Wreck and Order Read Online Free

black tiles, my knees and forehead touching the glass, I stared into my eyes. For the first few minutes, I noticed my thin lips, blue eyes, the freckles shaped in a heart next to my left nostril. I made tiny facial movements—widening my eyes, puckering my lips—to convince myself that the person I was seeing corresponded to my actual self, in real time. But gradually, as I sat and stared, my face became foreign to me, the way a particular word loses its meaning if you say it aloud over and over. The arrangement of my features looked alien, in the child’s sense of the word. Later, when Magic Eye drawings became popular, I was reminded of the exact second of the mirror feeling’s arrival every time I stared at one of those computer-generated creations, and a mass of indistinguishable colored dots suddenly gave way to an intricate scene—a scientist pouring from a flask, a girl kicking a soccer ball. For a time, I was addicted to the exhilarating discomfort of seeing myself as unrecognizable. I’d always end up rolling around on the bath mat, mesmerized by this sensation that was the absence of all learned physical sensations. Of course I had none of these thoughts at the time. It was not I, but my body, that was bewildered.
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    My mother burst into my room one night while my father and I were playing Connect Four. She shook a woman’s magazine in the air above our heads and read out loud: “Leave him after the first slap!” I had never seen my father slap my mother, but he didn’t deny he had. Mostly, he seemed not to really participate in their fights—like at Thanksgiving, when she had screamed “Shit! Shit! Shit!” because the bakery ran out of her favorite kind of pie. My father read a novel on the couch through her cries. It had been his job to pick up the pie.
    The kitchen table was my mother’s favorite place to cry. Her sobs made me think of gasping fish, flopping about on the bottom of a ship. On the nights after their fights, my dad would read to me before bed, sitting on the floor with his back against my twin bed, his voice straining toward sweetness. After he shut out the light and left, I would roll onto my stomach with my fists pressed against my chest and imagine floating high above everyone I knew—parents, teachers, classmates—until each familiar head became an indiscriminate black dot before fading into the green-speckled earth.The trick helped, a little. I learned to hear the screaming as wordless, the sound of the space between two people, any two people, every two people.
    My mother met another man and separated from my father when I was in sixth grade. I went out for dinner with my mom and her new boyfriend a few times. Rick didn’t speak to me. He just looked at my mother’s made-up face with this vacant urgency, as if a need that belonged to someone else had gotten lost inside him and was searching for a way out. He gave me a teddy bear for my eleventh birthday, just when I was discovering lip gloss and MTV. Rick and my mother moved to Phoenix, where one of his buddies had promised him a job “making bank”—my mom giggled when she repeated the phrase to me—as a sales rep for some popular online store. My mother invited me to move with her, but I stayed with my father, who always had time for me. He hadn’t had any videography assignments in a while. He was always talking about making a documentary, but whenever he started seriously pursuing one of his ideas—doing research, contacting potential interview subjects—he decided there wasn’t enough information or it had already been done or another cause was more important.
    Strange, but the years after my mother left weren’t so bad. I now had an excuse for how I was. I was the girl whose mother had abandoned her; it was only natural that I be eerie and withdrawn, that I show up to school in strange outfits that made people laugh nervously and give me a wide berth. It was satisfying to discomfit my peers, whom I saw as