EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 19
taken from our collective lives we are diminished. But even in death we have much to
celebrate. It is only a transition, like so many others."
She moved into the circle and unfastened the lids of the caskets. From where he sat the
hunter could not see inside. His wife's hands fluttered around her waist like birds. "Think,"
she said. "Think hard about something you would like resolved, some matter, gone now, in
the grips of the past, which you wish you could take back—perhaps with your daughters, a
moment, a lost feeling, a desperate wish."
The hunter closed his eyes. "Think now," his wife was saying, "of some wonderful moment,
some fine and sunny minute you shared, your wife and daughters, all of you together." Her
voice was lulling. Behind his eyelids the glow of the candles made an even orange wash. He
knew her hands were reaching for whatever—whoever—lay in those caskets. Somewhere
inside him he felt her extend across the room.
His wife said more about beauty and loss being the same thing, about how they ordered the
world, and he felt something happening—a strange warmth, a flitting presence, something
dim and unsettling, like a feather brushed across the back of his neck. Hands on both sides
of him reached for his hands. Fingers locked around his fingers. He wondered if she was
hypnotizing him, but it didn't matter. He had nothing to fight off or snap out of. She was
inside him now; she had reached across and was poking about.
Her voice faded, and he felt himself swept up as if rising toward the ceiling. Air washed
lightly in and out of his lungs; warmth pulsed in the hands that held his. In his mind he
saw a sea emerging from fog. The water was broad and flat and glittered like polished
metal. He could feel dune grass moving against his shins, and wind coming over his
shoulders. All around him bees shuttled over the dunes. Far out a shorebird was diving for
crabs. He knew that a few hundred yards away two girls were building castles in the sand;
he could hear their song, soft and lilting. Their mother was with them, reclining under an
umbrella, one leg bent, the other straight. She was drinking iced tea, and he could taste it
in his mouth, sweet and bitter with a trace of mint. Each cell in his body seemed to breathe.
He became the girls, the diving bird, the shuttling bees; he was the mother of the girls and
the father; he could feel himself flowing outward, richly dissolving, paddling into the world
like the very first cell into the great blue sea ...
When he opened his eyes, he saw linen curtains, women in gowns kneeling. Tears were
visible on many people's cheeks—O'Brien's and the chancellor's and Bruce Maples's. His
wife's head was bowed. The hunter gently released the hands that held his, stood, and
walked out into the kitchen, past the sudsy sinks, the stacks of dishes. He let himself out a
side door and found himself on the wooden deck that ran the length of the house, a couple
of inches of snow already settled on it.
He felt drawn toward the pond, the birdbath, the hedges. He walked to the pond and stood
at its rim. The snow fell steadily, and the undersides of the clouds glowed with reflected
light from the city.
Before long his wife stepped onto the deck and came down to join him. There were things
he had been preparing to say: something about a final belief, an expression of gratitude for
providing a reason to leave the valley, if only for a night. He wanted to tell her that
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