Farewell Navigator

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Book: Read Farewell Navigator for Free Online
Authors: Leni Zumas
the bar and back again.
    I could leave right now, before he sees her. Take his arm and hop away, drag him until he starts running, gets ahead of me, glances over his shoulder to chide, Come on! I could chase after him laughing and he would laugh too and my nose would run and we’d stagger on the snow, shouting, until we were long past the mall and the bar and the brick where a splash of his blood can still be detected if you look close.
    Him and me, no one else.
    Back at the counter I say, Nothing caught my eye.
    The instructor nods and the bell-rope clatters behind me. I see her see him. I hear him stop in his tracks. She smiles; her black lashes flitter. She says, That wouldn’t happen to be your brother, would it?
    Yeah, I say, turning. Horace stands pressed against the door. His face has gone a lunar white.
    Hello stranger, calls the instructor.
    Oh, he says.
    My mouth is ready with all kinds of sabotage. We have to be getting back. We’re late for our movie. We’re meeting our mother for lunch. Horace, didn’t you need to stop by the hardware store?
    How’ve you been? the instructor asks.
    Keeping my head out of the oven, Horace replies, and cackles with unusual vigor. Incredibly, she laughs too. More of a bark, really. Together they laugh a lot longer than the remark warranted. My brother comes to lean against the counter. He smells like smoke and toothpaste.
    You know, I wanted to tell you, she says, since we never got a chance to discuss your story in class. . . .
    He bends closer.
    I make for the door and keep a careful hold on the bells as I open it, though god knows what for—Horace wouldn’t notice my leaving if I screamed the whole way out. A swift glance back through the snowflakes: she is laughing again. Perhaps he’s talking shit about the impotent woodcutter, or regaling her with a hilarious account of finding, when he came home from tenth grade, our father asphyxiated in his car: It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “blue in the face”!
    Her barking can be heard through the glass and clear across the parking lot as I walk—reminding myself to root for him—back up Main Street in the direction of home.

HEART SOCKETS
    On a rain-black morning she inches up and asks me to do some groundwork. Cut through the glass mask the new boy wears. Drop her name at his feet, please, and see what he picks up. Struck speechless herself whenever he’s near, she wants me to be the talker. I am so much older, she thinks, I won’t be after him myself. I have no desires left, she probably thinks.
    You just need to do the groundwork, the girl explains. Once that’s laid, I step in.
    The supervisor stops pacing, lets his crotch hover at my shoulder, and waits. I give him my heart and he pinches it between thumb and pinky, testing. We are told to make hearts firm and flesh them strong, stitch them tight in the glare of our room, tall and white, with long wood tables and plates of silver instruments.
    Garbage! says the supervisor.
    But the stitches are good, I say.
    No keeping, he says, it’s shit. He turns and brays to the room, We are not in the jack o’ lantern business here!—his skull shining globy in the white, chilly light. Tidy stitches! he howls. Tidy, tidy!
    With his barks and warbles, he ruins the room. I, cowering,tell my ears don’t listen. My stitches stagger, wrung clumsy. There are so many hours before the day can end.
    The animals wait at home, splinted and bandaged. Codling, elver, owlet, smolt. Human milk works on these wild babies. Even the eel? Especially the eel. It finds the breast quickly. My nipple is bigger than its head but it licks drops. The young owl’s beak is nimble; the codling’s lips are a wet pleasure. The infant salmon sucks longer than a human child can. Hurt young animals heal quicker than you think. Some rest, some milky drink, some affection is a marvelous cure. Behind my house are shelves for them, tin-roofed, padded with straw. Clean troughs for the fish. Old soft

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