The Lava in My Bones Read Online Free PDF

tell me,” he finally let the rock drop to the ground, lifted his head, and saw where he lived.
    He beheld a vast plain and a forest and beyond, another forest and lakes and cliffs and more forests and trees and plains and rocks, and suddenly a shrieking wind from the Arctic Circle hurtled down across a vast distance to blast every cell in the surface, subsurface, and deepest layers of his body.
    He’d never seen himself so clearly.
    Sam said, “Franz, my country is—” and as spiked disks clattered furiously at the back of his head, he told Franz everything: How the fierce, ravenous, northern winds roar down across seven billion forests full of 1,000 billion trees where they tear off pine branches, fracture birches, uproot junipers and wild crocuses,drag up rocks from the earth, and dash grey, gritty water against cliffs; the air is full of the piercing wail of starved coyotes and grizzly bears; snow falls in avalanches from the sky and becomes an army of ice-pebbles beating your cheeks as, gazing at empty horizons, you call out for a warm breeze that never comes—for your heart can pound all it wants, but your blood will never be enough to warm the extremities of your body, and your thigh muscles can strain all they can, but will never hold your torso straight against the wind, and you can barricade your doors and windows behind mountains of wool blankets, but the gales will smash every window of every building you’ve ever been in, hurl your wool coverings to the farthest corners of the Earth, and drive its steely, icy claws into every pore in your skin at once.
    In the country he lives in, it is always minus 7,000 degrees Celsius, the wind has never stopped blowing, and winter is 1,000 months long.
    Seeing Franz before him, Sam hurled himself onto the inexpressible warmth of his body and, as his mouth wandered wildly over the rock edge of Franz’s chin, the hard, level expanse of his chest, the solid protuberance of his groin, an Arctic wind beat at his back and neck, drove snowflakes through his hair, striking faster, colder as Franz’s flesh burned like fire beneath him.
    That day, for the first time in history, there was a snowstorm in Switzerland in mid-summer. Shopkeepers goggled in disbelief as white flakes appeared in the formerly blue sky; the bankers stopped walking and checked to make sure the date dials on their watches were correct. Soon, the streets were clogged, tram cars couldn’t run; the café owners took their tables inside andchanged the day’s special from pasta salad to fondue.
    When Franz and Sam finished making love, they looked out at a world transformed into an endless series of ghost-like mounds of pure white snow.

    When Sam woke the next morning, he lurched upright in bed. Why had a man’s body brought him pleasure? Was he himself a man? Two men together was pointless—they can’t produce babies. What’s happened to logic? Does science have anything to do with this? With a flash of panic, Sam thought: the world is still dying and I’m doing nothing about it.
    That week Sam ate rocks every day; he couldn’t resist their beckoning curvaceousness, their ribald density and earthy flavour. They swelled his libido, and Franz ate rocks with him. He became accustomed to Franz’s maleness, the deep voice vibrating the chest cavity, the hardness of his eyebrow-ridge, wiry hair curling in unexpected places, and the raw apple scent of his groin.

    Sam steps away from the barred window and sits on the cot in his bare-walled room.
    I’m imprisoned now, he thinks, in Ontario.
    Light gleams on the floor tiles, and the air smells of antiseptic. He hears a staticky radio from the room next door. Someone coughs outside his door. The door does not open.
    Sam puts his face in his hands. He knows that organisms are never completely at one with their environment. The world is 4.6 billion years old, and the subterranean plates of its