How to Be Both Read Online Free

breaking.
    Ahorse ! I said.
    She gave it to me : I turned it over in both my hands : it had ears : it had scrapes : the scrapes were what made the tail.
    My father was pouting down at his trowel : he rubbed the dust on its point with his thumb and examined the handle, not laughing : but my mother kissed him : she made him.
    Another time : hot, and the cicadas : my mother was drawing a line in the ground with a stick.
    I saw what it was before it became it : it’s the neck of a duck!
    Then she moved to a new piece of ground and drew a line and then another then joined them to 2 other lines and a curve : it’s the place where the leg of a horse meets its body!
    She finished the horse, started again, drew a line, then another, made a scuff in the dust and drew lines in the scuff : it’s a house! It’s our house!
    I found a stick of my own in the tall grass and broke it near the base so it had a thick end and a thin end : I came back to the pictures : with the thin end I added 3 curves to the roof of the house she’d drawn.
    Why have you put a tree on the roof? she said.
    I pointed up at the roof of our house behind us, at the place where a twig that had taken root in the ridge on the top stuck up in the air.
    Ah, she said. You’re right.
    Icoloured with pleasure at the being right : with the thicker end of the stick I drew a slope, a circle, some straight lines then a curve : we both looked over at my father’s back : he was at the far end of the yard loading the cart.
    My mother nodded.
    That’s good, she said. It’s very good. Well seen. Now. Do me something you can’t see with your eyes.
    I added a straight line to the forehead of her horse.
    Very witty, she said, oh, you’re a very witty cheat.
    I said I wasn’t, cause it was true, I had never with my eyes truly seen a unicorn.
    You know what I meant, she said. Do as I asked.
    She went to collect the eggs : I closed my eyes, I opened them : I turned the stick upside down, used the thin end of it.
    That one’s him angry, I said when she came back. That one’s him kind.
    Air came out of her mouth (by which I knew that what I’d done was good) : she nearly dropped the eggs (by which I learned that the making of images is a powerful thing and may if care’s not taken lead to breakage) : she checked the eggs were safe in her dress, all unbroken, before she called him over to see his faces.
    When he saw the angry one he hit me over the head with the inside of his hand (by which I learnedthat people do not always want to know how they are seen by others).
    He and my mother stood and looked for a time at his faces in the dust.
    Not long after this, he began to teach me my letters.
    Then, when my mother was gone into the ground, and me still small enough to, one day I climbed into her clothes trunk in her bedroom and pulled the lid down : it was all broadcloth and linens and hemp and wool, belts and laces, the chemise, the work gowns, the overgown, the kirtle and sleeves and everything empty of her still smelling of her.
    Over time the smell of her faded, or my knowing of it lessened.
    But in the dark in the trunk I was expert and could tell almost as well as if I was seeing which was which, which dress, which usage, by the feel of it between finger and thumb: kitchen use, Sunday use, work use : I went deep in the smell and became myself nothing but fabric that’d once been next to her skin : in the dark between the layers I shoved down or up with a fist and felt for a tapering strip, a ribbon or tie or lace coming off the edge of one of the sleeves or collars, a tassel, a strand of whatever, and was awake till I’d twisted and wound something of her round a thumb or a finger : at which point I was able to sleep : when I woke I’dhave freed myself up unawares in my sleep from the tether I’d made : but there’d still be a curlicue shape in the strand of stuff afterwards which held for a time, before it went back to the shape of its own randomness.
    One day when I