Free The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) by Tina May Hall Page B

as sin and twice as delicious. Strawberries grow in the shade at the edge of the forest—you have to hunt for them.
     
    Now. He lifts the latch, and the door swings open. My mother used to say there was no time like the present. I step forward like a bride. He knows all my soft parts. Still some way off in the woods, I see it, the ruby scrap, a cardinal flitting perhaps, the reflection of the setting sun. I keep my eyes on it, ignoring him as if he were a doctor prodding me, a paper sheet between us. I watch until the red fills my vision, seeping up from my very skin.
     

How to Remember a Bird
     
    There is a hole growing in the center of town. People come from all over to see it. The first time anyone noticed, it was the size of a pumpkin, but since then, it has become so big we have stopped measuring. Just last month, the bakery slipped into it, and for days, the hole smelled like rye bread. It is hard to tell when the hole is going to open wider, so we don't get too close to its edges. Of course, children are fascinated by the hole and must be kept away with warnings and threats. My friends and I used to stand near the edge of the hole and dangle our heads over. It was a strange feeling, as if something were both pushing and pulling us, a feeling that we could endure only for a few moments, just long enough to start to see the outlines of things rumbling below us and to hear the echo of conversations, so faint they might have just been our own voices, reflected.
     
    A few years ago, a paleontologist from St. Louis came looking for bones and fell in. He caught hold of a root (gnarled as an old woman's knee , he said later) and held himself there, about twenty feet down, until some men from the filling station pulled him out with a rope. He is the only person I can remember who went into the hole and came back out. Before he left to go north and look at something frozen, he told us that in the hole he saw armchairs and tennis racquets sticking out of the walls and heaps of shoes and staplers piled onto ledges. I think it changed him, being in there, because he didn't talk about rock strata and geologic eras anymore. He couldn't stop describing items he spotted and sounds he heard and how dark the center of the hole was, how it was like night, except in pieces he felt moving against him. We listened to him carefully because a lot of the things he mentioned were familiar, things we had lost a long time ago.
     
    When anyone dies in the town, we say that person went into the hole. Even the older townspeople say it, though they knew a time when there wasn't a hole and still there was death. Last Fourth of July, the oldest woman in town gave a speech about when we didn't have the hole and how life was worse then. She said having a hole was a way of remembering. But a lot of people didn't believe her and called her senile. When I was young, my parents told me our cat, Galileo, went into the hole, but I saw them putting her in the metal drum where we burned trash out in the yard. That was when I realized there were several ways into the hole. I found another in the back of Brian McConner's Volkswagen bus, where I had sex for the first time. There was a little refrigerator that Brian had painted with neon green daisies, and as we slid and slipped all over the foam mattress that smelled of patchouli and sweat, those daisies went translucent and dark, disappearing before my very eyes. Years later, the paleontologist described neon flowers glowing deep in the hole, almost covered by junk mail and half-empty nail polish bottles, flourishing like some strange plant that only existed thirty-five feet underground.
     
    It is said that if you throw something from a dream into the hole, the dream will leave you forever and a new one will come in its place. For instance, if Bill, the diner owner, throws his apron into the hole he'll spend his nights combing the tail of a piebald horse instead of washing endless mounds of gravy-crusted