The Death of Small Creatures Read Online Free PDF

brain damage right? What could be worse? Of course, you can die.
    Still seeking a new doctor, who I will then have refer me to a new psychiatrist, possibly the one that the neurologist guy recommended. I am wary of those mind-altering medications and will be more cautious in the future. Oh, the irony, I know.
    November 14, 2008
    My throat is sore today. I have a blood spot on my eye from throwing up, sort of hidden under my bottom lid. My eyes are oddly red.
    I have left the house only a few times in two weeks. I have not walked anywhere far in months. It has been a strange and dangerous year.

Two
    The Gondolier Wears Nikes (August 2003)
    The bridges in Venice arch from one side of a canal to the other and pin together two distinct possibilities, one a network of cobblestone and narrow corridors at another. You may cross or turn back, and as a result you will be either here or there. The outcome will be the same: you will become at least remotely lost. The streets in Venice lead nowhere.
    The bridges are arched so the gondoliers can pass under by tilting their heads downward while the gondola glides through. It’s midday. I’m lying prone on hot cobblestone with my camera poised on an even keel with the canal. “Look,” I say. “Look at his red shoes.” I take pride in this observation and want to be rewarded for it.
    I get the feeling that on the other side of one of those bridges I might bump into myself, my elusive twin. She exists perfectly. She is happy and dressed in silk. Her red scarf flutters into the balmy wind. There is a faceless man on her arm, her soulmate. He exists perfectly too. He exists for her.
    Leigh takes a green bottle of beer out of his backpack, looks around and when the coast is clear takes a swig. “Oh yeah, look at that,” he says.
    I snap a picture but the gondola slips past. I won’t know until I get home and develop the film that I have captured nothing more than a river of milk and a flower box under an iron grate of a window across the way. A smear of red would have been enough, something that might have been a shoe, a blotch of insect blood, a wing of light refracted back into the lens, because no one will believe me now when I tell them I saw a gondolier in Nikes.
    I will search for that gondolier as the day progresses. I will search for others in similar shoes but won’t find any. An interval has passed that I’ll never get back. It’s one of those unremarkable snapshots that imprints itself on your brain—flowers against a white wall. I feel like I have missed something important. I will never be satisfied in life. You know life will never be what you once thought it could be. You didn’t think it would require so much work.
    Leigh will propose marriage to me in St. Mark’s Square near the end of this day. I will not understand until that moment the implications of my answer, or how much I did and did not want authority over such a preposterous choice, though all my life I had been waiting for it. I will feel something inside me ignite like a flame, and the moment will crystallize around me. There he will be on bended knee.
    Yes. No. Cross or turn back.
    He is an older man, a good man. He owns a small boat with two sails. There is a void of open water beyond Discovery Island in Cadboro Bay I will never penetrate. I watch from the shore as he and his spinnaker get smaller and smaller and, rounding the peninsula, disappear. I will always be new to him. I tell myself he will always love me for my relative youth. I want him to teach me how to love him the way a good wife should.
    I have been comparatively horrible, taken pleasure in hurting him, insulting him in public. I called him vacuous in front of my mother, and I said it like this:
vac-u-ousss
. In the shoe store I said he was nothing more than a cheap suit and tie. Some of the worst things I’ve ever done I’ve done to him.
    Perhaps it’s the current, how the