The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Rebecca Hirsch Garcia
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Short Stories
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
A Golden Light
After her father died Sadie stopped moving.
It started with her throat. The day her mother called and told her he was
dead she opened her mouth to scream or cry or shout or something, and
nothing came out. She pushed her throat muscles together and moved her
tongue around until she felt ridiculous and then, at last, a bubble of sound
slowly pushed its way out of her mouth. It was a tiny, tinny no quickly
buried underneath the sobs which flagged in and out from the receiver. She
tried again to say something more, but this time she spoke only silence.
Hello? her mother called over the receiver. Sadie, hello?
I will never be able to talk again, Sadie thought mournfully, and she
placed the phone back in its cradle.
But the loss of sound was only the beginning. It was soon followed by a
loss of movement. Walking up or down a flight of stairs became an
insurmountable effort; soon even walking on the flattest of flat sidewalks
seemed an undertaking too painful to bear. She began to feel as if she was
struggling underwater each time she stood up on her own two feet. By the
time of the funeral her hands had become slow and dim-witted, clumsy and
uneasy to manoeuvre.
At the burial Sadie stood in the front row, and as they lowered the
casket into the ground, she realized that she could no longer hear the
morbid sounds of the coffin scratching along the dirt. She strained her head
forward, listening for the sounds of sobs and the indelicate noise of noses
being blown, but there was nothing except a strange humming void.
I’ve misplaced my ears, she thought, and tried to remember if she had
put them on that morning or had simply gone out without them.
She looked around for her sister or her mother or her brother-in-law;
instead she caught the wandering eye of a middle-aged woman, some
variant of cousin or family friend. She touched Sadie’s hand, her eyes
watering in a fresh wave of tears. Be strong, Sadie read off the woman’s
lips. Sadie nodded vaguely and let her hand be clutched, let herself be
dragged into the sea of black cloth that wept and reminisced on her
shoulder. They all seemed so sad, but Sadie, dazed from the loss of her
senses, kept forgetting what they were being sad for.
After the burial she fell under a wave of exhaustion. She couldn’t make
it to the car; on the way out of the cemetery she sat down to rest on a little
bench marked Viner and never got up. If it wasn’t for her brother-in-law,
who noticed her absence in the car and came looking for her, she might
have remained there forever, hunched on the bench like a small frightened
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