Cures for Hunger Read Online Free Page B

that the salmon runs would end and checked spawning dates in the books I’d hoarded from the school library. He and I used to fish often, in the streams between the fields or in the reservoir outside the valley, but he had less and less time and often wasn’t even around, so I couldn’t ask. I lay in bed, looking at pictures of fish—the toothy great barracuda or the gaping goosefish with its antennae. Their mystery riveted me, the way they appeared from the deepest, darkest water and vanished again, how they belonged to a different world. I wanted nothing more than to catch one, for my father and me to go to the river the way we used to and stand together and then laugh over what we’d caught.
    When I woke, my face was on the book, the page glued to my cheek. I carefully peeled it off and sat up. He was shouting somewhere downstairs.
    I got out of bed and opened my door. No one was in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs, and I crept down, gently setting my foot on each step so that it wouldn’t creak.
    I went to their door and listened. My mother was crying.
    â€œIt’s all bullshit,” he said.
    â€œI saw it. It was as real as you standing here. I was lying there dead, and my body rolled over, and half of my face was rotted. It was me from a past life.”
    My hand fit against the edge of the doorframe, my cheek to its cold, painted wood.
    â€œStop going to those things. What’s wrong with you?”

    â€œI’m not stopping. I need to figure this out. I want to know who I used to be.”
    It was unfair that he didn’t want her to learn more. Her description was thrilling, like a mystery in a novel. But maybe he was protecting her. That happened in stories, too. All this was confusing. I’d thought she was angry at him, not the other way around. I was so frustrated by all I didn’t understand that I stomped back to my room, not trying to be quiet at all.
    The next day he was gone, and she made us sit with her on the living room carpet. She wanted to teach us something special she’d learned. We sat cross-legged and closed our eyes, and she told us to calm our minds and look inside until we saw a white light. The white light was our soul. This, she said, was called meditation.
    I rolled my eyes in the dark, then opened them. My brother and sister sat, my mother, too, eyelids settled, faces smooth. The sun descended against the mountains, the fields already in shadow, the last flare of daylight in the dirty window glass. I closed my eyes again, and there it was—the glow, a pale thumbprint in the dark substance of my mind.
    That night, when she came to say good night, I told her.
    â€œI saw my soul. I saw the white light.”
    Tears came into my eyes, not from sadness but the spinal thrill of mystery—all that could be known and discovered. She knelt by my bed and stroked the hair from my face.
    â€œI’m proud of you,” she said. “I want you to keep looking inside yourself and to tell me everything you see.”
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    My mother often talked about purpose.
    â€œYou all have one,” she said, driving us home from school, staring off above the glistening, leaf-blown highway as if we’d keep on toward our purpose and never return.
    She told us that our gifts helped us to understand our purpose. Since my brother’s and sister’s report cards held stars mine lacked, they were clearly gifted in school. In particular, my sister’s gifts were singing and, when necessary, punching boys, and my brother’s were math and
behaving. He was also gifted with an obsession for space travel and Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and he played so many hours of Tron Deadly Discs on his IntelliVision that his thumbs blistered.
    Though I’d tried my hand at creating sculptures from trash and even made dolls with my mother’s old maternity underwear, stuffing them with cotton and twisting them the way clowns did with