The Matter Is Life Read Online Free PDF

foamin while painful gutteral sounds came out. Mr. Gunioff watched fascinated.He set the lamp down without thinkin and knelt down to stare at the dyin animal. He watched to the end.
    When it was over he probed the beast with his foot to try to get him to move again, but its body had twisted itself into the stillness of death. Mr. Gunioff stared at it for a long time then hearing Mrs. Gunioff calling from the house to see if he was alright, he waved back and then drug the beast away to bury him.
    He thought about the death he had seen all that week and looked often at the bag of poison he had left.
    One day, feeding the sheep, he noticed the sickly one and the thought squoze into his mind that it need not live. He should poison it! Put it out of its misery! He could see one more time the workings of this poison that made the victim dance such a strange dance. That night he prepared the poison but waited til daybreak so he could see the dance better. He fed the sickly sheep off by itself and stood entranced, fascinated, watching it go through the labor of death.
    He began to sit on the porch through the day, even more quiet than usual. He didn’t even go to one of the few things he ordinarily would go to with his wife. One day she dressed in her little country clothes and went off in the wagon with the Conet couple that lived down the road. That was the day he went out and searched among the sheep and found one he thought would not last long anyway and fed it the poison and watched it die!
    Later that week as he sat on the porch he decided sheep were too expensive to lose and turned his face to the chicken yard, wondering how they would dance. He soon found reason to go to town and did! He got more poison and some icecream for his wife and a little black satin ribbon for no reason at all. She smiled at his thoughtfulness and thanked him.
    Needless to say, he became so caught up in his fascination with death the chicken yard was soon empty. They looked so funny as they danced around and cackled and then just keeled over! That was the problem, they died so fast! You had to poison several just to get a good look! They would twitch a little for awhile, but that wasn’t enough.
    Mrs. Gunioff was alarmed at the deaths and at a loss as to the reason because her husband always saw to things like that. She had no sittin hen now so she sent Mr. Gunioff to get one and set it away from the chicken house where she could watch things better.
    Then the sheep began to disappear and she couldn’t understand why he was not more upset about it. She took her pet sheep, a baby lamb, and moved it closer to the house so she could watch it too!
    Mr. Gunioff bought the poison in bulk now and had quite a bit left when he buried his last sheep. Somehow, by this time, he was sick at the loss and his mind rested about a month. His wife wondered that he did not replace them, a few anyway, because they were expensive. But he did not.
    After the month or so had passed, his craving to see the dance of death returned and the cow was his choice to go. They had no children left at home so they didn’t need all that milk! She, the cow, was different dying; she was large and her poor, pitiful moans were almost human as she labored to die and when she did die, he felt small satisfaction. A cow wasn’t much fun to watch, the big body moving slowly, in pain.
    A week later, it was the horse. It should have hurt him, cause he loved that horse he had had so long. But his obsession made any regret brief, if at all. He watched the horse die with his legs kicking and his eyes rolling in fear as he looked to his master, his friend, for help. Gunioff didn’t bury the horse. He was tired. He just covered it up and went to sit on the porch and stare off into space.
    Mrs. Gunioff lamented and cried in distress at the happenings on the farm as he listened and watched her, saying nothing.
    Sunday it was, yes, it was a Sunday. Mrs. Gunioff went off to church with the Conets in