The Cage Read Online Free PDF

away. She saw this image of her death change to herself at twenty-nine. Her body as it sat now, her hands loose on this wheel, the clothes she wore, the expression she showed. She had a feeling within her body almost of peace. The sensation of warmth was gone.
    Her car slowed, stopping in the right-hand lane. It faced directly backward, toward the oncoming truck. Her hand moved to the stick shift, threw the car into reverse. It rolled back into the breakdown lane and stopped. The car trembled slightly as the truck roared by.
    She rolled the window down, noticed with surprise she wasn’t shaking. The wet smell of pine blew into the car and she admired the snow-covered trees by the side of the road. Their silent beauty startled her. Her vision seemed much clearer. Then she opened the door and vomited onto the snow all that remained of her lunch. Nothing solid came up. The taste at the back of her throat seemed so harsh, like hawking blood. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been sick.
    Looking down at that liquid melting through the snow she understood for the first time that this was exactly how it would happen. A normal day, a normal activity and then—death. This idea was new to her. She mulled it over, the wet flakes falling onto her hair, her hand on the door handle, listening to the heavy sounds of the cars plowing by. She thought she must have survived other, less obvious brushes with death—her foot stepping over the soap in the shower, a fever breaking, a bulging can of beans thrown away. They must be happening all the time and she hadn’t noticed. Before, death had always seemed so very unnatural, so extreme and unfair, foreign to her life.
    She rubbed some clean snow on her forehead and then swished some around in her mouth. Once the beauty of the trees had begun to seem less severe, she closed the door, cautiously turned the car around and looked over her shoulder into traffic as she waited to merge back in.
    For several days after that she slept longer than normal, and the simplest food tasted wonderful. It was a long time before she realized that her harshest fears had slid behind her somewhere in that pirouette and had been left lying across the snow behind her like a body.
    Two weeks after the skid, Beryl decided to try to photograph a fox that she’d heard lived on one of the large estates in Brookline. She crept up the quarter-mile driveway in the predawn to lie tucked in tight against a log near the fox’s den. The many lit signs saying PRIVATE PROPERTY, SURVEILLANCEDEVICES scared her far more than the fox. For the first half hour she pictured men in black uniforms running through the woods toward her cradling guns, but then she countered it with the image of a small clot of blood heading toward her brain or heart, her motionless shock, her slackening face, the camera sliding out of her hands. That, she realized, was a much more likely threat.
    Lying on her back, she watched the light change slowly in the sky behind the bare winter treetops. A small creature, perhaps a mouse, rustled slowly through the leaves to her left, but she couldn’t see what it was, for she kept the camera pasted to her eye. Her legs went to sleep, and then her back and neck, and still she held the camera to her face, her finger on the button, pointing up to where the fox would most likely appear. She passed into a quiet musing state where she noticed many things without thinking about them. She heard many creatures without feeling panic, forgot her fear of the men.
    She heard nothing different beforehand. She saw only some red fur glistening with dew, large brown startled eyes looking down at her and a small black nose. The camera clicked and the fox leaped over her, one light hard paw pushing off her hand. The picture showed wild beauty, the color of the fur incandescent against the dark leaves, the intelligent eyes, the quiet dawn.
    Death, Beryl realized, wasn’t waiting for her