Onion Songs Read Online Free PDF

touched, we don’t want their eyes on us, we don’t want to look into their eyes.”
    “ Bob, you’re scaring them.” Not completely true, he thought, because although he couldn’t look at Richie right now, he could still hear him laughing over there, so hard his voice was cracking. “Could we just go home, please ?”
    He gazed at both of his youngest in her arms, crying. “I don’t want them to be scared,” he said softly. “I get scared. Each day I get scared. The doctor doesn’t know when, sweetheart. I see him twice a week and still he doesn’t know. Maybe I’m lucky—at least my when has a range. Three months, a year. I feel bad for you with no idea when your time’s going to be up. Like all those animals. They never know.”
    She looked away, her crying sparking another round of tears in their children. Richie had stopped laughing, had sullenly turned his back.
    “ The main thing is... we look away. All of us. We won’t see. We pretend it doesn’t touch us, this messy thing. Our kids need to know about that, how life is this messy thing, but okay because that’s the way it is for all of us, we’re all in this messy thing. Don’t turn away. Look into our eyes.”
    After a time the air cools and families leave the park. Few words are said in the car. In their fatigue they settle on takeout in front of the TV and an early bedtime.
    In the park , small animals come out of the woods for abandoned scraps. They forage around the grill with no apparent recognition of the figure sculpted in metal. Other animals stay back in their lairs, alone, quietly licking at miscellaneous wounds.

 
    DOODLES
     
    “ Her drawings know more about the world than she does.”
    This thing his ex-wife used to say about their daughter eventually led him to take his seemingly compulsive, absent-minded doodles more seriously. He did them all the time: at work—on the papers due on his boss’s desk by the end of the afternoon, at dinner—on napkins, tablecloths, even credit card slips, even in his sleep, on the graying walls of his dreams. A nervous habit, or an addiction—he simply could not stop himself.
    He had to have the pen firmly in his hand, and the pen had to be moving.
    This habit underlined, circled, boxed, and generally ornamented his days. If he forced himself not to doodle, the days flowed on without form or direction.
    “ Her drawings are smart drawings.” He had no idea what this really meant, but he agreed completely.
    His daughter had drawn pictures of houses mostly: huge, elaborate structures heavy with character. But however wonderful her depictions, she always seemed more careless in her execution than most children. Sometimes she didn’t even look down at the page. She just drew, sight unseen. She drew her world, and the houses that were in it, and the creatures who lived in those houses. This ceremony of drawing that she performed every day centered her, and seemed to make her happy.
    But he scribbled and doodled, late into the night sometimes, and found no peace in it. He wondered if it was because of his age, or because of a long-standing pessimism about all forms of self-help. Whatever the reason, for him it was like worrying an infected wound. And yet he could not stop himself.
    *
    “Sometimes there’s magic in doing the same thing again and again.”
    A series of vertical lines running up and down the page. Walls and borders that were not to be crossed. Some weeks he built these walls before and after everything he wrote: letters, reports, grocery lists. He’d write his name and construct the walls that were intended to hold it in, keep it from expanding so much that it became unrecognizable. Ego expansion could be a problem—it left one open to attack. A few individual walls scattered here and there emulated grass, or the spikes at the bottom of a pit to trap uninvited guests.
    Sometimes it was a comfort to go over these vertical lines again and again to make them thicker. The act made