All That Is Solid Melts into Air Read Online Free Page A

All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Pages:
Go to
heel, and lingering on her ankle, gripping it as though in greeting before replacing it gently on the ground, a blacksmith’s motion. He looks into her lean face, so twitchingly alive, a thoroughbred, and shakes his head with disappointment.
    “Your heels are too sharp. How can you wear these shoes in weather like this?” he says.
    “Women are well-balanced creatures. Didn’t you know this?”
    She stands on one leg, then the other, and removes them, hanging them on her fingers. He laughs. A light chuckle, boyish, which surprises both of them.
    “You can’t come out, you’ll freeze with no shoes.”
    “I’ll be fine, there’s a doctor present.”
    She stands expectantly. And so he scoops an arm underneath her legs and carries her onto the ice. He takes wide steps, bending his knees, keeping a stable base underneath them. If they fall in, there is no one around to help.
    When they reach the stool she half kneels on it, tucking her legs beneath her. She places the shoes on the ice and then unfurls her shawl. For an instant it hangs horizontally in the air, swelling in the middle, just as when the nurses change beds in the wards, a suspended sheet gathering together everything in proximity.
    She twirls the shawl as it descends, and its thickness falls across her entire body, no part of her distinguishable beneath shoulder level. When she is wrapped and seated, he stands behind her and places the rod in her hands, then unclasps the spinner and they listen to the mechanism rotate until he thinks the depth is adequate, then flips over the metal spur, causing the line to brake, and he encourages her to loosen her grip on the handle by gently pinching her fingers.
    “Now what do we do?” she asks.
    “Now we wait,” he says, and she feels his breath streaming over her neck and he sees the black stilettos lying askew on the white ice, giving off an air of bewilderment.
     
    THE MEMORY CARRIED Grigory all the way into the hospital lobby. He glanced at the clock above the reception desk. There was work to be done and he was late. It was almost 9:00 a.m., a full hour and a half past the time he usually arrived. The place was already moving in the ways it always did. People were sitting, clutching their numbered tickets, waiting to be registered. The administrators were walking behind the counter pressing bundles of paper to their chests. Somewhere in the room a radio broadcast a combination of static and muffled conversation. He brushed through the double swing doors of the ward corridors and passed rooms with nurses handing out medication and saw patients sitting up expectantly, their arms linked to intravenous drips beside their beds. Usually he would turn inside one of the wards and have a word with a few of them, a reminder that the surgical staff didn’t just see them as skin and bone. He’d ask where they were from, read their medical charts and reassure them, tell them they’d be out of here before the weather changed or the hospital food became too much for them.
    People looked up as he passed but he avoided all eye contact. He caught himself midpause gazing blankly at an empty wheelchair, still carrying this morning’s vision, the very unlikeliness of it turning inside him. He’d have to shake himself out of it.
    An attendant crossed in front of him pushing an empty gurney. It shimmered noiselessly across the lime-green linoleum, a twig drifting on a river.
    The smell. The place always had the same smell. It usually hit him as soon as he walked through the doors. Disinfectant and boiled vegetables. Earthy and sickly clean. He couldn’t smell it without thinking of his aunt, his father’s eldest sister. Walking into her house as a child. The stink of her old, unbathed body covered over with the perfumed powder she put on her face.
    Family in everything. History bundled into the basic materials of who we are. His was a job where he could trace the origins of things. He often stood and looked at X-rays and saw
Go to

Readers choose