A Paradigm of Earth Read Online Free Page A

the luggage, her tears out of her control. She thought, I have come to the end of the route; she thought, there’s no transfer . Still she had considered somewhere else to go, had decided she would go somewhere, so she snorted at the foolishness of her own melodrama.
    She would go where she had planned to go, to live in the basement flat of her parents’ house until the estate was executed, and then to this strange new home the Universe had thrust upon her. It was apparently huge, big enough to share with other orphans and failures. She would subject herself to service, and routine, and she would ignore herself as much as possible. After all, she thought, there must be a reason she was still breathing. Every thought told her to stop, every instinct perpetuated breath. She put one foot in front of the other.
    She had nothing left to do but that. It Should be, she thought, all I desire.
    Now, Morgan was a fugitive from the war with life. She had escaped from the world of the damned, the red brick hospital where the twisted bodies and tortured souls of the gargoyles and other ruined ones were sent to live and sometimes to die. She had escaped the wake of torment after the death of her parents. She had escaped the minor needs—to care, be cared for, to live with happiness. They were all irrelevant to her: she, her suitcase and her cat fading away into the distance rather romantically, although really it was more than a month before she could put herself on a Greyhound bus, and the journey was mundane, even ridiculous: infants crying in their mothers’ arms, large countrymen with their tractor caps cocked back on their balding heads, fussy old people insisting on the seats near the driver, pre-teenaged children with a gross sense of importance traveling alone for the first time, and Morgan.

    Morgan can see that she is not human. It is clear. She has kept the external shell, but everything has been scraped out, there is a void there, an alien void, outer space made internal, and she wonders whether she will ever have the courage, or energy, to explore it. As the poet said, the energy needed to live / alone is so great.

2
     
    A house is not a home
     
    Morgan dragged her heavy suitcase out of the car while the driver unloaded the cat carrier, and stood looking at the huge house. It looked like a mansion; in fact, it had not been a family home since before the days of her grandparents’ school, and they had told her it had most recently been used as a monastic community of some kind. Morgan hoped that the peace still lived there, even though the godly did not. She was so tired. The weeks of dismantling her parents’ lives were over now, the estate divided, and her share (both realized and expected) sunk almost completely into the essential refurbishing of this great shaggy lumbering Edwardian dormitory, a shabby relic a hundred years old and counting, where she hoped to do some good, eventually.
    The house stood inside an overgrown yard surrounded with a rusty wrought-iron fence. It faced south, fronting onto a cul-de-sac avenue along the edge of the riverbank. Morgan left her suitcase by the gate, took the cat carrier and walked across the narrow street to the ribbon of grass boulevard. In front of her a dramatic drop two hundred feet to the river was staged by a small shelf of greenery alongside the water, where bicycle paths and picnic tables attested to the urban parkland vision—but the picnic tables were weathered from green into grey, and up on the grass, the bench overlooking the river had been carved deeply with graffiti. She showed Marbl the view, but the cat was complaining loudly, and turned her back like Gertrude Stein.
    Morgan smiled without humor. “Guess you’re telling me not to avoid it any more,” she said, and the cat was silent at last. They returned to the gate and Morgan lifted the latch. It was stiff, and caught briefly, then released with a musical pop. She kicked the gate shut behind her, climbed