The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

Unlike others, I’ve never had any real objection to television besides its basic silliness. When I was growing up, we listened religiously to silly shows on the radio, so what’s the difference? Our kids were always devoted readers and decent students. If they liked to plop down in front of the set for an hour or two after school or a football game on the weekend, OK. I was often there next to them, enjoying both the show and their company. It also came back to me that the first time any of the kids ever asked a question about sex came while watching that television. In the middle of the “Dick Van Dyke Show” one night, Norah informed us she’d heard from a girlfriend that babies were made when men and women went to a hospital, lay down on separate beds, were connected genital to genital by a long white rubber hose, et cetera. Was this true, Dad?
    So, great things had happened in the presence of this now-departed pain in the ass. It almost made me want to ask for it back.
    Apparently, Roberta had had much the same experience. Over dinner that night, she told me she’d been thinking about the television, too, and different memories connected with it.
    “Remember switching it on, and, at that moment, Oswald was brought out and shot by Ruby! I remember it so well. The world was in mourning. We all walked around like we were drugged. No one thought something else was going to happen. But right there in front of us on that TV, it was like the first public killing ever televised!”
    “We saw it on that one, the Brooker? Are you sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll be damned.”
    “My son, Dean, lives way out in the country. He and his wife, Gaby, have got this dachshund named Zip. It’s a nice little thing, but the problem is, their next-door neighbour had a rabbit for a pet that Zip was always trying to get. They let this rabbit run loose in their yard, and it drove the dog crazy. Every time he’d see the thing, he’d bark and scratch at the ground or throw himself at the fence separating them. It caused bad feeling between the two families, but what are you going to do?
    “One night, Dean and Gaby were sitting in the kitchen after dinner, drinking coffee. Who comes in covered with dirt from head to toe, carrying the dead rabbit in his mouth and proud as General MacArthur? Zip. The little stinker’d finally figured a way under the fence and killed the poor thing. Well, you can imagine what happened! Gaby had a conniption fit and grabbed it away from the dog while there was still something left. Luckily, Zip hadn’t bitten into it. They guessed he’d killed it by shaking it and breaking its neck.
    “But what were they going to do now? Both of them could just imagine what the neighbours would say in the morning when Dean and Gaby brought it over and explained what’d happened.
    “They talked over all the possible ways out of this, and finally came up with a real long shot. Clever, but a long shot. Gaby took the rabbit and washed it real well. Shampoo and everything. Then she got out her blow-drier, if you can imagine that. Dried and combed the damned body till it looked brand-new and fluffy. Peter Cottontail-fresh. By this time, it was about ten at night, and part two of the plan.
    “Dean took the beautiful dead lump, snuck into the neighbours’ backyard, where it’d lived in a hutch up on stilts, and put the body back in its home. Then he tiptoed back, and the two of them went to bed with crossed fingers. What they were hoping was, the neighbours’d see it dead out there, and think it’d died of a heart attack or something in the night. Natural causes. But next morning early, they heard this crazy, wild scream next door, and both of them thought the jig’s up. A little while later, the neighbour woman, who by the way was very religious, came banging on their door, looking like she had just seen a horror movie. White as a sheet and talking a million miles an hour, she kept saying, ‘A miracle! Honest to God, a