Only Children

Начало книги

AT LAST, she felt The pain. From out of the universe the hurt arrived: rumbled into her belly, radiated to her pelvis, crashed into her spine, and dissolved, a terrible acid, into her bones.

And then it was gone.

Nina rose from the bed slowly — for weeks she had had to rotate herself one way, then the other, in order to gain enough momentum for rising — and waddled out of the bedroom.

Once in the hallway, she heard Eric on the phone. He was at the center of an electronic carnival. Besides using the phone, Eric had his eyes on a television broadcast of a baseball game, its volume muted, while the stereo softly played his current obsession, Handel’s Messiah. To achieve these multiple sensory gratifications, Eric had stretched the phone wire from the kitchen wall unit all the way out, across the living room, so he could sit on the couch while chatting, his eyes on the television, his ears perfectly positioned to hear the stereo balance.

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