Prayers to Broken Stones Read Online Free PDF

dark room and feel around until I found the cord. Once when Simon was staying up late to do his homework, I went upstairs by myself. I was swinging my arm around in the darkness to find the string when my hand fell on Mother’s face. Her teeth felt cool and slick. I pulled my hand back and stood there a minute in the dark before I found the cord and turned on the light.
    “Hello, Mother,” I said. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at her. She was staring at Simon’s empty bed. I reached out and took her hand. “I miss you,” I said. I said some other things, but the words got all mixed up and sounded stupid, so I just sat there, holding her hand, waiting for some returning pressure. My arm got tired, but I remained sitting there and holding her fingers in mine until Simon came up. He stopped in the doorway and stared at us. I looked down and dropped her hand. After a few minutes she went away.
    Father put Baxter to sleep just before Thanksgiving. He was not an old dog, but he acted like one. He was always growling and barking, even at us, and he would never come inside anymore. After he ran away for the third time, the pound called us. Father just said, “Put him to sleep,” and hung up the phone. They sent us a bill.

    Father’s classes had fewer and fewer students and finally he took a sabbatical to write his book on Ezra Pound. He was home all that year, but he didn’t write much. Sometimes he would spend the morning down at the library, but he would be home by one o’clock and would watch TV. He would start drinking before dinner and stay in front of the television until really late. Simon and I would stay up with him sometimes; but we didn’t like most of the shows.
    Simon’s dream started about then. He told me about it on the way to school one morning. He said the dream was always the same. When he fell asleep, he would dream that he was still awake, reading a comic book. Then he would start to set the comic on the nightstand, and it would fall on the floor. When he reached down to pick it up, Mother’s arm would come out from under the bed and she would grasp his wrist with her white hand. He said her grip was very strong, and somehow he knew that she wanted him under the bed with her. He would hang onto the blankets as hard as he could, but he knew that in a few seconds the bedclothes would slip and he would fall.
    He said that last night’s dream had finally been a little different. This time Mother had stuck her head out from under the bed. Simon said that it was like when a garage mechanic slides out from under a car. He said she was grinning at him, not smiling but grinning real wide. Simon said that her teeth had been filed down to points.
    “Do you ever have dreams like that?” he asked. I knew he was sorry he’d told me.
    “No,” I said. I loved Mother.
    That April the Farley twins from the next block accidentally locked themselves in an abandoned freezer and suffocated. Mrs. Hargill, our cleaning lady, found them, out behind their garage. Thomas Farley had been the onlykid who still invited Simon over to his yard. Now Simon only had me.
    It was just before Labor Day and the start of school that Simon made plans for us to run away. I didn’t want to run away, but I loved Simon. He was my brother.
    “Where are we gonna go?”
    “We got to get out of here,” he said. Which wasn’t much of an answer.
    But Simon had set aside a bunch of stuff and even picked up a city map. He’d sketched out our path through the forest preserve, across Sherman River at the Laurel Street viaduct, all the way to Uncle Will’s house without ever crossing any major streets.
    “We can camp out,” said Simon. He showed me a length of clothesline he had cut. “Uncle Will will let us be farmhands. When he goes out to his ranch next spring, we can go with him.”
    We left at twilight. I didn’t like leaving right before it got dark, but Simon said that Father wouldn’t notice we were gone until late