A Brief Lunacy Read Online Free Page A

slurps his soup. Carl is a good man but he slurps his soup.
    â€œJust a walk. Breath of air, and I need to get my yarn from the car. Call me if you hear anything. I’ll be back soon.”
    I half-wittedly hold the door behind me for the dead dog and kick dry leaves from the landing, where they pirouette to the ground. The sun has dried the night dew from the forest. Small noises surround me as I make my way through shriveled ferns toward the pine tree. I stop here and there to listen to rustlings made by squirrels and birds and perhaps mice. Nothing sounds big like a human being walking. Carl is right. She couldn’t come all the way here by herself.
    My still life has collapsed. I gather dry leaves into a pile at the base of the tree and lower myself onto them. I’ll just sit quietly and listen to what comes. A woodpecker hammers in the next tree. I hiss at it to shut up. If there were someone in the woods, I wouldn’t hear them over that racket. I shift my weight, unfold my legs, which have fallen asleep, and stretch them out in front of me. My foot kicks the old broken wing bone.
    â€œSylvie? Are you out here?”
    The woodpecker racket ceases. The small rustles disappear. There is nothing. I’m not sure what I expect.
    â€œLook at me, Mommy.” It’s a little girl’s voice I hear in my head, not my grown daughter who is crazy, hiding in the woods. “Look how high I am.” And I looked and said, “Oh, my. You certainly are a climber.” And afterward we walked through the woods, her small hand tucked in mine, while she gathered her “collection,” as she called it, a tote bag heavy with stones and chipmunk tails and clods of moss. In those days, we lived here only for a few weeks in the summer in a cabin we built ourselves. Sylvie set up a whole village of people and houses made from sticks and bones and feathers in the middle of the living room floor. Did we know something then? Harry said it was strange for a child to set up a disparate world like that. Sam and Charlie knew to stay away from her village, and each year it grew larger and more complicated until the year she was twelve. One day we came back from town and everything was gone. The only sign was a moldy spot in the center of the braided rug. She never spoke of it. When I asked where her village was, she said she was grown up and had no need for such things. Should I have talked to her about that? I guess we should have.
    The next year, Sylvie burned the place down.
    Then I hear it again. A footstep, perhaps. The snap of a stick. A breath that is not mine.
    â€œHello? Sylvie? It’s Mommy.”
    I struggle to my feet because my legs are all pins and needlesfrom sitting so long. No one answers. I look up but I can’t see anything. My glasses. “Come down, darling.” If I had my glasses I could see better. A pinecone drops from the tree and sticks to my sweater. Is that the noise? Pine-cones dropping?
    All the way back to the house I listen for her, but I know she isn’t there. She would appear if she saw me. She’d laugh and throw her head back, and for a moment I’d think she was little Sylvie of the woods with her tote full of doll parts. But after the laugh would come anger and swearing and then perhaps a lost look and a tilt of her head. “Mommy?” And she’d run to me and kiss my eyelids. Once, after the kiss she bit me. Not hard. But Carl noticed the marks.
    Carl sits at the end of the kitchen table, receiver to his ear, twirling my broken glasses around and around through the empty lens hole. He’s talking to Charlie at the office, asking if he’s heard anything. Now, why would Sylvie contact Charlie?
    â€œWill we see you on Thanksgiving?” he says. “Well then, bye, Son. We’ll keep in touch.”
    â€œWhy are you using the phone? What if she calls?” I sit down in my chair. “What if she’s trying to reach