Stella Descending Read Online Free PDF

a box in the cellar, next to the barrel organ.
    Stella did not want to die. She would never have fallen off a roof, just like that. As a child, you are always falling. Then you stop. Your morals go on falling, of course, but you yourself stop. Very rarely do you see a grown woman or man fall down—in the street, for example, or on a streetcar—and the odd time this does happen it is extremely unpleasant for both the person who has fallen and the one looking on: a shared loss of balance. Then you grow old and you start falling again. These days I’m forever falling down. My knees give way beneath me. I slip on the ice. I want to go in one direction; my feet go in another. When I venture out onto the street, this is what I fear most: falling down. That I’ll fall and break something, to say nothing of making myself the laughingstock of anyone happening by. Stella would not have jumped, either. Not from her children. What she could have been doing up on that roof is a mystery to me. He must have forced her to go up there. They were reckless, those two, Stella and Martin, just like children. Daring and bullying each other. Clinging to and pushing each other away. Maybe it was only a matter of time before one shoved the other over the edge.

Amanda
    Other things I don’t tell Bee: For example, (4) I call my boyfriends Snip, Snap, and Snout. They don’t know I do. They don’t know I have more than one boyfriend, either. Snip doesn’t know there’s a Snap and Snap doesn’t know there’s a Snout and Snout doesn’t know there’s a Snip or a Snap. When I was thirteen I had no breasts and no boyfriends. Marianne had breasts— but then she was a year older so that wasn’t so surprising. Marianne was my best friend at that time. Once, she took off all her clothes in Mamma’s room. She took off all her clothes and stood in front of Mamma’s big mirror, and I stood behind her and we gazed in awe at her breasts, her skin, and her lovely long fair hair and her little round tummy and her butt and legs. I told her if I was a boy I’d definitely want to fuck her. That’s what I said, but I was thinking that what I really felt like doing was running a finger down the side of her body, following the soft line that curved in at her waist and out at her hips. Marianne stood in front of Mamma’s big mirror, stark naked in front of Mamma’s big mirror, and then all at once she gave a little jump, a jump for joy, sort of, and the words just blurted out of her:
Oh
my god, I’m gorgeous!
    I don’t think she meant to say it out loud, because her face went bright red and she scrambled back into her T-shirt and panties as quick as she could.
    I’m fifteen now, and I look pretty good too, not as good as Marianne but not bad at all. That time in front of Mamma’s big mirror, I didn’t look good. Sometimes I would put on a lot of sweaters, one on top of the other, so nobody could see I didn’t have breasts. When the boys see me, I thought, all they’ll say is, There goes a girl who’s all wrapped up. Not: There goes a girl who’s got no breasts. Since then I’ve come to the conclusion that when they saw me the boys didn’t think anything one way or the other.
    I tell Bee, who’s lying here in bed beside me, that Mamma falls and falls and never hits the ground. And while she’s falling she sees the strangest things and she meets the strangest people and creatures. Birds, for example, flying south. But birds don’t fall, they fly. There is a difference. She meets a squirrel that has fallen out of a tree and a cod that has been fished out of the water by a boy and then tossed, half alive, half dead, onto dry land. I explain to Bee that it’s exactly the same thing, as misfortunes go, for a cod to be pulled out of the sea as for a squirrel to fall out of a tree. I cover us both with a blanket. Maybe Mamma will meet Granny too, I say; God must have kicked Granny out of heaven a long time ago, she was so grumpy and