Read Grants Pass for Free Online

hand hung low, holding a string of beads, his
mala, and he pushed them through his fingers, one after the other. Staring
straight ahead, he didn’t seem to realize what he was doing. His lips moved,
but no words came out.
    She didn’t blame him. Even the
incense couldn’t cover the smell of sickness in their one-room flat, all sour
and wrong . The storms had started again, and the sky hung heavy and gray
over the Boudhanath Stupa outside. Thunder rolled now and then, and bucketfuls
of rain slammed against the roof. They couldn’t even open the window to let in
some air.
    New cloth retrieved from the cool
bowl beside her, she took the old one from Tenzin’s forehead and replaced it.
He made a face, like her touch hurt him. Pema winced because she knew it did.
It had started three days ago. Now Tenzin’s normally sun-brown skin looked like
pale wax, wet from sweats that came out of nowhere. He’d sleep for a few
minutes, then wake up and twitch in some awful unspoken pain, then sleep again.
    She hoped he’d sleep forever soon.
When he did, she wouldn’t leave him at the ghats with all the others. Sonam
wouldn’t want to either.
    Cloth replaced, she stood and wiped
her hands on her jeans and went to the desk, flicking on the computer screen.
The internet connection had gone down last week, but she still opened up her
inbox and went through her old mail now and then. They hadn’t seen anything
from their oldest brother, Thinley, who had been in Chicago, for weeks. The
last she’d heard, the sickness and devastation was worse there.
    Here, they’d had landslides in the
mountains, disasters along the roads to Tibet and floods on the roads to the
Terai. The monsoons had begun early for the last two years, the rivers had been
flushed with too much runoff from the Himalayas, but the Valley and her people
had mostly survived. Pilgrims had still come from the villages, Hindus for the
temples, and Buddhists for the stupas and monasteries. Shopkeepers had opened
their doors in spite of the fact that there were no tourists, and hadn’t been
in over a year. It was an act calculated to ward off their own despair, but it
spread to the rest of the city — or at least the neighborhoods like Boudha that
used to thrive on tourism.
    Pema wished she could find out about
Chicago — whether things were better or worse there. Thinley’s emails used to
be so funny, full of stories about the city, how different the clubs were
there, the jokes people told him, and the strange Inji couple who owned the
restaurant where he worked. But she didn’t open any of those; instead, she
opened his last mail, scanning it again, even though she had it memorized.
    It still didn’t make any more sense
than it had the first time. He must’ve been sick when he’d written it — Tenzin
sounded the same, fevered and confused. There was something pasted into the
text — a journal entry, maybe from someone he knew there, but definitely an
American.
    When the end of the world comes,
meet me in Grants Pass, Oregon.
    That, at least, made a little more sense, these days. But still, not much.
    As she had the thought, there was a
sudden popping sound from the computer, from inside the walls, and the screen
went black. The sound of the tower’s fan stopped short. The light overhead
flickered and went out.
    A hard knot formed in Pema’s
stomach, as she sat there in the gray-almost-dark, listening to the suddenly
deafening sound of the storm outside. She looked over her shoulder at Sonam.
    He sat in the exact same position:
Staring at nothing, fingering his mala thoughtlessly. He hadn’t even noticed.
    “ It’s not
Thursday, is it?” she asked, because she wanted to hear him say something.
Thursday was Boudha’s scheduled evening for blackouts, to save power…but she
knew it wasn’t Thursday.
    “ No.
Saturday.” His expression never changed.
    He could’ve at least smiled at her,
she thought. He was the oldest here — he used to smile at them when