Stunt Read Online Free PDF Page A

yourself.
Sheb Wooly Ledoux. Portraitist.
    Mink stands on the pads of her feet and then on her toes. Bedazzling, she comes to a sharpened point. She is a prospector and she is instantly six inches taller. She could drill a hole through the ground. The Mime and the Turban step back. Are there other tricks? Will she blow fire? Mink’s feet are as gnarled as yours. Like a standard greeting, it is one of your only commonalities. Mink is surveying. The neighbours must have pulled open their curtains. Sensuous Marta and her fretting gnomes. Cruiser on our front lawn, blinking red, uniformed hulks in the doorway. We are the stage now. We are the players. Mink misses nothing. Especially an audience.
    She topples to the floor. A melodrama of grief, she wails and sobs. But the performance has chinks in it, and it gets the better of her. It turns real. It turns sour. She cries, a thing snarled in a trap, nothing but the expanse of a deaf world around her, idiot hunter turned loose within it, knowing that she is alone in the woods, and that she will bleed to death, and that the only one who might have saved her is gone.
    Immaculata slinks down three stairs so she can watch. I don’t. I can’t. I write a letter.
    I have never seen Mink cry, except at sports on television. She cries at victory; finally, after this endless human slog, she recognizes one of her own. A champion. She does not cry at loss. When there was a fire around the corner from our house, the smell of tar and hair burning filled the air. The smell of old. Doilies, photo albums, a recliner and a basement full of hockey cards and comic books, all of it in an uproar of flame. In a trance, Mink excused herself from the dinner table and slid out the front door. When she came back hours later, she leaned her face in close to mine and said, ‘She smoked in bed. The dunce. Everyone knows that one.’ Mink was bored. Her face was hot from watching.
    Now she has stopped working. Her mechanisms are sputtering and flailing. I do not want to see this in Mink. I do not want to see this mess. One thing in our life was supposed to be tidy, sure. One thing was supposed to never change.
    The Mime has a coughing fit.
    When the policemen start back to their cruiser, after Mink rights herself, a resurrection really, I run past her, a feral kitten, to the Turban. I hold a letter in my hand.
    â€˜Mail this for me. Promise.’
    The Turban stonewalls.
    â€˜Promise,’ I repeat myself.
    He looks at the Mime. The Mime nods.
    â€˜Promise.’
    â€˜I don’t have an address.’
    I slip the letter, rolled into a scroll, into the Turban’s hand. He looks at it; it is a baton and he did not realize he was running the relay. He won’t even read it. His curiosity is that dead.
    Walking away, they turn back one last time. Together they say, in different pitches, ‘What if we don’t find it?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The address.’
    â€˜You will. You have to.’
    The cruiser pulls away. One hand on the radio dial, the Mime looks at me. I wonder if he lives in a storage shed. I wonder if he wants me to live there with him and breed goldfish and play with a rescued, chewed-up doll on the sawdust floor. I wonder if he wants to change my name.
    Walking back to our house, I see a glimmer in the grass. It could be the Mime’s gum, the Turban’s medallion, their bitten ears. It is my tooth, my last baby tooth, white, small, bloody at the root. It must have fallen out when I slept.
    Mink waits for me in the doorway. From here, you could convince me that she is made out of marble, cut out from a blockinto this tiny, immovable shape. I hope she does not touch me. Or console me. I smile at her, wide, with my bar-brawl mouth, my incredible ugliness. These empty spaces, a baying. I am the mascot for what is missing. I am filthy. My eyes go dull. She lets me pass. I don’t even know if she is breathing. She closes the heavy door behind us.