This New and Poisonous Air Read Online Free PDF

anyway. He grabbed her legs and pulled her roughly off the sofa, wrestling her to the floor. This
was enough to finally rouse her, and as she adjusted her tank top, she said, “All right, David. Let’s go see if they find that stupid rock.”
    He was relieved, though he’d never show Kitty how much. He knew he was, in fact, the stupid king of baseball and saw the world as a series of outlines. Kitty knew how to fill in the blanks. To him, she was like one of the statues at St. John’s, long-limbed and tormented—a series of miraculous meditations.
     
    We understood David’s love. On Tuesday nights at women’s basketball games, we rooted for Kitty Miller, admiring the sharp curve of her ponytail and the way her eyes caught light from the blond gymnasium floor. At seventeen, she was still an arrow of time, pointing us toward our own graceful moments of youth. She took care of our children, served plates of egg casserole at church brunches, and helped the Founder’s Daughters fold paper flowers to decorate empty shop windows. Despite all of this, we knew she was biding her time. Girls like Kitty weren’t meant to grow old among our factory corridors and sawdust diners. Eventually, when she found a way, she’d leave. We’d seen it happen to other promising sons and daughters, though we thought, like them, she’d end up in some city, calling home twice a month to assure her mother and her brother that she was fine.
    What we never imagined was that Kitty would be taken. How could such a thing happen to our girl? But Kitty rose halfway through the movie when the adventurers had assembled the collected pieces of a parchment map and found the entrance to the cave where the diamond was hidden. Wind blew across the cave mouth, and one of the adventurers, gaunt with exhaustion, said the noise sounded very much like regret. We wanted to stop Kitty,
to pull her back. If nothing else, we wanted to save her for David’s sake. But farmers and factory workers, teachers and clerks, we were each trapped in our roles.
    The Orpheum Theater was our landmark after all, a sweet flycatcher in an otherwise unlovely town. How did the building become more than mere mortar and brick? If we had to guess, we’d say its transcendence was a product of our desiring. Everything that is desired is, in a sense, made flesh. We snuck off for afternoon matinees when we should have been building toolboxes at the plant and stayed late for midnight shows rather than making conversation under the dinner-plate moon at the reservoir. Our mothers hadn’t been able to warn us about work not doing itself because they too had spent their time in the Orpheum’s thrall, sometimes barely remembering to feed us. When visitors came, they were drawn to our theater, if not to sit for a movie, then just to marvel at the abundance of its Oriental bric-a-brac: silk-tasseled mirrors, brass elephant heads, brèche violette pillars, and foreign deities that peered from every corner of the stonework. The auditorium was a walled courtyard, complete with an accurately constellated sky and a procession of clouds projected on the black ceiling by a magic lantern machine, and the pale glow that fell on us night after night was like a hunter’s jack-light, pulling animals helplessly from the brush.
    David thought his sister needed to use the theater’s restroom, but when she simply remained standing at her seat, blocking the view of those behind her, he touched her hand and whispered, “Kit, you feeling okay? ” Her gaze drifted from the tense scene at the jungle cave to the black door beneath the movie screen, the one we told ourselves was the entrance to a storage room or simply an unmarked exit. We said these things to avoid saying the door was a way of climbing inside the Orpheum’s
skin. “We can leave if you want,” David said. “Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea.” Without responding, Kitty began to walk down the center aisle, a bride in khaki shorts and a tank