Lamb

Начало книги

We’ll say this all began just outside of Chicago, in late summer on a residential street dead-ending in a wall. It was the kind of wall meant to hide freeways from view, and for miles in each direction parallel streets ended at the same concrete meridian. No trees on the lawn, no birds on wires. Northern shrikes gone, little gray-bellied wrens gone. Evening grosbeaks and elm trees and most of the oaks and all the silver brooms of tall grass and bunch flowers and sweetfern and phlox gone. Heartsease gone. About the tops of upturned trash bins, black flies scripted the air.

Imagine the corner house made of white brick and aluminum siding the color of yellow mud. Inside an old man sat in a dim-lit television room, tipped back in his La-Z-Boy, a box of microwaved chicken balanced on his sunken chest. He had shuffled into the yellow kitchen and taken a vacuum-packed meal from the freezer out of habit, microwaved and carried it with a sour dishrag into the TV room out of habit. It wasn’t until he sat down and smelled it that he remembered he’d intended not to eat. He let it cool and he picked at it with his fingers. Tried not to breathe. Again and again he held his breath until some will that was not his own reclaimed it.

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