OCR Text |
Show 13% to erupt h e l l f i r e and c e l e s t i a l sparks again. She had been a d o c t o r ' s only daughter. The summer she and my father were engaged, he had been logging at nearby Lake Hebron to help support his f a t h e r ' s family and to pay for the diamond r i n g he had ordered from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Her family vacationed with his family at Crater Lake and seemed to approve of the warmth between the two During t h e i r separation, logging through young people. "My f a t h e r had grown t a l l e r , tannerAthat summer, but Karen must have grown in his mind, assuming mythical proportions in his dreams as her brown, young body bcame the epitome of desireable womanhood. When at l a st everyone he saw her, he disappointed -families by declaring, "Karen, how small you are!" I stood beside Brian, staring into the water. It was lovely - no longer a pustule erupting on the earth, but crystalline and pure. Intraducible as Brian's eyes. Pale-blue shade of my father's. Impertinently-blue and clearer, almost challenging the sky in purity. Dedptive as romantic love, annointing the heart with rapture, inducing two to hope, to turn from all the world to find consolation in a single orb, a solitary sphere. When, in fact, it is the mou hell in disguise. "Nothing can live in it," Brian told me. "No fish? No plants?" Why couldn't I remember what I had +hp wav the mind sees learned and relearned about illusion - xne wdj 4-v,^ -hpa-rt is stunned into more than is really there when the hearx 11= r -Poplins: as stupid as silence. But I asked Brian anyway, feeling * a middle-aged debutante. "Why not?" |