Free Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 by The Small Assassin (v2.1)

the room was a mosquito
netting draped all about so that a turn entangled her in it. If only there was
one word, one word between them. But there was no word and the veins did not
rest easy in the wrists and the heart was a bellows forever blowing upon a
little coal of fear, forever illumining and making it into a cherry light,
again, pulse, and again, an ingrown light which her inner eyes stared upon with unwanting fascination. The lungs did not rest but
were exercised as if she were a drowned person and she herself performing
artificial respiration to keep the last life going. And all of these things
were lubricated by the sweat of her glowing body, and she was glued fast
between the heavy blankets like something pressed, smashed, redolently moist
between the white pages of a heavy book.
                 And
as she lay this way the long hours of midnight came when again she was a child. She lay,
now and again thumping her heart in tambourine hysteria, then, quieting, the
slow sad thoughts of bronze childhood when everything was sun on green trees
and sun on water and sun on blond child hair. Faces flowed by on
merry-go-rounds of memory, a face rushing to meet her, facing her, and away to
the right; another, whirling in from the left, a quick fragment of lost
conversation, and out to the right. Around and round. Oh, the night was very long. She consoled herself by thinking of the car
starting tomorrow, the throttling sound and the power sound and the road moving
under, and she smiled in the dark with pleasure. But then, suppose the car did not start? She crumpled in the dark,
like a burning, withering paper. All the folds and corners of her clenched in
about her and tick tick tick went the wristwatch, tick tick tick and another tick to wither on. . . .
                 Morning. She looked at her husband lying straight and easy
on his bed. She let her hand laze down at the cool space between the beds. All
night her hand had hung in that cold empty interval between. Once she had put
her hand out toward him, stretching, but the space was just a little too long,
she couldn’t reach him. She had snapped her hand back, hoping he hadn’t heard
the movement of her silent reaching.
                 There
he lay now. His eyes gently closed, the lashes softly interlocked like clasped
fingers. Breathing so quietly you could scarce see his ribs move. As usual, by
this time of morning, he had worked out of his pajamas. His naked chest was
revealed from the waist up. The rest of him lay under cover. His head lay on
the pillow, in thoughtful profile.
                 There
was a beard stubble on his chin.
                 The
morning light showed the white of her eyes. They were the only things in the
room in motion, in slow starts and stops, tracing the anatomy of the man across
from her.
                 Each
little hair was perfect on the chin and cheeks. A tiny hole of sunlight from
the window-shade lay on his chin and picked out, like the spikes of a music-box
cylinder, each little hair on his face.
                 His
wrists on either side of him had little curly black hairs, each perfect, each
separate and shiny and glittering.
                 The
hair on his head was intact, strand by dark strand, down to the roots. The ears
were beautifully carved. The teeth were intact behind the lips.
                 “Joseph!”
she screamed.
                 “Joseph!”
she screamed again, flailing up in terror.
                 Bong!
Bong! Bong! went the bell thunder across the street,
from the great tiled cathedral!
                 Pigeons
rose in a papery white whirl, like so many magazines fluttered past the window!
The pigeons circled the plaza, spiraling up. Bong! went the bells! Honk went a taxi horn! Far away down an alley a music box played “ Cielito Lindo .”
                 All
these faded into the dripping of the