Free If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories by Laura Kasischke Page A

said a word about the humming of the electrical lines until Tony finally insisted that they all stop and listen.
    “Listen,” he said, holding up a hand. “It’s there. It’s terrible. You’ve just gotten used to it.”
    Three or four matrons cocked their ears to the sky, and Tony could see the sound of it register on their faces. Oh, yes, they agreed, that high whine, that incessant buzzing. Really, it was something.
    And, now, as if in response to being heard, the sound swung and surged, widened and narrowed. It was the sound he imagined someone being electrocuted would hear. Wires and heat penetrating a brain in waves. Excruciating. But numbing. And Tony felt good. He’d gotten them to stop, to listen. Even the little girls had begunto gather around, and were silent now, intent, their faces turned up to it, all of them hearing it—the daughters and their mothers looking from the wires to the sky and then back to Tony, focusing in on him as if they could tell that he was a man at the height of his powers, a man who heard things others couldn’t hear, and he felt quite sure that they’d always remember him, and that day, and the way he’d stood there listening to the lines with them, and how, then, as if calling them back to the things of this world, he’d started to talk about the weather, so casually, in his own backyard, as if nothing were the slightest bit out of the ordinary here.

Our Father
     
    A fter our father lost his passport, we had to hide him. By then, this was easier to do than it would have been earlier, before so many other fathers had gone missing. The factory still blew its whistle—some programmed and mechanized cry that couldn’t be stifled—but we never saw any fathers shuffling off to work any longer. That old, gray migration through the ashes with their lunchboxes was over. Now, it was all frantic mothers out there in the streets, trying to look pleasant but with ashes of their own on their lips and under their eyes.
    When there was a knock on the door, one of us would shake him awake, tug him by the arm from the couch, and shove him into the bedroom. The other would wait until the all-clear signal (a faked sneeze) to open the door.
    “Is your father home, little girl?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Who’s that sneezing back there?”
    “That’s just my sister, sir.”
    The wind seemed to move around in the mouths of these official men at our door, as if they’d been wolfing down nothing for so long they couldn’t keep it from coming back out. Old newspapers seemed to blow around behind their official eyes. You could see headlinesand obituaries fluttering back there. The expressions on their faces were like car alarms that had been screaming for days and had just that moment gone silent. Some said it was due to the estrogen in the water, these changes in these men’s faces.
    These men, we felt sure, were nobody’s fathers. The actual fathers were not wearing suits like these. They were hunched and exhausted by exhaustion and secreted away under beds and inside bells, as clappers too soft to make a sound.
    “Well, here’s my card. When he comes back—”
    The card always bore a name and an eagle and a blazing bonfire in the traditional colors of red and black.
    “—he’s to check in with his Official. He will of course need to bring his passport.”
    His passport.
    Poor Daddy.
    Every time he crawled out from under the bed after one of these visits, he was covered with dust. It clung to his face and to his arms and back, and no one bothered to brush it off. What would have been the point? There would just be more dust to come. There was no one to sweep the floors now that our mother spent her long days holding her tongue in meetings, or standing beside the conveyor belts. Our father couldn’t do the sweeping because he was busy suffering, and we were too young.
    So, for years we hid our father when there was a knock at the door, and we looked for his passport. We looked under the