All-Bright Court Read Online Free Page B

as she looked up through her curtains she saw the bomb disappearing. It was moving west.
    As it disappeared over the top of her building, the blood returned to her feet. She could feel it return. The blood made her feet hot. Venita stood on her hot feet and moved them through the kitchen, through the living room, and out onto the front porch.
    Her neighbor’s boy was playing with a magnet in a patch of dirt in the front yard. Many of the children in All-Bright Court collected what they thought were pieces of the sky. They collected the silver dust that fell like rain.
    It fell at three when the wind blew in from Lake Erie. When the wind blew west over the land, the silver dust rained on All-Bright Court. It was a silver like the edges of the sky, like the bottom of the sky on sunny days.
    At three, the roar came from the plant. It was the big roar of the day, like the sound of a dragon raging overhead. Underneath it the three o’clock whistle blew and five thousand men were going to work, and five thousand were going home. Inside the sound was the silver dust.
    If the women looked and saw their sheets billowing away from the plant they knew the wind was blowing from the west. Though they might not know it was the west, they knew that when the wind came from that direction it carried the silver rain. Some of them rushed to pull in their white sheets. They pulled the damp, cool sheets from the lines and took them inside to drape over the backs of kitchen chairs. Some called their children.
    â€œGet inside this house,” they would say. “Get ya’ll tail in here. That dust from the plant fenna fall.” And the silver came just as the women said it would. To some children it looked like glitter, and to some it looked like snow, and to some it looked like it was raining pieces of the bottom of the sky.
    What was falling was iron. With magnets stolen from school, the children collected the dust, made the filings dance and snake. When the children were caught out in the silver rain, they sparkled and came home smelling base.
    There was no wind on this day as Venita went to the boy dragging the magnet through the dust. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “The Russians done it, boy. The bomb, child. I saw a bomb out my back window, and it was headed this way.”
    The boy tried to pull away from her. “A bomb?” he asked, dropping the magnet.
    She let go of his shoulders and pointed to the sky. “There it is behind you. Look behind you, Polack boy,” Venita said, and fell to her knees.
    It was stealing blood from her feet again.
    â€œWe dead, boy. We going to die,” she said.
    The boy looked up at the sky. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “That’s not a bomb. That’s the Goodyear blimp.”

4
Nesting
    S AMUEL was hiding Easter eggs. Small and pastel, each was a perfect, oblong world.
    Mary Kate and little Mikey had dyed them. That Samuel had refused to do. A man had to draw the line somewhere. He had drawn the line, but he still had to hide the eggs.
    â€œIf you wasn’t expecting, I’d make you do this, hear?” Samuel said, smiling.
    â€œNo, you wouldn’t,” Mary Kate said, sitting in a chair with her feet propped up. “You ain’t brought me up north to boss me.”
    There were only a dozen eggs, and Samuel slid them gently between the cushions of the couch, placed them carefully under the chairs, the cocktail table. He even tried to slide one under Mary Kate. “Here you go, mama hen.”
    â€œStop playing now,” she said. “You going to break it.”
    â€œYeah,” Samuel said. “You look like you going to bust, you getting so fat.”
    â€œI’m not stutting you. I’m barely pregnant. Look at you. You getting so skinny,” she said, playfully rubbing her feet across his back. “Tonight was the first time you ate good in a long while.”
    â€œWe ain’t going to strike.