Free The Age of Cities by Brett Josef Grubisic

he could avoid discomfort altogether by wearing his usual black wool sock on the normal foot and a silky one, thin as onion skin, on the other. Weeks later, daffodils and narcissus having bloomed and wilted, the difference between the two remained exactly the same, ropy and skeletal on the left, bloated as a drowned man on the right. The doctor had said in so many words that what he saw was barely worth fretting over, and now Winston resigned himself to that learned opinion. There were many worse problems in the world, he lectured to himself. This one was peanuts. He felt relief when he thought how different it would be if he had woken up with a face that was half inflated. Or suffering from a blinding headache that kept him secluded in a sunless room.
    Winston dutifully swabbed on pungent salves until Alberta became resigned as well. She tried out a few new combinations—an odd ingredient like catnip or fish roe swirled in with the standard dollop of mustard—and then snorted at her fruitless determination: “Ha! What’s next, prayer? A visit to a faith healer?”
    It was a perplexing condition, but her mirthful fancies about it induced a bout of laughter. While rifling through her herb drawer—you really ought to organize this godawful jumble of envelopes, jars, and paper scraps, she repeated the resolution for what might be the hundredth time—on a May morning filled with the threat of a scorching summer, she poked fun at the idea of them making some Old Testament-style pilgrimage to a wind-whipped canvas tent. Her vision relocated them to an endless dry grass field in the Prairies rather than a desert in the Levant, and arriving by bus.
    She piled up the details: they’d have to wait in a long queue and talk to other travel-cramped desperadoes—a tired, lank-haired woman with a heavy-set, simpleton daughter; a recently married couple whose only child had been paralyzed by polio—about their pain and anguish and pretend to have faith in their capricious God, who had first stricken them and then offered up an unlikely map back to health that had led them to a scorched plain in the middle of nowhere. She’d have to hold her tongue, she imagined, yet she’d be granted the rare opportunity to watch her son being forced to pass the time in dreary talk with complete strangers. Chewing the fat. Crops, weather, sickness, and God: Oh, how he’d squirm.
    As Alberta widened the vision’s scope, its mugging vaudeville callousness faded; she concluded they’d be on the first bus to Reverend Whatshisname if her son became sick and no one could help him. It was a mother’s right. Why wouldn’t she? Chiding herself for such mawkishness, she thought, I’ve grown into a weepy old woman. She blanched when she pictured herself as one of those fussy Orange Pekoe-sipping ladies who spend their long days looking with wistful, tear-brimmed eyes at old photographs and whispering of war and fateful, misery-bringing letters from the government. Stuck so deep in the mud of the past, she huffed.
    Alberta abandoned her brewing of remedies and talk of shoring up her store of knowledge. There was a time when you stopped darning holes in a sock, after all, and threw it in the bin. And, besides, there was nothing left to use in that musty drawer. No alchemical combination. She held fast to her conviction that a cure was out there, hanging on to that certainty without qualm, and spoke to Winston now and again of holding a pow-wow with the Indians who sold bargain salmon at shadowy cottonwood groves along the river’s bank. It was just that there were better ways for her to spend her mornings than fretting about proportions and herbs. With her gardens, for instance.
    Besides, it wasn’t as though her son’s malady was any more serious than the various aches and swellings that afflicted her each and every season. She had long since given up on remedying her patches of scaly