Invitation to a Bonfire Read Online Free

was breathing, so still did she hold herself. Not like adoe in the woods, alert to danger. Like the hunter that doe has scented. Patient. Glacial.
    Without knowing what I would say, I started to move towards her, but at that moment the maid came in and rang for dinner, and we were all ushered through into the cramped dining room for undercooked veal and a few stabbing attempts at conversation. Once or twice I tried to strike up a topic with the young lady, whose name was Diana, or Dina, but she was half the table away and stuck telling my father about her study of painting—a theme on which he was routinely tiresome, his own mother having dabbled in watercolor. Once or twice she flashed those eyes at me, and my body seized with wanting. Then we all went up to bed.
    The week transformed into a series of excuses designed to push me into Dina’s company. I switched from the steady gelding I’d been riding to a mare Dina thought a better companion for her own; the mare and I were bitter enemies from the start, she always pushing my leg into trees and intentionally stumbling over shallow creek beds, and me driving her so hard with my heels that she ended each day sweated half to death. We tore after rabbits instead of foxes. Plunged down embankments too steep to escape and trotted back and forth in twin pique. Dina just laughed at our rivalry, and rode her horse with the grace of a centaur. One afternoon I let her walk me to the river that bordered her family’s property on the pretext that I give my opinion on opportunities to fish it, a practical task I could not have been more ill-suited to as a boy of seventeen, primarily enamored of books and cigarettes and the sound of my own voice. I knew nothing about fishing, and in fact forgot the explanation for our excursion as soon as we were out of sight of the house, though plenty of the creatures wallowed fat in the shade with speckled sides and deckled tails, confident and lazy. Dina let the back of her hand brush my fingers, and as we approached the water’s edge I pulled her into an embrace. “We can’t,” Dina whispered. She pressed her bosom against my breastbone, laid her head on my chest and clutched at me with her little fingers as I bent and ran my hands underneath her skirt. An hour later when we returned, her father asked about the fish and I was at a loss to give him any answer, until Dina smiled guilelessly and said, “He found the river quite singular.”
    Her father was no fool, and as you can imagine, our opportunities to be alone together were swiftly curtailed: the greatest satisfaction I would derive from that point onward was in watching her astride that wicked mare from my wicked own. We were seated far apart at meals, and during the cocktail hour Dina’s brothers took up all her attention, asking her to sing them songs they remembered from childhood or playing keep-away with ornamental jewels they plucked out of her hair. They endeavored to make a little girl out of her, but every childish game they concocted just emphasized her bloom into womanhood, a background of dishonesty illuminating a pure truth. Once, while passing me in an ancient narrow hallway, Dina touched my leg high enough up the thigh to ink the pressure of her fingers permanently into my skin. But she did not slow her pace, and soon disappeared around a corner, the tail of her skirt flicking back in a smirk. After we left I thought of her constantly, counting the seconds until we might be reunited. But when my father and I tried to make plans for a return trip later in the fall, we were met with the news that Dina had been shot through the waist by an incompetent hunter who mistook her brown riding jacket for a hide, and died of blood loss some five hours later, fevered white skin almost invisible against the bleached linens of her bed.
    I used to dream of her laid out on a funeral bier, her burial gown flowing over the edges like snow. I dreamed that