Notable American Women Read Online Free Page A

relief and become simply one more of my children—
There there—
making him only a brother to you, an older brother who briefly thought he knew something and could lead the way.
    But Father is home now and your older brother can stop pretending.
    You must trust me and love me and let me lead you free of sorrow and small thoughts, little ones, because God of God Almighty I’m the father of fathers, who knows and thinks and feels so that you don’t have to. And you—if you are listening and at all alive and in need, if it hurts and you are scared, and every day is increasingly an impossible prospect—you are my son, my daughter, my little one, all grown-up, so sweet, so tall, a little bitty thing, aren’t you, throbbing and new to the hot sun that spotlights your approach over this earth, a joy to behold, my darling creatures crawling so intently over the soil, homing in on the voice flowing out of the hole and through the sticks and shrubs of Ohio and America into your hearts. A river of sound from the mouth of your father. Swim into me and all will be well.
    You have always known that I am him, the one to father you home.
    Let it happen. Say good-bye to the old. Forget Ben Marcus and his world of lies. I am not the father of such a one, but I am yours, and yours, and yours. Come to me. We’re family.
There
there.
All will forever be all right.
    Your father,
Michael Marcus

2
The Ohio Heartless

    Shushing the Father

Blueprint

Better Reading Through Food

Dates

The Name Machine

Shushing the Father
    I DO NOT RECALL THAT Pal ever resorted to words. Mostly, he just ran and jumped and ate the brown behavior cakes, much like I did, but better and harder. When Pal swam in the learning pond, he dog-paddled with his head up and his tongue hanging from his mouth, as though he had shouted up a thick, dark syrup that froze between his lips.
    Pal was a black friend and he growled deeper than an animal. When I growled like him, we made a booming forest sound, enough to bother the women into throwing their listening cloth at us. His hair was one length all over his body, clusters of fine needles on my skin that set me shivering and needing to pee. I had to run to the shrubs and squeeze at myself in private until the terrible itchiness was gone. I wanted to tear him apart to see what exactly he made me feel—to put pieces of him on a table and understand his insides. His hard black head was mostly all I ever saw, a spot of nothing that I wanted to follow. Whatever I couldn’t grab and hold and keep was Pal. He was the only thing that wasn’t mine, which made me as angry at him as if he were my brother.
    I first met him in the arms of the great Jane Dark, who appeared at our house, to a black-carpet reception, along with her army of listening assistants: full-sized girls with stethoscopes and notebooks, wearing streamlined beige hearing suits. The girls stood outside our house that day and looked at our street in grim fascination, as though they had read somewhere it would soon be destroyed. From my window, I watched them, and they never flinched. Our big fake white house could hardly withstand so much staring; it did nothing but die in place as they stood there. Each girl looked almost the same. Sharp hair in a chunk of bang just over her eyes, a body buried under cloth, white shoes shining against the soil like spilled paint. An embarrassing amount of sunlight glowed on the cups the girls all held in their white-gloved hands. It was enough to blind someone who might be trying to figure out who they were.
    Later into Dark’s residency, the girls performed fine outdoor spectacles that reminded us how little we had done in our yard. You see someone using your own house better than you’ve ever used it, and you go to your room and close the door. Sometimes the girls linked their arms in a human chain on the lawn while Dark worked her behavior removals inside, rendering my mother a perfectly