Half-Sick of Shadows Read Online Free Page B

in toilet paper, which is why Father brought other people’s newspapers home from wherever he could find them. Mother held a ruler against each newssheet and tore it into six smaller sheets. Daylight shone through a crack and we hurt our eyes reading stories with the endings missing, and pulled our pants up over inky posteriors.
    The Manse contained other reading material: an encyclopedia and a dictionary – wholesome reading material, Father called it, but I had never seen him reading anything except his bible.
    Candles hurt our eyes at night when we read the encyclopedia. Father made us use candles because lamp oil cost the earth. I liked the encyclopedia better than the dictionary. It had stories, and sometimes they made sense. It had more than a thousand pages, and three columns of writing on each page, which felt like reading for ever. While I enjoyed reading from the encyclopedia, I wished it had only one column per page and fewer pages.
    The encyclopedia contained hundreds and hundreds of every letter in the alphabet, and had many pages devoted to words beginning with each one. So had the dictionary. An encyclopedia is a dictionary with true stories. On my fourth birthday, I started reading the dictionary at the beginning, intending to learn all the words through to Z. Alas, I gave up when the A entry introduced the word ‘diphthong’, which I made the mistake of looking up … something to do with two vowels. I looked up vowel … something to do with the speech tract. I looked up tract … a short pamphlet, often on a religious subject. Learning words involves more than meets the eye.
    Newspapers and magazines were the Devil’s work, especially newspapers – although useful for the toilet. They let the world’s filth into the home, according to Father, which is why I never saw an intact one … except once, when Father must have forgotten to hide it. I saw my first bare-chested woman in that newspaper. She deserved pity more than anything else, having to walk around all day, every day, deformed. I thanked God, in my prayers, that neither Sophia nor Mother had breasts.
    If Father had allowed newspapers, I would have been better prepared to encounter the world. Encountering the world, and possibly conquering it, was my destiny. Despite the absence of information – except in the encyclopedia – about life elsewhere on our flat planet – the one God made in six days – I knew we were safer in here, in the Manse, with the dead all around, than out there, in the world, with so much Devil’s work going on.
    There were other evolutions on the way. Running water! Electricity! I understood electricity to mean we would never run out of candles. Mother said everybody had electricity up north.
    Me, Sophia, Gregory, Mother and Father had death on our lips, and in our eyes and ears. Edgar, however, came from a different planet. Nobody knew where Edgar’s mind wandered when free to wander where it would. Mother and Father never scolded Edgar the way they scolded the rest of us when we needed scolding. I had an idea that he had a special status and, therefore, had been set apart. I assumed they liked him more than the rest of us.
    I liked him too.
    Father and Mother often quarrelled over education. Long before we were born, however, Father let Mother teach him how to read and write. Father never took to reading – apart from his bible. Writing came in handy for notes in the margins.
    Mother thought so highly of education she sowed the importance of letters in the form of words on paper into our brains almost before we had teeth. I could sing the Alphabet Song – albeit twenty-six letters in a single note – before I could locate my mouth with a spoon. She taught us well. She gave us the gift of word boats. She made us one each by folding sheets of paper into tub shapes. When we came across a new word worth remembering, we wrote it down, cut it out, and dropped it in our word boats.
    Gregory was by far the best at