Light Boxes Read Online Free

The smell stopped. He pointed at the sky. He told me to look for a girl’s feet through a hole. He said they could be Bianca’s. I didn’t see anything but clouds suffocating little stars. We watched for a few minutes until he said that a man and a woman were in a second hole. Still I didn’t see a damn thing. Thad said that the man and woman were fighting, throwing balls of paper at each other. I kept looking. Kind of crazy to think about holes in a sky. But maybe I did see two shadowy figures in that one hole. Who knows? I was drunk on cider, vodka and mud.

Orange Bird Mask
    Today we go up the hill with our weather-changing poles. Some of them are fifty feet long, requiring a dozen men to raise them. The idea is to destroy the clouds that cover the sun. An old Peter tactic he never had the chance to try.
    It fails, because when we raise the weather poles, an ice storm freezes them together. They blow down the hill and toward the town. One weather pole spikes a shopkeeper’s window.
    By nightfall we feel the sadness inside us that is February. I can smell the mint evaporating from Selah and Thaddeus.
    Not every tactic will be effective against February, Thaddeus says. Everyone stay positive.
    The War Effort has doubled since the great Thaddeus speech. We now have blacksmiths and sculptors and farmers and a little person and beekeepers, and most of them have lost their children to February. Most of them can’t unclench the fingers-into-fists that are their hearts.
    Go home and make a large fire, Thaddeus tells us. Warm yourself until your sweat soaks through your clothes.

Thaddeus
    February has destroyed dozens of our limbs. Infected men stay in bed where they are sad and useless. The rest of us stay up at night sketching plans for a new war strategy. We take turns pacing, crumpling paper, disregarding each idea that springs from our cold mouths. Selah makes tea with two crossed mint leaves floating on the top of each cup. Without an idea, we question if we should even continue our daily assault of warm-weather tactics. A few of the men have dressed for the day in long pants and sweaters. They throw up their hands and walk out the door. Selah is standing in the doorway trying to make out the mountains behind the clouds. She drops her teacup. Then she says I should come look. I walk over, and she points to her feet and raises her finger up to the roofs of the town. The hot tea has burned a path through the snow from our front door and down into the town.
    They find Bianca dead on
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    the riverbank. Two members of the War Effort drag her from the water and place her arms at her sides, rest her head on a rock. The members stare. She’s covered in blue ink, random letters they can’t form into words. When they tell Thaddeus, the smell of mint leaves is so strong it turns the windows in town green and the clouds look like moss.
    Thaddeus tries to decipher the words, hopes for a complete sentence. He sends a messenger for the Professor.
    The only word the Professor can make out is OWLS.
    You should know that I would like to join the war against February, says the Professor.
    Fine, says Thaddeus, buttoning his coat.
    In a few days you should call a meeting. There is something you need to see, the Professor says. It’s a tactic against February. I think it could help.
    Very well, says Thaddeus. A meeting tomorrow at my home. Good-bye.
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    The Professor’s plan for light
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    boxes was a mess of equations and diagrams nearly three hundred parchment sheets long. He didn’t sleep for days, using Thaddeus’s workshop to construct the first light box. When the pounding of metal, the sawing of wood, the breaking of glass, the tearing of paper stopped on the night of the fifth day, he emerged with his face covered in black grease and arms bloodied.
    It’s finished, he told Thaddeus. He picked glass from his knuckles with his teeth and spit them out. Let’s begin the meeting so