ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 110
tint where her ever narrowed eyelids meet around the yellowing of
her eyes. Most people would say that she is old, though measured
rightly she is a blinking in the eye of greater things, and the more
perceptive among them would say she looks sickly and cruel, sitting
in front of her ugly house, dirtily white like clouds gathering atop
a mountain to storm, soaking up sunlight and looking at her trees.
She is called kind, on some occasions, by some people. It has something to do with her willingness to house a sickness in her lungs,
as putrefied vegetation houses the agents of its withering. She is
smoking a small cigar and wheezing fitfully, her lungs simultaneously fulfilling and failing at their function.
The child is drooling contentedly on the head of broccoli it holds
in its hand, gnawing with its few and tiny teeth, as it sits inside the
house, in the house’s kitchen, on the floor, wrapped in the sunlight
coming through the window above the sink, full of dishes. This is
the same sunlight, the motor of all the life these people will ever
see, whether they know it or not, that the old woman soaks up.
Eventually the child will grow into a man, named Jude. He will hit
his first wife with a heavy object for making cloth flat. When he
does that he will salivate much as he does now. The saliva will then
have a substance in it which is produced when the cells in his jaw
divide more than they normally would. The cells in his jaw will do
this because of tobacco, which, when placed in Jude’s mouth, just
behind the last few teeth in that receptacle, turns the fluid in his
mouth, his saliva, a vile orange, redolent of sewers. Jude will not
be called kind by many people. Perhaps this will be a misuse of the
word. When Jude begins to lose his teeth, he will more frequently
smile and roll his eyes toward the white debris of clouds and stretch
the muscles of his face, baring those few stalwarts. Even in decay,
they will have a kind of beauty.
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The third person is another woman, a woman of thirty. She is the
daughter of the woman sitting in front of her ugly house and its low
frowning, overhanging roof, on its porch. Her name is Annabelle,
