Free How the Days of Love and Diphtheria by Robert Kloss Page B

the paper kingdom, set ablaze.
    Now the woman’s belly, mounded in low sickly glow. When the man felt the rise and what struggled beneath he understood the tent was no longer enough. So he constructed a house alongside the burning house. Now inside the tent the woman grew large. Always from her position the long shadows of construction, the ground of soot and ash. Hammering and the strains and groans and soon an entire wall blotted for the shadow of this new house. A two-story home in the English colonial style, the miniscule windows and the stone chimney, the wood plank floors and how this man pilfered the landscape for animals to insulate the walls, how he figured the fur and meat of these creatures would shelter them from the roar of the neighboring house, the fumes. How the kittens scratched and mewed and the hounds, their muffled baying until all was silent, until, finally, all were dead or too weak to mew and moan. How the windows streaked black and in those days, very seldom, the tar dripped. Their flower print wallpaper and how she scrubbed furiously with bleach at the first hint of black. Always, no matter the insulation, the soft blue fumes and the wood smoke, the pine tree air fresheners she hung first from the living room doorway and then the kitchen and soon fastened from hooks in the ceiling and all throughout the bedroom, the nursery. The subtle motions of a thousand air fresheners when the man or woman passed beneath. How the man’s eyes watered for the smoke and pine fumes. How he punched the walls, the bloody purple of his knuckles and how he said “this goddamned house!” There the drip of tar along the crevices. How the television antenna bent under the soot and now the man on the roof with a push broom. How the woman wept silently on the sofa while the man’s racket from the rooftop, the hoarse wind, the plummet of cinders. Soon the duct-taped rabbit ears and the flickering local news. Now the soon-mother mounded on the flower print sofa and the soon-father there sockless and half asleep on his reclining chair. How they tucked the exterminator clothes away in trunks in the cellar, how they said “good riddance.” How the woman pried open the trunks while the man went job hunting and the waft of dust and age and yellow and how she regarded these clothes, starched with mold and soot, some mornings, as she strung the laundry across the basement. The laundry she once thought to dry in the open sun and how she leaned at the window, and the thought of the grass and the wind and their sheets, thrashing against the breeze.
    In those days our women died by childbirth or by the flames. How many women we found as if tarred, sprawled on front lawns, within pantries. Yes, so often an unwed mother became a living wick, and her condition was cured by the long blue flames—
    Now the boy along the hillside. How he lay on his belly in a mound of soft ashes. How he watched the lighted windows and the mother and father who were not his and the son they bore. How the son was not him. How he watched them through the lighted windows, streaked with soot. The son, in those days and how she held him against her lap, his pink open mouth. Now how the boy dreamed of you, returned. How he considered your hooves and your white eyes peering through black masks. How the son grew and how this new family laughed and watched television. How they ate carrots and ham from television trays. How the son grew. Soon, almost a man. How the father snuck the old exterminator outfits from their chests and how this son and the father played catch in them, their familiar bandanas tight. Their slow ungainly trudge through the debris. How the cinders caught in the wind seemed like worms set afire. How the ball spiraled through this horror until it plunged forever into mounds of black. How father and son made black angels pressed into the soot and how their soot castles caught on every gust. When the two returned inside how