Free Last Things by Jenny Offill Page A

chest againand again. After a long time, Alec blinked and waved his arms. One hand fluttered through the air, then rested on his heart.
    My father put down his pipe. He looked at Alec for a long time. “Did you see anything?” he asked finally. “Lights and beckoning figures, I suppose?” Alec shook his head. My mother appeared in the doorway. “What did you see?” my father said again. Alec stretched his arms out wide. He said that the last thing he saw was the wings of a great bird closing over his face. He looked at my mother, lovely in the doorway.

The last night of summer, it was too hot to sleep. Only my father could. He could sleep through anything, my mother claimed. To prove this, she knelt beside his bed and played a kazoo in his ear. “See?” she said when he snored through “God Bless America.”
    In our nightgowns, we drove to the lake. It was quiet out. Just the trees and the dark night all around. At the edge of the water, my mother took off her clothes and dove in. The mouth of the lake closed over her. I was afraid, but I didn’t cry.
Shh
, I heard her say.
Don’t say a word
.
    It was like that sometimes. Her voice in my head, quiet and blurred like a piece of a dream.
Shh
, she said.
Shh
. The wind moved across the lake. It made a sound like a slap when it hit the waves.
The monster lives here
, I thought. I watched the white balloon of my mother’s face bob to the surface. It slept at night like we did, she said.
    The water was cool around my ankles. I waded in deeper and deeper until only my head showed. Ipretended I was a woman whose head had been cut off and was floating out to sea. My mother had told me about guillotines and about the black-hooded executioner who pulled the string. I let my head drift along the waves, singing a sad little song.
I’m dead, I’m just a head, I’m mean, I’m guillotined
, the song went.
    My mother swam over to where I was. “I thought the monster got you,” she said. A piece of hair was plastered to her head like a question mark. The moon made her skin gleam. I hooked my arms around her neck and clung to her. The black lake of death, my mother called it when we went there at night.
    She swam like a turtle with me on her back. There were just a few stars out. We swam out past the end of the pier, toward the darkness that was Canada. The sky was a dingy gray streaked with white. It looked as if someone had wrung all the color out. I thought of the monster asleep at the bottom of the lake. Was he lonely, I wondered. Did he think he was the only monster in the world?
    My mother believed that the monster was a dinosaur left over from another time. Once in a blue moon, she said, a creature everyone thought was extinct was discovered in some remote corner of the world.
    This happened once off the coast of Africa when two fishermen caught a strange gray fish. The fish had fierce-looking teeth and fins attached to leg-like stalks. Local fishermen were puzzled until a paleontologistcame to town. He identified their catch as a coelacanth, a primitive fish believed extinct for more than thirty million years.
    My mother knew a lot of extinction stories, but this was the only one that ended happily.
    There have been two great extinctions since the beginning of time, she told me. The first one happened 245 million years ago and wiped out almost every living thing. The second one killed the dinosaurs, but no one knows why.
    When would the third extinction begin, I asked, but my mother said it already had and that it wouldn’t end until the last human being disappeared from Earth.
    In the distance, the lights from the shore flickered and went out. There was a floating dock far out in the lake and this was what we swam toward. I tightened my grip around my mother’s neck. She was swimming more slowly than before. I was afraid she might fall asleep and sink.
    I tugged on her hair. “I want to go home,” I said. “Right now, I want to.” My mother didn’t answer. She