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

person you’ve ever known – just like your mother always promised you.
    Your grandfather still doesn’t know for certain what’s begun as he stands in the kitchen facing the back of your grandmother’s blouse. It’s a white field muddied with a print of large, brown flowers like no one ever sees growing anywhere in real life.
    â€œDinner won’t be ready for a while,” she says to him without turning. Water sloshes in the pot, displaced by the backyard-grown vegetables.
    He steps into the kitchen, his right leg frozen like it’s asleep, still standing sheathed in polyester trousers, stretching long and distant all the way to the rubber shoe sole that grips the floor under his foot. The leg lumbers beneath him, snagging on the surface of the yellow floor.
    Passing from the kitchen into the living room, he reaches out for the back of his armchair – the one he brought home strapped to the vinyl top of his Chevy Impala, the five-dollar garage-sale price tag still pinned to the cushion. The pads of his fingers are just as numb as his leg now, telling him nothing about the familiar, nubby texture of the low, nylon loops in the chair’s fabric. The hand doesn’t grip. It rolls against the coarse brown upholstery like a waterlogged, empty glove.
    He jerks and lets his body fall sideways, into the seat of the armchair. A chord of creaks and moans sounds out from the old springs and wood inside it. Maybe he looks up at the wooden sunburst clock hanging on the wall, clicking like a metronome. Or maybe he just sees the clock in his memory.
    The outline of a dull headache is reshaping itself, changing out of its fuzzy, formless mass, stiffening into something rigid – its edges becoming defined, tightening into sharper and sharper contrast. The ache hardens into a knife of stunning pain inside his head. The blade draws back, pauses, and stabs deeply into his brain. White light flashes, moving forward through his skull to the backs of his eyes. And then it’s dark – like he’s suddenly fallen to sleep.
    His mouth opens to call for your grandmother, but the sound he makes is nothing like her name. Her paring knife clatters onto the stovetop, as if she already knows what it all means. She’s moving in the dark spaces around his body, small and somewhere beyond him.
    â€œI’m callin’ the ambulance,” she says. Her feet carry her back into the kitchen with a hard, staccato sound, like a volley of darts fired into the floor. And she’s out of his reach.
    â€œShoes,” he remembers. “Even in the house it was always shoes with us.”
    He sits. He knows the upholstery on the chair’s back is still sagging against his weight. He can feel it through the darkness and the numbness. And he still knows the smell on his skin is the washing machine’s white grease. There is still clarity in the sound and meaning of your grandmother’s words as she speaks into the enormous green rotary telephone hung on the kitchen wall.
    â€œHe’s tryin’ to talk, and I can’t understand him at all. I think he’s in real trouble.”
    The heavy telephone receiver lands in its metal hook. There’s a grind and click as your grandmother twists a dial on the stove and abandons her cooking. And that’s when he knows he won’t ever eat again. What comes next is – nothing. He loses the sonic tie that links him to his wife’s voice and feet. In the quiet, he’s set adrift, dark and silent.
    Bracing himself against the horror of the language-less sound, he tries to call to her again.
    There’s another flurry of darts on the floor before they’re muffled on the shabby carpet in front of him. She’s standing over his armchair. “They say they’re coming quick as they can. I’m just in the bedroom packing a few things in case it turns out…”
    As she speaks, he sweeps his last strong arm like a