The Flame Alphabet Read Online Free PDF Page A

fool the eye, make her look like something that she was almost certainly not. And sometimes it even calmed her down, allowed her to move on to other troubles, our little girl’s great project of faultfinding—with us, with others, with the world—that would never be complete.
    With Esther upstate, our days without exposure numbered four by now.
    Our health seemed to be flowing back, but there were hidden factors in play. We were ignorant of the illness plateau, the comprehension ratio we’d soon surpass. There were only so many words you could stand before you were done. About the child radius we were naïve. Naïve is too mild a word for what we were. With this illness, signs of recovery were the trickiest symptoms of all. Feeling better was perhaps just a form of stunned disbelief, a shutting down. Maybe this was the quiet before the really fucking quiet.
    “I think I feel better,” Claire announced, sounding blurry. “I’m definitely kicking this thing.”
    Said the half-dead person, I thought.
    It was remotely possible she was right, which isn’t to say Claire wasn’t capable of objective diagnostics, but that sometimes she suffered from spells of positive thinking.
    To prove her vigor, Claire cornered me, sexually, made a physical trespass. Seeking, it would seem, someone to leak on. But my body, pajama-clad and sweated out, with enough blood to power only part of me, failed to cooperate. Her lips dragged across my back like a rough little claw.
    “What do you think?” she said. There was something forced to the way she kept rubbing, as if she wanted to get down to the bone.
    Claire’s breath soaked into me and she pitched her voice against my neck, speaking so closely to my body that only gibberish came out. This should have felt nice, but something sour hovered.
    “Want to?”
    “You mean now?” I stalled.
    “We could,” she said, and her hand dropped, found my coldness, squished it inside her fist.
    There was no response. I rolled out of range.
    Claire never propositioned me, which on its own would be understandable. Language shouldn’t be required for a married couple to toil for their grain of pleasure. But she never actually took off pants, mine or hers, or got the enabling oils or the towel. I guess that was supposed to be a man’s work, or maybe only mine. She sent out clues and then waited for me to follow through, but often I did the reverse. Some days I was blind to the clues a little bit on purpose.
    In this case I was hoping to wait for Thursday, when we were at synagogue, the two of us in the woods after the broadcast had ended. In the hut, with the cold air pouring in, and the radio crackling in the background, it was easier to surrender to what sometimes, if we were exceptionally lucky, felt unterrible.
    Claire furrowed back into me, tugged too hard, and I swallowed some bile. Part of her on the wrong part of me was gritty and rough. There was a terrible smell in the air, most likely my own, and my groin was cold. It seemed as if what she gripped so fiercely might come loose in her hand.
    I tried to look at Claire, but her face was too close. “Should we later?” I said, hiding the apology in my voice.
    I sold the gambit with the most unbothered look I could manage. It was important that she not feel rejected. I noted, too, that sudden atypical sexual desire, with predatory indicators, was a clear symptom. But of what I still wasn’t sure.
    “I’m just so happy,” Claire said, and her hug turned cozy, safe.
    Wasn’t I happy, too? she wanted to know. Wasn’t I?
    We hadn’t been outside in days. We hadn’t gotten dressed or done more than swish some cold water in our mouths, inhale a little bit of soup, maybe submit to the coarse body brush we treated each other to at bedtime. But bedtime seemed to be all day lately, and since today,
with the contagion absent
, we found ourselves moving faster and suddenly dressed for an outing, we got in the car and took off for a black-blanket