My voice is cracking. It suffers up and fails and surges again. It breaks eons before the ice ever will. Now I'm breathless and covered in freezing spittle. Rangi watches and never even opens his mouth.
Karen Russell
Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.
karen-russell accident-brief occurrence-00-422
My voice rises like a hand struggling to break the surface of that water. I wonder if it's like this for Rangi, too; if Rangi's mutism just means that he has sunk several fathoms farther down than the rest of us, and given up on swimming.
Rangi doesn't look happy; his face is still a mask of old fury. I wonder what it feels like to be angry at everyone except for a dead bear. It scares me to think about it. I picture the dead bear loping and slathering forever inside of Rangi, a long-toothed loyal animal, his one memory of love. Digger Gibson should never have adopted him. Who wants salvation when it just orphans you futher?
Anger flames through me and my muscles tense to hit him, a violence that clenches once and then vanishes. My fists uncurl wihtout my conscious intervention. I stare down at my open palms with real surprise, feeling shaky and defeated. It's as if my body knows before I do that it's too dangerous to feel this way towards Rangi. Right now, he's the only other human around for thousands of vertical miles.
In a few minutes, the town will stand up and applaud. I feel as if I'm looking down at my own funeral, only nobody knows that I'm dead. It's a frightening, lonely feeling.
Behind us, Brauser is moaning. His cries swell and sky-crawl. It's a wordless sound, a wild sound, this animal pain that can't be haltered and led to meaning... This is the worst sound, I think, the very worst sound in the whole world. Then the moaning stops. Brauser's movement stops. And I regret all my hastier judgments. Any sound is better than this.
My sisters all have Bible names that start with a pious growl,.. They eat unbuttered peas and fatty gristle and leave the choicest, glaziest cuts of the ham for Mr. Oamaru and me. They are pretty, and this means that charity comes easy to them. They don't understand the real cost of what they are asking of me. There is a long silence, full of bright expectant stares..
We are flying to the Aokeora Glacier to sing down the snows. It's one of those rituals whose true meaning is lost in antiquity, a ritual that we continue because of blind tradition and our parents' desire to booze.
When I was a much younger boy, my mother was beautiful, but it was a sewn-up tulip kind of beauty. Then my father left. We curled in and blackened. We were heathens, you know, before Mr. Oamaru and his piratical, body-soul conquest of my mother. Mr. Oamaru has had a soft opening effect. He paid her mortage and made my sisters. He made her beautiful again. Everyone notices... And you know what? I hate him for it.
And then Ruth was crying and I felt like a monster. But everybody knows that Mr. Oamaru is not my real father. Mr. Oamaru is my mother's husband. He is my sisters' father. Not mine.
She says it again and again. She's snowing down a new past for Mr. Oamaru, a tough rock of ice in a sea of time. A new memory for our family to stand on.. It was hard enough to lose my father the first time. Now I can't even hold on to my memory of him as a basically good person. Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn't just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what's done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water. The past shifts its crystals inside me.
It's unclear whether Brauser was trying to hit Franz Josef or Rangi. I hope it was the former. There's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.
Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot's bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.
I just stand there. I know better than to walk over there. Somehow, I intuit that if I extend my hand now, I will get infected by the pilot's helplessness, his gibbering fear. The help can't be me; the help needs to come from some other direction. I hear myself barking orders, full of an iron contempt for the pilot. What a crybaby. What a true fuckup. It's an angry feeling that I used to use on the farm when my father first left, late at night, to immunize myself against my mother's terror.
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