[Download] "Bleeed" by Shenandoah ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Bleeed
- Author : Shenandoah
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 74 KB
Description
Hadn't known the girl. He had not. All he knew was, she was the daughter of friends of his parents. Or maybe just acquaintances, for his parents had known many people in those years. First, he'd remember of her, a distinct memory: He'd been thirteen years old and in ninth grade and she'd been only five years old, a lifetime between them at those ages. One small child interchangeable with any other small child, girl or boy, and of virtually no significance to a boy of thirteen for whom no one matters much except a select gathering of boys his age and older, and a very few girls. And there was his mother speaking to him in a voice frightening to him, impulsive, intimate, and her hands on him as if to restrain him from slipping away, "That poor child! And her parents! Of course, they have to be grateful that she's alive, and that terrible man has been--"and he saw a shudder of revulsion in his mother's face, and he quickly looked away, for there was something wrong in this, his mother speaking to him in a voice he rarely heard except when his parents were speaking together in the privacy of their bedroom and the door closed against their children. Jess was the sort of boy lacking not curiosity exactly but the recklessness required for wishing to overhear exchanges between your parents you understand are not meant for you to hear. And so, Jess resented this behavior on his mother's part. That look of revulsion tinged with excitement in his mother's usually composed face. For there was something sexual in this. Jess knew, and didn't want to know. For what could a terrible man mean if the girl had not been killed, except sex? Jess was embarrassed, and resentful, hotly his face pounded with blood, badly he wanted to escape. What had he to do with a child eight years younger than he was! And his mother saying, "If you've heard anything, Jess, will you tell me? Tell me what you've heard." (They were in the kitchen. Jess's mother seemed to have been waiting for him there. Had him trapped between the refrigerator and the stove.) At thirteen you no more want to speak of sexual matters with a parent than you want to speak of God with a parent. And so, not meeting his mother's gaze, Jess mumbled that he hadn't heard anything about whatever this was his mother was telling him, whatever ugly and unspeakable incident wholly unrelated to him and to ally of his classmates--Jess took care not to repeat the girl's name; the name of a five-year-old girl means virtually nothing to a boy of thirteen--assuring his anxious mother that no one at his school had been talking about it, so far as he knew. So far as he knew was possibly the truth. So far as he knew was, for a boy of thirteen being questioned by his mother in a way distressing to him, the most negotiable of truths. "The worst of it has been kept out of the news, so far. Her name isn't being released and actual details of what he did except 'repeated assault'--'critical blood loss'--imagine!--a five-year-old girl!--nothing about the family, and a picture only of the 'perpetrator.'" Jess saw his mother's mouth, that was usually a smiling mouth, was contorted. Harsh lines bracketing his mother's mouth. This is the way she will look when she is old. When she is older, Jess thought, wanting badly to escape now, push past his mother and run upstairs to his room, shut the damn door behind him and burrow into his most secret and forbidden thoughts, sick-thoughts, guilty-thoughts where neither his mother nor his father could follow him. For there are places in the world like secret fissures and fault-lines into which we can burrow, and hide, where no one can follow. Stammering now, insisting that he hadn't heard anything about the girl, nothing at school, daring now to lift his eyes to his mother's eyes in a desperate appeal, and it was then that Jess's mother uttered the astonishing words Jess would never forget: "I wish I could believe you." Not accusing so much as yearning, wistful. And her mouth s