Onion Songs Read Online Free PDF Page A

think our alertness will protect us from the inevitable.
    In the middle of the night they come for Willy. I am somewhat comforted that he shows no signs of surprise. Surely, this is what he has always been waiting for. Tonight they come as eight or nine squirrels and a large black bird with a broken neck. The bird bothers me most: its head flops and stretches painfully on the narrow strand of neck flesh as it still manages to grab a bit of Willy’s pants in its beak and pull with the squirrels to drag Willy’s body off into the night. Now and again one of the squirrels will let go and turn its head, smiling at me so broadly I can see that all its teeth are missing.
    Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming. But most, I think, are punished.
    In a few days they will come to take another of us. Rabbits, perhaps, or snakes, or shiny emerald-green beetles, or an old dog that so resembles one from our childhood we will be convinced it is the very same one. Soon only Jacob or I will be left.
    But that is the worst kind of wish- fulfilment. How do I know I will be a survivor? At some things the imagination fails.
    I know I should not whine about it. It is a natural process that happens to everyone. You can wait for it or you can play with it, you can roll your ball at it or you can run headlong into the cars that seem to be everywhere. But what you cannot do is stop it from coming.
    Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable. Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come.

 
    PICNIC
     
    Each day of fair weather they gather along the edge of the park: to eat and talk, heat their sluggish bodies under the sun, watch animals creeping through the woods beyond, exclamations of pleasure with each new sighting, holding up the kids, making them look. “Kitty!” his youngest cries. At two, every animal is kitty. “Kitty!” patting the iron squirrel holding up one of the many barbecue grills the park provides. “Kitty!”
    “ When I was a kid we ate squirrels my daddy shot: two, three times a month. But he still thought they were beautiful, and never killed when we could afford better. I don’t know, maybe that made it okay.”
    “ Bob...” his wife warned, looking at the kids, but only Julie was listening, eyes big above her clutched hamburger.
    “ No, it’s true. It didn’t taste bad, a little strong. Dark meat, heavy with blood. An honest taste, I think.”
    “ I don’t think the kids...”
    “ I think about the kids all the time, these past few weeks. They should get out and see more animals, get to know them. Everything isn’t a kitty. Now when they see one it’s this big surprise—shouldn’t be like that. Animals are invisible to us—when they appear it’s this big magic trick. Then at night, their eyes shining in the dark, and in our dreams.”
    “ We take the kids to the zoo.”
    “ That’s not what I mean. Julie? That hamburger you’re eating was made in a slaughterhouse, honey.”
    “ Bob!”
    “ They’ve got this gun, and it shoots a steel bolt into the cow’s brain, and almost before it falls there’s a hook and a knife in it, oh, and sometimes they use a hammer to finish it, but not always. I don’t think the animal’s always dead.”
    “ Bob, that’s enough!” His wife had Julie up in her arms, and Julie was sobbing, and their little boy too. Their eldest, Richie, the sullen teenager, sat at another table, a look of entertained surprise on his face. Bob stared at the half-chewed hamburger that had dropped out of Julie’s little mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
    “ I’m not saying she shouldn’t eat meat. I’m not saying any of us shouldn’t. I just don’t think we should be blind to the suffering is all, turning our heads all the time. And not just the suffering—we just don’t see them, we make them so goddamn invisible. We don’t want to be