All We Know of Heaven Read Online Free

beautiful red leather. Fleather. Flowing things, flowing past the window of her bedroom. Flowing into the trees.
    Boards. Bees.
    Birds.
    They lived in bird huts. Birdhuts.
    Dannymadethemlittle birdhuts. In his ship, shop, his shipshape shop, at his own hut.
    He learned how in ship class. There.
    No!
    It was for water! A glass was for water. For drinking water. And she was thirsty. It went together.

    As soon as she’d finished with one thought she had to figure out another thought. The whole decoding thing began all over again! Every thought—every little thought—was like making a building with LEGOs, matching red to red and yellow to yellow and green to green, long to long and short to short. She wanted to scream, but it wasn’t an option. Her mouth wouldn’t let her scream. She felt as if her lips were sealed in plastic wrap.
    She heard someone soaking . . . spiking— SPEAKING clearly. “You didn’t see her then. Mary Helen! She was forty pounds heavier with the fluids! Like a bag of water! Since two days before Christmas Eve. No, it’s GOOD how she looks now! It’s GOOD, Mary Helen!”
    Wibbledibblewibblewhisperwhisper.
    “Not just her spleen. Her skull had hairline fractures. It’s amazing that they weren’t worse fractures. People who get thrown from a car, it’s the worst thing! They usually just die. She looks good. Yes, this is what they call GOOD.”
    Shushwshiperwhisperwhisper.
    “I know you wouldn’t believe it was her. WE couldn’t recognize her.”
    Those Mary Helen sentences were the first sentences that she heard all in one piece.
    The rest was cheesy music in this weird

    heaven that went up and down and around like a Ferris wheel, broken up by different voices saying, “. . . so young . . .” “. . . just asleep . . .” “. . . when she was little, do you remember the two of them with sand cupcakes?” and “. . . never one of them without the other . . .” “. . . at least she’s at peace.”
    Last winter? When was winter? What was winter? Go.
    Fight. Winter! Winner.
    Who was she?
    She was she, was she, herself. Was she Mary Helen? Mary in hell? No. She was someone else. Who was the someone she was?
    She was lying on a bed. Her feet were bare, a lumpy pillow under her neck. Maybe she was at her own funeral.
    Her own funeral. That was where she was.
    This was an excessively creepy thought, that her eyes might be not-just-shut-but-glued-shut and stuffed with gauze to look still-alive and natural (her great-uncle was a priest and went into way too much detail about these things). But if she were dead she should be an angel able

    to . . . flow? . . . around above everyone else in the room, to see if aunts and uncles and brothers and . . . other people were there crying over her.
    One of the only benefits of being dead was finding out for sure who were really your . . . other people . . . and were staying for the whole thing, including the rosary, not just showing up to sob a little and then be carried out of the room by her boyfriend as she stumbled and cried out your name. If it was Leland Holtzer, she would stop crying rightawayintheparkinglotandsay, “Can you believe they didn’t close the coffin?”
    Maybe it was dark because they had closed the coffin.
    But what would that matter to an angel? And the truth was, maybe they didn’t need to close the coffin. Actually, she didn’t even know how she had died. Maybe she looked great. If she had to be dead, she hoped she looked great. Maybe she broke her neck cheering. It happened. She tried so hard to listen for funeral music, she exhausted herself and fell asleep.

    the cross ‌

    The kids crept out onto the road after the chief left. No one spoke.
    Tall, slender, elegant Lelandspottedatennisshoestrung with miniature gold-and-black pom-poms and dropped to her knees in the road. She thought if she hadn’t been wearing jeans, she would have scraped her legs, she fell that hard. She wondered if anyone else noticed how hard she fell.