Read Kalila for Free Online

Maggie chop carrots for the stew. Her arms, their sculpted outline, their scattering of freckles. Her neck muscles clenching. You’re lonely for her, even though she’s here. She reaches for an onion and soon begins to cry, bent over, fists stuffed in eyesockets, laughing, It hurts. It hurts. You want to buy her a silver necklace you cannot afford, a pair of ruby earrings, something to draw her breath in, clasp her hands together. Something to make her forget, if only for a little while. Her arms make angular shadow puppets against the wall. Winter dusk brings sadness, a despondency you have to fight. Pushes you to silence. Maggie gets pissed off that you don’t chat, but these days you’re holding up the world.
    She hands you celery. You begin to chop. You are an outsider; you’ve always been. Your parents use words to inflict damage, like the side of an axe to drive a point home. Words frighten you. A phrase falls like Newton’s apple, drops and explodes before you get it out; words shift into shapes, intents you never meant. In the classroom this doesn’t happen, only here, where words are too important. Galileo left words altogether. In the late 1500s he disappeared into the Camaldolese monastery; attracted by the quiet, studious life, he joined the order.
    You start in on the Chinese cabbage. People in ancient times believed the earth stood still, and the sky moved around it. That’s how they explained the changing position of the stars, movement from night to day. Strange, the earth’s steadfast rotation. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five days, six hours, nine minutes, and ten seconds. One revolution around the sun. You’ll put that on the grade ten science exam. You pick up a zucchini. A trivia bonus question.
    Maggie climbs a chair to reach a serving bowl. You want to say, I’ll tell you anything, but Maggie doesn’t ask. Beside you, your Cross pen, three red marking pens, your calculator, a stone you picked up by the river, your labs, a book called simply Physics , as if that says it all. Maggie moves to the light switch and, without asking, gathers up your pens and papers, sets a place for two.
    She’s using few words these days. You miss her chatter, her foolish endless lists of who she lunched with, a joke one of the old men in the Home told her — why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine — how some of the old ladies are forever chasing Fred Regier. Those times seem relics of an ancient world that you strain to remember.
    Throughout dinner neither of you says a thing.
    Your silence, and the rhythm of the lifting of your spoons.



Foothills Neonatal ICU becomes a separate country. With its own time zones, population, weather. Well-behaved mothers are allowed inside its borders only after passport inspection, the ritual washing, the donning of the gown.
    The hospital gown: that barrier, that disguise. A yellow gown that forces mothers to look like invalids, not real mothers at all. What does a mother bring to neonatal? Nothing. I flip open the Mother File in the filing cabinet of my head, watch my own, bent weeding in the garden, moving under loads of wash, sprinkling clothes, making soap, cutting noodles, gutting chickens, canning fruit, alive with the energy of chores. My mother fed her children from the soil. I pushed my child, soiled, into the world. She slid out in her own feces, meconium-stained. A sign of distress, the doctors said. Kalila made some pick of a mom. I look around the huge warehouse of a room, designed for optimal efficiency. Isolettes jut from the walls. Panels of wall plugs. Blinking, beeping monitors. Hell of a nursery I’ve created for my daughter. The nurses told me yesterday they’ll take no more breast milk. Kalila cannot swallow. Just give up the breast pump. There’s no work I’m allowed to do. Not even fold clothes. Kalila has none. My work experience in a seniors’ residence doesn’t