Free See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

answered it and it was someone from a utilities company—one of the many in the now-known world—someone from a company who supplied an essential component that kept the Sweet household a reasonably comfortable place in which to find yourself. Mr. Sweet gave reassuring answers, explaining the delays of payment in a way that never brought up the truth that the Sweets could not at that moment pay their bills, and he did it with such conviction and in any case what he was saying was believed, and this convincing falseness made him feel that he had gotten away with murder; not the murder of Mrs. Sweet or the young Heracles, because he only wished to kill them, not murder them.
    And so that passed in the moment, the Sweets, Mr. and Mrs., with their respective positions regarding their young son, from very different perspectives, as the boy lay in his crib, clad in his little tunic that had been wrought with loving purpose by Mrs. Sweet, his tunic that was a shield from the natural elements from which a newborn child must be protected. But Mr. Sweet was much vexed, for bills and such everyday matters interfered with how he thought the world, you know, the everyday, should progress: for instance, when you, or anyone for that matter, turn on the light switch, the light, be it in the ceiling or a lamp on a table, will come on; when he wanted hot water for his coffee (he liked instant coffee, Maxwell House) he had only to turn on the stove and a brilliant flame would appear and make the water hot and then he would have his beverage and this is how he began each day; when he wanted to call his mother and father, who were at that time in the grave, he picked up the phone and dialed: who should pay for it all, who should pay for living itself, this was a question that so concerned Mrs. Sweet and why did Mr. Sweet not know her, not know who she really was, not know she was a virus, the cold that brought you low in summer.
    I hate her, thought Mr. Sweet, but she billowed toward him, in a long white nightgown she had bought from the Laura Ashley store on Fifty-seventh Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues in New York City; the cost of this garment could have paid for a month’s worth of telephone calls to her relatives who lived far away, or a day’s worth of drugs that could keep a person who was dying of AIDS alive for weeks then, or the fee of the copyists who copied the complicated jumble of notes that Mr. Sweet said was music. That nightgown, so light in fabric, for it was woven from cotton grown in Egypt, so romantic in the imagination of the person who made it and who later died after falling down some stairs, could so easily be transformed into a noose, but how to get Mrs. Sweet to put her neck into it? Mr. Sweet came into the room, looked down at the baby Heracles, and kissed his wife. See Now Then, See Then Now, just to see anything at all, especially the present, was to always be inside the great world of disaster, catastrophe, and also joy and happiness, but these two latter are not accounted for in history, they were and are relegated to personal memory. And she looked at her son again lying in his baby bed and in no particular order and also all at once these thoughts and accompanying feelings overwhelmed her. The episiotomy, a necessary wound made by the doctor (Barbara was her name) in charge of the safe delivery of the young Heracles, caused Mrs. Sweet much pain, a pain that she had not imagined ever, but should have had a memory of it because that same gash had been made in her vagina when she was giving birth to the boy’s sister, but this kind of pain, this particular kind of pain, another person living comfortably inside you and then, after a while, forcing themselves out into the world, and in doing so tears apart your body, and you will love them more than anybody else will love them, such pain, so much of it, and sometimes it had a texture, rough, undulating, sharp, and stinging, intermittent, then flat and