Love Letters of the Angels of Death Read Online Free Page A

just answer me with one of our favourite eschatological maxims about how it takes a spirit and a body to make a soul. Lots of people try to believe it, I guess. But you know it’s true. Instead, I ask, “What would you do with one of my hand-bones anyway?”
    â€œI told you what I’d do with it,” you say. “I’d keep it – just keep it.” You promise to treat any bone cut from my hand with careful reverence, insisting you wouldn’t use it for anything grisly. “I wouldn’t even let anyone else know I had it. And it wouldn’t be left out with the living forever. There’d be a secret addendum in my will leaving instructions for the boys to bury it with me.”
    â€œYou mean, instructions to have it burned up with you.”
    â€œRight, right.”
    While you live, you promise, my hand-bone would stay hidden, tied around your neck as a token of my life, dangling inside your clothes – clean and white in a secret reliquary, hung low on your breast.
    I still don’t know.
    And there’s no way to resolve any of it tonight, so I start to fall asleep. I wish you could sleep lying across my chest. But you can’t, so you pull away from me. You’re rolling over to sleep on your back beneath the high, taut dome of your womb. You told me once that the baby feels like a sack of ball bearings rolling and spilling inside your guts. It’s not something I like to think about too much.
    I’m not afraid to see you sleeping on your back, even though the ever-shifting gnosis of the pregnancy books stashed under our bed tells us a sleeping position like that one is anathema. But there it is – sleeping on your back, growing all that hair, burying a husband with his skeleton intact – I guess there’s always some kind of risk to be taken.

Three
    Still alive, the first of your grandfathers to die comes lurching toward the light in the doorway over his head. He bends, ducking beneath the slope of the ceiling’s low overhang much too soon, climbing the stairway out of his basement, hunched low enough for his fingers to graze the tops of the grey wooden stairs. A rebuilt washing machine motor sits on a sheet of two-year-old newspaper on the cement floor below. Today, his fingers are stiff and faraway, unfit for grappling inside something as dim and close and greasy as the washing machine’s innards.
    In the narrow basement doorway, he slumps at the edge of your grandmother’s sunlit kitchen. His left arm rises in front of his face, lifted against the hard sting of noontime glaring through the window. Beyond the bright squares of sunlight falling onto the dark yellow floor, a little woman stands slicing potatoes into a battered aluminum pot.
    Sometimes, when I’d come into a room too fast at a family reunion, when I was looking at something else but I could see her in the periphery, I might think your grandmother was you – hardly five feet tall with a cranium I could palm like a softball and that skeleton built almost like a little boy’s but definitely not like a little boy’s. She’s your grandmother, all right. Anyone could tell.
    You make the same kind of mistake sometimes too. Remember the last time my family got together for a picnic – the time you came up behind my brother and clamped your arms around his waist before you realized he wasn’t me? I can still see him, dark eyebrows arched high, holding your wrists at arm’s length while you strained against him. You were screaming and cackling and trying to explain yourself.
    But you’re not quite a part of this chapter of the story yet. Right now, you’re fifteen years old, sleeping through your summer holidays in a perpetually unfinished bedroom without a door, in a corner of your parents’ basement. You’re nowhere near the house where your grandfather starts to die over a broken washing machine. He is about to become the first dead