OCR Text |
Show Moon -10 "Sometimes I wish it made me sick," David said. "Maybe I like it too much." He did not seem to suffer ill effects. He seemed merely intense, his eyes rimmed red with feeling, his words thick, as if losses and yearnings had layered up inside him like fallen leaves. It did not seem wrong for someone to be this way, to see her for the first time, to be an artist, a person who notices the way things are attached: branches to trunks, ankles, elbows, breasts. When she came home after class one night, her mother met her at the door, her lips pressed thin. She followed Anne up to her room. Then she closed the door behind them both and flung herself at the charcoal nudes Anne had taped to the walls. She tore them down and crumpled the large sheets of paper into balls, her face twisted with rage. She said in a hissing, quiet voice, "You are falling my daughter, falling into the darkness of the world." There was an Army officer at her window at the train station who wouldn't go away. He had pale blue eyes that would have been cold except that they were rilled with admiration for her, and he had taken off his cap to reveal a head of thick, almost black, hair. She slid his ticket under the brass bars, and still he stood there, oblivious to the line of people behind him. "What's your name?" he said. "I don't think you need my name to get on the train," she said, remembering Alice, who always used to say, "Never talk to a man without a proper introduction." "I think you're beautiful," he said. |