you like,” she nodded sympathetically.
    “Like our other sister,” added Binbecka.
    I was afraid because Dad was angry a lot of the time. And blurry-eyed in the evenings, squinting at me over dinner and saying things like, “Isn’t it past her bedtime” and “Don’t feed her that—you might as well feed steak to a dog, that’s how much she’ll appreciate it.”
    Mum said, “You’re sounding more and more like your bloody father every day. I thought we came to Canada to get away from him and now I feel like I’m sharing a house with him.”
    “No, as I happen to remember it, Corinna,” my father objected, “it was your fascist of a father we wanted to get away from.”
    “Well, at least my father instilled something of a work ethic in me,” she provoked.
    “You!” he said, incredulous. “A work ethic! If that’s so then you go out and get a bloody job! You see what it’s like being an indentured labourer and having to support an ungrateful family!”
    “And I assume that means you’ll be taking on the job of parent?” my mother jibed. “In every job you’ve had since I’ve known you, you’ve become convinced that you are being undermined. You are a paranoid son of a bitch. As a parent, you’ll probably think your own children are going to stage a revolution to dethrone you.
    “All right, Corinna. As of tomorrow I will start washing their crappy nappies and you can go out and find yourself a nice little job. But don’t come crying to me when you can’t get hired because you’re not qualified to do anything,” he stated smugly.
    “They’re not even wearing nappies anymore, you stupid bugger, that’s how observant you are.”
    “The only thing you’re qualified to do is be a whore!” he shouted.
    “You fucking bastard!” she screamed. The casserole went flying into the wall and crashed in the sink, and then a familiar silence, punctuated by Willy’s sobbing as he clung to the leg of the kitchen table.
    —
    In the morning I had my nice school to go to. There I had my nice clean desk, and my exquisite penmanship to exercise in a nice new notebook under the guidance of my nice teacher named Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly gave me the book that was to be called “My Autobiography,” in which I wrote, “I was a dead purple baby.” She expressed some concern about that, but it was my next entry that prompted her to call my parents in for an interview.
    “My name is Thelma and I am a dead, bled body or sometimes an insect or a rock in a cave. When I am a twig, my eyes turn around and I can see the inside of my head and it is red and bloody. My favourite hobbies are being a Shetland pony and coming to school.”
    Being anywhere but home really. Being in my imagination, or in another building altogether.
    Dad was the parent now and Mum was getting on her fold-up bicycle every morning and riding to her job as a secretary at the Ministry of Transportation. Dad was sending me off to school with a piece of burnt toast and taking Willy to the Oriole Nursery School, where Mrs. Elkinburg gave him graham crackers and powdered orange juice.
    Every day Willy brought home a picture he had drawn with crayons. Every day it was a picture of a blue dragon stretching out its red tongue to eat the sun. “He shows exceptional artistic promise,” Mrs. Elkinburg wrote on Willy’s first term report card. “His creative impulse, though, seems oddly fixated on the image of a blue dragon trying to consume the sun. He should be encouraged to explore other images.”
    “I think he’s developmentally retarded,” my father pronounced helpfully upon reading the report.
    “Don’t be stupid,” my mother said. “The poor boy’s starved for a little inspiration and encouragement. What does he see when he gets home from school? You. He might as well come home to a corpse. And Thelma’s hardly any help. She’s so lost in her imaginary