Some Possible Solutions Read Online Free PDF Page A

because it seemed inconceivable that we could receive all these blessings for free. We wanted to pay, pay, pay.
    The Sniper Solution
    There came a time in my life when I could not speak to another person without imagining that person’s skull getting shot by a bullet on the left-hand side of his/her head, as though there was a sniper in the upper corner of every room I was ever in, a sniper crouched atop each building I passed.
    The person (my husband or whoever else) would just be talking to me, innocently, and there I’d be, watching the explosion of bone and blood and brain and hair spraying out across the room or the bus or the street, speckling the person’s clothing with red and other disturbing colors.
    I would feel so tenderly toward the person just then, seeing the delicate inside revealed this way, the horrifying ketchup of it all, the imminent loss, and I would try to listen so closely, ever so closely, to what the person was saying, as though I was listening to his or her dying words.
    â€œOh my god,” I would agree, “yes, yes, I see what you mean.”
    I could only hope this tic of mine had something to do with compassion, and with becoming a better person.

 
    THE DOPPELGÄNGERS
    The Queen always looked profound when she pooped. Her eyes solemn, as though regarding the void. That was why they had taken to calling her The Queen, even though she was only a month old. Also, the way she sat enthroned in her car seat in the over-packed car as they drove to the new town. And the regal purple stars on her blanket, beneath which her absurdly tiny legs jerked this way and that.
    *   *   *
    â€œIt’ll be better here,” Sam assured Mimosa that night in the new house. She was standing in the new kitchen beside the new window looking out into the new backyard. She was holding The Queen close to her. She—Mimosa, not The Queen—was crying. The Queen was sleeping. The Queen’s head fit flawlessly beneath Mimosa’s chin. She wondered if all babies’ heads fit so flawlessly beneath their mothers’ chins, if it was a biological thing. Who were those women, those women who had cautioned her, “Don’t worry if you don’t love your baby right away; it takes a while”?
    â€œIt’ll be better here,” Sam said again, or maybe he didn’t. She was too tired to know. Everything was a blur—the red numbers on the digital clock, the black hole of The Queen’s mouth.
    Sam came up behind Mimosa and did something, the bite on the back of her neck, his vampire move. It was a trick he’d discovered by accident, one night many years ago; they’d been rolling around in bed and somehow his teeth had found the skin there. He’d immediately let go and apologized. “No,” she’d said firmly, giddily, realizing that now she could love him. “I mean, please. Do it again.”
    Since this was the first time he had done it since the birth of The Queen, Mimosa was particularly sensitive to it. The touch of his teeth traveled silken down her spine, like an epidural in the seconds before it begins to numb. She turned to him, opening her mouth. The Queen awoke with a howl.
    *   *   *
    While Sam was at work, Mimosa ran her fingers from the top of The Queen’s head all the way down her spine, again and again, an addiction. It was too much, this beauty, this responsibility. The Queen burped. The Queen stared wide-eyed at the corner of the room as though watching a ghost emerge from the wall. The Queen farted. Mimosa couldn’t bear the softness like a piece of overripe fruit where The Queen’s skull had yet to fuse. It seemed that The Queen could vanish or disintegrate in an instant, that it would take almost nothing to destroy her.
    â€œAre you there?” Sam said, standing in the doorway. A heat wave had begun. The bedroom was hot and dark. The whole house was hot and dark. He