The Medicine Burns Read Online Free PDF

padded silently from the room, and I, shaking, locked the door behind her.
    Months later, I was back to my same old tricks. My parents had discontinued their curfews and inquiries. My father had opened his own business and both he and my mother were concentrating on that. I was left to pursue my own pleasures.
    One night, there was a large drag party planned at one of the clubs and I’d decided to dress for the event. That afternoon, while my parents were at work at the store, I went through my mother’s closet. I thought it would be amusing and a little perverse to go as my mother. I found what had to be one of the ugliest dresses in her wardrobe, some synthetic green and white checkered dress with gold decorative buttons up the front. I was carefully going through her drawers for underwear and stockings when I discovered a plastic bag with something inside it. I sat on the floor before her dresser and opened the bag up on my lap. There, as new as the day they were delivered, were the plain, white baby shoes Mrs. Rosenbloom had brought to my bris. I felt suddenly stricken, shocked that she had kept them all these years. I put the shoes back in their bag and into the dresser, and then, sadly, I hung the dress back on the rack.

Undertow
    The smell of cut grass and a tint of blue from the moon across its razed surface made me think of blood. I walked, well-dressed, across a wet, open field into an unfamiliar neighborhood where I’d been invited to a party. At the edge of the field, my elementary school stood squat, in darkness, finally small, arbitrary. Monkey bars in the distance looked like wire cages, domelike, sunk into the earth and the limestone beneath. I remembered watching my bicycle being stolen across this field. A teenager with an institutional walk, an apelike, slumping gait, carried it past, while I ran last and out of breath around the track. I stopped to watch him guide it away, intimidated by his sideburns and hairy arms. I was tearfully parting with the glowing red bike, its streamers from the handlebars lifeless and severed.
    I was too afraid to say anything until he’d gone. Then the rush of real time, of consequence and loss, the sting of irremediable experience that would demand honest retelling, humbling repetition. Passing the school, small as a shoebox on the playing field, with portables like roach traps, bolted closets stacked with autoharps and recorders, I think of trapped voices, a clench of words, screams.
    I slipped through a fence and crossed the street, into another field littered with cans and tires and magazine pictures. Three houses with gravel driveways sat in a cul-de-sac, yellow, blue, and pink, with ornate plaster seahorses chalk white against their walls. Cuban music played from a car outside the pink house. A man slumped in its front seat, smoking, feet on the dashboard. A heavyset girl stood outside the front door in a shirt of gathered popcorn fabric, kinky hair pulled back. It was her party, though most of her friends hadn’t arrived. She had the worst English of anyone in our school. She was, they said, slow. I tutored her, and was the only non-Spanish speaker at her party.
    She waved as I came up the gravel front, then stood before me, embarrassed by so few guests drifting apart in her heavily decorated living room: the whole ceiling like the skin of a piñata, a rough, short fringe; a crystal bowl with punch, orange sherbet marbling its surface. Rented lights and a DJ overwhelmed the room, especially with so few of us there. It made our hearts pound.
    I went to the patio and sat on a beach chair, now and then lifting the cover from the parrot’s cage, fascinated by its angry wing beat and ferocious quickness. I sat in the chair, nodding to people as they came out onto the patio, picking up pieces of their conversations, imagining Sonia and I as clairvoyant mutes, able to foretell the deaths of each of her guests. They would laugh at the message the way