Mother Box and Other Tales Read Online Free

descended and streamed now over their heads, fleet and mean, weirdly bright as they whipped toward the bay. Sylvia imagined what the ocean must look like beneath that coming storm. She imagined it had risen to the occasion, was itself heaving, hysterical, impressionable. In the end, it was the ocean that would do the most damage to the island. A slow erosion of the land and the things that had been made of the land: the piers and shops and pavilions, the fountains and rickety crab shacks, the houses with their sandy curbsides and carefully banked garden soil. Her mother had always said the ocean was like a little brother—foolish and easily led, but once it got going, boy, look out! Her mother said the ocean had something to prove, but Sylvia was an only child and as far as she knew her mother was also an only child. They had lived alone together all of Sylvia's young life in a little house near the mouth of the bay. The island was so narrow there that in her bed at night Sylvia could hear both the impassioned tossing of the ocean's waves and the more circumspect murmuring of the bay. In the season, the oyster-rakes passed back and forth over the beds just beyond her window. It had not been idyllic. There was no air-conditioning and the sump-pump yielded up a steady trickle of gritty, brackish water from around the foundation, but to Sylvia it had been very real and soconstant she remembered every surface and angle of the house in a still, clear, inviolate light as if it had never been visited by her own experiences. As if it were a place wholly independent of her, enduring, to which the fact of herself was incidental and easily overlooked.
    The house was no longer there. The whole area had been leveled to make way for a Palmetto Bank and a parking lot, a Build-Your-Own Burrito restaurant with a flashy lanai complete with taxidermied parrots and cane-benches cemented into the ground. In fact, the only marker of her childhood that still stood was a corrugated-steel warehouse which had housed in its time an auto-body shop, construction materials and then sand dredged from the deep ocean rifts to replenish the beaches after storms. The occasional fiddler crab would stray from the bay's mudflats and set up a territory in those artificial dunes, loiter in the cracked hanger doors with its swollen, belligerent claw drawn up before its eyes. Now the warehouse was a church called the First Holiness Spiritual Center in Christ, but it endured regardless. As did the bay, of course. And the ocean.
    Steven stumbled over something. Sylvia heard him swear under his breath, closer than she had thought. “Let's cut through the alley,” Dannie said. “It looks like it's going to rain.”
    After her encounter with the first Mrs. White, Dannie had gone back to the store frequently. The season was changing, but in such a begrudging fashion she found it difficult to mark the time, and already her body was no use to her. She was so large her size seemed a condition of her being. Like a blimp, she thought, but not in any old way. Not in the way the pregnancy guide books had encouraged her to figure—full like a fruit, or a pod from which would be squeezed perfectly identical peas—but rather full like a hovering disaster filled with swirling miasmic gasses, waiting for the spark. She explained herself in this way to Mrs. White whonodded and produced a string of tiny, bone beads, each carved into a rudimentary face, dug-out hollows for the eyes, slashed mouths partially open.
    “Lover's chain,’ said Mrs. White and pooled the little heads in Dannie's hand.
    “I know what you mean,” Dannie said. “I have never been one to shy away from the truth.”
    Oh, it had been, she now realized, some kind of salad days. All around the island, the jessamine had been blooming and falling off, blooming again. Her feet were distant, mysterious conveyances. She heard them as she went, rustling through the dropped bells, shushing in the brittle drifts