Who Will Run the Frog Hospital Read Online Free PDF

it and play cards. We’d walk miles to the county dump to see the bears. By the time we were twelve, we’d bike to the head shop and buy wisteria incense. Or we’d godowntown to the Orpheum, say we were sixteen and see an R-rated movie, occasionally a foreign one, which would mesmerize and perplex us. We’d eat Junior Mints and popcorn—each candy a sweet pillow on the tongue; each popped corn as big and complicated as a catalpa bloom. On a dare we might even drink the blueberry punch, which was the color of Windex and shot up the sides of the Jet-Spray cooler like some wonder of nature; no one else in our town had ever drunk it. That’s what the man behind the counter always said. We would wash it down with water from the lobby fountain. Then we would sit in the dark, on the left, to watch the movie from an angle, eyes peeled for flesh. At thirteen, we would hang out at W. T. Grant’s, buying bras and ice-cream sundaes, and trying on men’s sweaters, the bottoms of which, when we wore them at school, stretched out shapelessly, the hem warped and hanging around by our knees: that was the look we wanted. At fourteen, we would claim to be sleeping over at each other’s house, and then we’d stay out all night, go to the railroad tracks, and from old mayonnaise jars drink liquor collected from our parents’ own supply. Then we’d sleep in the family station wagon in the driveway, wake early, get donuts at Donna’s Donuts at dawn when both the raised and glazed ones were still warm.
    But increasingly now I was alone with my outings, wondering what it was like for Sils with her boyfriend Mike, what they did together, what were all the things I didn’t yet even know to ask, and, now that she had gone to a new advanced place I hadn’t, whether she liked me less.
    In some ways my childhood consisted of a kind of wasting away, a wandering dreamily through woods and illegally in the concrete sewer pipes, crawling, or pleasantly alone in the house (everyone gone
for an hour
!) chewing the salt out of paper bits, or hiding under quilts in the afternoon to form anew place somehow, a new space that had never existed before in the bed, like a rehearsal for love. Perhaps in Horsehearts—a town named for an old French and Indian War battle, one full of slaughtered horses whose bodies bloodied the village pond and whose hearts were said to be buried on Miller Hill just south—the only things possible were deferment and make-believe. My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and propped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was liquid, like a song—nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.
    But one can tell a story anyway.
    One can get a running start, then begin, do it, and be done.
    Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft—a whore’s arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind—why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured—for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.
    Before we had renovated our house, it had only one bathroom for the entire family and often I would rush to use it, finding the line three kids deep; there was a mirror in the hall and we used to clutch our groins and hop around, watchingourselves, hoping we wouldn’t explode. There were only two bedrooms for three children—the yellow room and the blue room. For a