The Meagre Tarmac Read Online Free

in my father’s body was too gross a sacrilege to contemplate.

IN HER PRIME

    TIFFY HU AND I are passing by the hedges behind the tennis courts, headed to skating practice, when a horrible truth strikes me: life is eternal. There’s no escaping it, not even in death. I’m scuffling my shoes over the concrete slabs, over tufts of grass and weeds and the anthills and dried snail shells. Dogs do their business under the hedges. Flies drop their eggs.
    Smudgy little birds perch on the fence and hop through the thorny branches.
    â€œYou coming, Prammy?”
    â€œI’m thinking,” I say. What goes on in her little brain? It must be like the birds, hopping and chirping. Actually, I do know. It’s sex, sex, sex.
    A year ago, towards dusk, I was walking by this same place. A gray veil, like a frayed blanket, had moved up from the gutter and across the sidewalk. Birds were dive-bombing. As I got closer, the blanket dissolved into moving parts. Hundreds of mice, or maybe moles, were making a dash up from the sewers and across the naked sidewalk to their burrows under the hedge. It reminded me of a nature film, like wildebeest on their migration, attacked by crocodiles, or hatchling turtles pecked by seagulls.
    We die and decompose. We never return and we will never sleep with virgins in a perfumed garden, or go to heaven or hell no matter what our sins or virtues, or drop into the airless nirvana my mother prays for. But this afternoon, the combination of birds and ants and tufts of grass makes me see that something of us does return. Our chemical shell is reabsorbed. It’s as simple as the Law of Conservation of Matter. The elements keep going on, and on, and on and they recombine randomly, making birds and mice, grass and trees, and sometimes, even, every few thousands years I guess, a dog or a human being. Life is a default position. Wherever the promise of sustainability exists, something will find a way to inhabit it.
    â€œPrammy?”
    How many lives before I’m a self-conscious person again? There’s no end to it until the sun quits, but then our elements are blasted into space and we drift in the dark for a few million years, like dandelion fluff, and our cells start splitting and a few billion years later we slither onto alien rocks in a galaxy far, far away. Without a gram of religious feeling in me, I’m suddenly a believer in eternal life. This is seriously weird.
    The ice surface is a polished pearl, and I start by laying down a long, lazy sum, the ∫ from the Calculus, running the length of the rink, edge to edge. It’s my signature: Pramila Waldekar was here. Nothing is hard if it can be reduced to numbers and everything, sooner or later, is just numbers. So long as I do my spins and axels inside the sum, I’ll be safe. Today he’s going to be hard on me, maybe because Tiffy is with me. “My Gods, you are not Aeroflot taking off from sfo, you are artist. You must rise from nuthink. From ice. All rise coiled inside.”
    And I wonder if there is not a coefficient that includes speed, drag, and vertical lift. It’s a matter of directing energy.
    Poor Borya thinks it’s an invoction to the ∫-hole on the top of a violin, a subtle dedication to his marvelous self. Back in Minsk, he played the cello. Sometimes he plays for me.
    People are prime numbers, or they’re not. The Beast is eighteen, which factors to 3x3x2, a perfect expression of his mental age. I’m thirteen: prime. Tiffy Hu is twelve, 3x2x2: what more to say? Borya is thirty-seven: prime. We are irreducible. Borya hasn’t been prime since he was thirty-one and he won’t be prime again till he’s fortyone. What will I be like in my next prime, at seventeen? A fat cow, says Borya. A woman is never stronger than she is at twelve or thirteen. We are designed for our maximum speed and strength, before the distraction of breasts and hips. He only takes on girls between