Demi – Gods – Eliza Robertson

Eugene printed three copies. I buried mine in the yard. Duck, why don’t you see if anyone wants a top-up? Roy played with a cube of ice on his scoop. The cube shifted up and down, back and forth in a miniature cross, a puddle sweating around it. Willa, said Mom. I scowled at her and left them at the bar. On the dance floor, Pamela lifted her sternum so high she looked like a goddess of war, levitating above them all, ready to pin them with arrows. Eugene described to her his plans for the new gazebo.

Wanda swayed by herself in her pink dress, arms bent like a cactus. Ko-Ko whispered into Pamela’s husband’s ear, and all of them appeared so wicked and clownish, I turned and went upstairs. Joan sat with Luke in his bed. She looked grand in the toy-sized frame, like a mother who hired a nanny to conduct the cleaning and feeding, who remained bright at the eve of a day, who read to her son and attended parties, clasped the hands of strangers, took drinks and cigarettes, danced.

She would balk at that description—she always denied her maternal instinct. I’m a good sister, she would say. That’s all. But here she sat, reading from a book of bedtime stories. She had a voice I liked to hear with my eyes closed. I sipped my Cuban drink and leaned back against the headboard. Her voice paused and I felt the glass tug from my hand. I opened my eyes.

She leaned over Luke’s forehead to sip the beverage, then passed the glass back to me. We continued to pass the drink back and forth. After the story, Luke asked for another. I left her with the drink and went down the hall to my own room. Out the window, dark had fallen and a pale navel of moon illuminated the seafoam. It reminded me of Verne and the blue queasiness I had been feeling—an unease with the fact of her, her coolness toward me.

Had I dreamed the canoe, the rabbit, the barrette? Roy and Mother were another source of queasiness. I thought it best to ignore them. I would return to Joan and we would scavenge the cupboards for bridge mix or chocolate chips. Eugene would be in bed soon—too loud and red-faced to go on suavely. He had a keen sense of embarrassment and when to excuse himself.

Mother will have fortified the corner with Roy, petting his cheek, lighting his cigarettes, passing him a tumbler for refills.

In the golden age, we communed with gods. A god could be hidden, barely contained, inside the costumes of normal men. Nothing was certain. How could you refuse a beggar’s request or a gambler’s wager, the bold advance of the boss’s only daughter, without fear of causing offence to a god? You would say yes. In the golden age, whatever was offered, you would say yes. —FRANCES LEVISTON, “THE GOLDEN AGE” OceanofPDF.com THE BEACH HOUSE We must have met the brothers in 1950, because USA had defeated England in the FIFA World Cup.

They arrived with the sun in them, their bodies hard and tan like peanuts, eyes chlorine blue—even in the woods, my bedroom, the log where Patrick burned the moths with a magnifying glass. Kenneth was handsome except the bridge of his nose where his brother had thrown a dictionary at his face. The bump made his smile slope. I knew he and my sister loved each other when she made a daisy chain and he tucked it in the pocket of his shorts.

I wondered if Patrick and I loved each other. He had carved cheeks, a hairless chest and floral lips, like he had been sucking on a sweet. He preferred secluded places to play: we swam by ourselves; we lay under my bed where I found it difficult to breathe.

The moths made me cry later, but I didn’t tell him to stop. Their khaki wings looked folded from rice paper. I imagined ten moths circling a candle to form a lantern. One antenna was crooked. The wings ignited like dog-eared pages in a book. I have been thinking about memory as a space we dwell in. A dwelling. On the one hand, the word denotes a residence, the place we return to—a house, a warm doorway, a nest.

On the other, dwelling indicates a process of reflection. A lingering. Maybe both involve lingering. OceanofPDF.com 1 1950 — Salt Spring Island, British Columbia On the first morning, Kenneth slept in; Joan buttered toast soldiers for Luke in the kitchen; Patrick and I slurped cornflakes at the table. Mom’s dollhouse had disappeared.

Dad had built it for her when he designed the beach house, off the same blueprints, slicing every wall to scale. The dollhouse stood no more than twelve inches high, and Mom kept it on the nesting tables by the window. I loved it, because my dad had joined the pine with his hands, because Mom kept it after he left.

Eugene hated it for the same reason. The real beach house too. He wanted to sell. He left his yacht in San Diego—they could sell that also.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 5664dc1b072eb475
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,528,122 bytes (1.457 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 195
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 302.9 minutes
• Total Words: 60,581
• Total Characters: 328,183
• Average Words per Page: 310.67
• Average Characters per Page: 1682.99

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