Stunt Read Online Free PDF Page B

their own strength. Family too.
    Like a ghost baby, Immaculata follows Mink, her feet barely touching the ground.
    The wind picks up. Like my mind, it is an itch. The creak and sway of the walls. The shift in the floors. The rattle of the windows. Without you in it, this house is unfamiliar. This house is not mine. The green fridge and matching stove, pot holders with beehives on them, a spider plant dangling behind the sink on a shelf with spices. Who lives here? And really, why should I?
    Tell me, why did that woman around the corner burn along with her son’s Scout uniform? Why did she stay in her bed swearing it all existed, that it was true – people used to live here and some of them loved each other – hand on her heart, cigarette in her mouth, the flames licking her knees, quick and feisty, carnival clowns? Why, when it would have been so easy for her to walk out the front door and through another one, the old love having been so well beaten out, a broom to a rug, that it does not even smoulder? Why is it that she stayed and you left, seamless as a good thief?
    Or did you just need to lose yourself in the night? A deeper black than yours. A gangrene all its own. When you’re sick, you love the sicker thing. Well, I can be sick too.
    I sock myself. Right in the eye. Fist whistling through the sponginess of cartilage. It is the sound of a boy bouncing a ball once in an empty stadium. It is an excellent punch and the blood, obedient, my intimate, shoots itself to the surface and pools there. My eyes water, and then I am presented with pain. It wears a pressed suit. I welcome it. I shake its hand. It is a shape, something I can turn over and examine. The black eye is a relief. The boon to inflicting pain on yourself: you can predict its arrival. I look at my reflection. Slowly, it rises, the bruise, as though you left a jar of paint on my face to shimmer like the inside ofyour mouth. You would say, ‘See, Eugenia, my darlin’, everything’s built for injury,’ and then you would punch yourself too. ‘We’re the same.’
    The wind again. Babble, babble, the entire world is telling its secrets at the same time. Mink returns. I can smell her. She has washed her face and put on fresh lipstick. Menthol and blubber. I sneeze. She stands behind me, hesitates, says, ‘Hm,’ and then she leans down and does exactly the wrong thing. She puts her hand in the centre of my back and runs it up to my neck, spiders losing their balance. She kisses me with a trace of her teeth on the spot where my spine meets my skull.
This is where the mother cats carry their kittens, Genie. Vets are trained to hold them here. It keeps the critters calm when they feel threatened.
Then she leaves. A cartoon tunnel. She is a dot shrinking in the distance. Not a perfect stranger after all.
    I remember the cats in our yard picking up their litters by that loose skin, and how the kittens would immediately go limp. I throw up in the sink. And then I cry. I cry so much that I fog up the windows of the kitchen. By the time I lift my head and see what I have done – changed the ecology of the place into steam and salt – I want to show someone. I want to get Immaculata and I want to tell her: it is so weird how powerful we can be when we are sad. I want to tell you.
    Instead, I stare at nothing. I am sitting for a portraitist and I am saying,
This is how we live, this is how we live.
    {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}
    my darlin’,
    one one thousand. two one thousand.
    s
    From the kitchen, night a black spill, I hear Mink in the living room doing her exercises. I know that she is wearing her turtleneck and her tights and that she is thinking to herself:
Why wear pants when you got gams like these?
She is so flexible she can kiss her own tailbone.
    After Mink explained the scruff of the neck and its significance to a kitten, I asked her if she loved me.
    â€˜Of course I love you. I’m your