The Flame Alphabet Read Online Free PDF Page B

which we could enjoy other people in textbook abstraction, without the burden of intimacy.
    The kids would devour their food, then run off down the foot trail that dead-ended in a wall of trees. Well, other people’s kids. We used to bring Esther to the picnics, but she clung to us and sulked, building out a gloom that she somehow bloodied our own hands with, as if
we
created her moods in a lab and force-fed them to her every day, giving her no choice but to display feelings of our own authorship. The other kids formed a roving pack, moving like one of those clusters of birds that seem to share a single, frantic brain.
    Claire and I would scout the kids for Esther, identifying girls her age, potential targets for friendship.
    “I like that girl’s shoes,” I’d say, and Esther wouldn’t even look, just tell me that
I
should go talk to her if I liked her shoes so much.
    “Is that how you captured Mom? Complimenting her footwear?”
    “I didn’t
capture
your mother,” I said.
    “Not yet,” smirked Claire.
    Kids approached Esther and asked her to play, but she politely declined, citing fatigue. Or she’d say, “No thank you, I never really get to spend time with my parents,” putting her head in her mother’s lap. Claire accepted the affection, ulterior or not, and petted Esther’s hair, careful not to push things too far.
    Last year a gaunt, tall girl trespassed our blanket and asked, in the workshopped tones of a second language, if Esther wanted to come see something. The girl smiled conspiratorially, as if to suggest that Esther’s idiotic parents could have no idea how brilliant this thing was that she was inviting Esther to see. Parents were creatures with ruined, insensate heads, and how could they ever be expected to appreciate the marvels of the Monastery valley woods? What was it they’d found, a bucket of fresh, oiled genitals? When Esther declined, failing even to look intrigued, the girl ran off and was soon sucked into a cloud of children who plunged down the hill, shrieking.
    “Sweetie, I thought she seemed nice,” Claire said.
    “Because she asked a question? That makes her nice? That’s a fairly low standard, Mom.”
    “Well, because she was inviting you to join in, and that’s a nice thing to do. She made an effort to include you.”
    “So if I try to coerce someone into doing something they don’t want to do, then I’ll be considered nice also?”
    This was Esther logic. It was formidable.
    “You guys wouldn’t go running off with a pack of strangers,” Esther said, “so why should I?”
    “It’s fun,” I ventured, bracing myself for her response.
    “Dad, can you name one time in your life when you suddenly ran off with a group of people you didn’t know, screaming and laughing, simply because they were your age?”
    I looked down, hoping Esther would lower her voice. But it was true, I could not think of a single time.
    “I guess it’s something you sort of stop doing when you get older,” I admitted.
    Esther looked at me so hard I couldn’t bear it.
    “So why can’t I follow your example and never get involved in such practices in the first place? I’m not an animal. I don’t follow people around simply because their asses smell good to me.”
    I probably sighed. Certainly I expressed disappointment without speaking. It always surprised me when I didn’t just stoop to Esther’s level but dug down below it, responding to her killing logic with sublingual ordnance. She watched my little performance, the facial codes I sent out to no avail. I saw her straining not to feel sorry for me.
    “This picnic would be more successful,” said Esther, as if she were honestly trying to troubleshoot what had gone wrong, “if you guys gave up your urge to control me.”
    “But where’s the fun in that?” I said under my breath.
    Sometimes Esther appreciated these retorts. Not today.
    We were surrounded by other parents on the black rug, some of whom were overdoing their