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Show Woodworth/232^ Don't ask me any questions. Just read that number." He points with his glasses. "Why don't you find your own glasses?" she asks, slowly. "Than you could read it." He doesn't answer. "That one," he says, and points again. She looks at the line of tiny type, noticing that his fingers are red and wrinkled, different than the skin under his pajamas. She reads the number twice before saying it out loud. Gold Cross Ambulance Service. "Why?" she asks, but he is already out of the room, repeating the number over and over to himself. Jake has died. Not Jake. Her body feels parched. Empty crab shells, brittle on the beach. "Warty, come down," Ned calls up to her- Automatically, she gets up, puts on an over-sized t-shirt. Don't want to go. Don't want to see. Why me? Ned is in the kitchen, holding a mop. Does he expect her to mop the floor? Then she sees Ruth at her feet. Her head is in a pile of eggs, and yolk sticks to her hair- Whole yolks bob incongruously in the mess, and a stream of blood from Ruth's nose trails through the whites like the remnants of a fertilized egg. Her body looks small and twisted at an impossible angle. j . •• • The tan mblifcairy jacket makes her look young and slender. 9 "Worn?" |V\arty says quietly. The silence is punctuated by a blue jay, fighting with another bird at the feeder, "nom?" she says again, and Ned tries to interrupt saying, "I've called the..." But then it over-takes her, blind and rushing and heavy as tidal waves, sweeping everything down eight years into one morent where the family is getting smaller and smaller, closing in, shrinking until thev will an bP inyj.s^ble. all of them ashes, all of them dust. |