Stunt Read Online Free PDF

I look up at her. Still, she is the colour of orchids.
    Mink yanks the curtains closed. The show is over. The house takes on the quality of a cellar. Let there be root vegetables. Let there be murder. Let there be cards and cigars and whisky. Let there be pickling and ladies of the night missing pinkies and a dozen black cars idling in formation outside, their exhaust a potion to the air. Let our shoes be polished with beet juice. Let one of us be dead. Let it be me. A slit throat or, better, a bullet hole still smoking in the forehead, halos lifting themselves to the heavens. Let there be some kind of stringed instrument moaning in the corner played by a one-eyed sloth in a beige tuxedo. He taps his foot through the rotting floor. Potato bugs scurry for peace. We have been here for centuries. Deciding how to live. When, finally, the verdict comes down, intrusive as daylight.
    â€˜It is better to be widowed,’ Mink says with the clarity of a snapped elastic, one burst blood vessel on her cheek. ‘The funeral will be tomorrow afternoon. They’re calling for rain.’ When I protest, ‘But he’s not dead,’ she says, ‘He is not coming back, Eugenia. Waiting is for dunces.’ She is all full stops – a telegram. Immaculata bows her head in shame or prayer, I cannot tell. Mink goes on, ‘He could slip in the shower. Choke in his sleep. Fall down the stairs and break his neck. He could catch fire in any number of ways. He could have some crippling, surprise disease. He could be standing still and just die. A heart attack. A clot to the brain. To the lungs. Blood poisoning. A tropical flu. An arrow. A rabid bear. An elephant seal. Mouse droppings. Strangulation. A bone in the throat. He could be the victim of malice. A gang of thugs. He could drive into a telephone pole. He could drown in a culvert. He could be hit by a train. Gruesome has a kind of endless quality to it, girls. Pick.’ She has foam at the corners of her mouth.
    â€˜Drowning it is rumoured to be peaceful and besides he could not swim,’ says Immaculata with the fixity of a logician.
    Even though you could not swim, you could splash. At first, it would seem you were attacking, pounding the water with your fists; it would come up in rapid shocks around you. But then, too quickly, you were being attacked by something flexible and all-knowing – something that, patrolling the shoreline, I could not quite see.
    â€˜Do you second?’ Mink asks me. ‘I need you to second, Junior Miss. I need you to second.’ And then, the general flicking dander from her epaulettes, she says, ‘Pull it together, Genie. Drowning it is. He drowned. In the lake. Fishing.’ She glares in my direction.
    Mink pushes her chair away from the table with a skid, turns on the radio and piles the clean dishes into the cupboards. When Mink does what she calls
women’s work,
she is a robbery in reverse. Returning everything to its rightful place. The opposite of a thief, she is loud and careless. Daring the world to catch her, to find her out. Clattering, slamming, fighting the furniture, beating the carpet, huffing at the sinks, the shelves, the floors, Mink must keep track of all the misplaced pieces, for only she knows where they go. I wonder if this is what motherhood is: the noisy race, the impossible task of staging wholeness.
    Mink starts to make dinner, wraps a tea towel around her waist instead of an apron, says, ‘What the fuck am I doing,’ throws the tea towel to the ground, tells me to stop my whimpering even though I am not making a sound, it is Immaculata imitating a mewling calf, which she does when she is afraid.
    With that, Mink goes upstairs to her bedroom. There is not a step or a gesture out of place. She cannot help but bechoreographed. Watching her round the stairwell, I wonder why it is that I am living with a perfect stranger. Roofs constellate and land on us like children who do not know