It was a long-standing and friendly argument. It all goes together in our bellies anyway. We can just put it all together in the pot, Matty insisted. The man laughed at Matty’s concoctions and tried to teach him, but Matty was impatient and didn’t care about the subtlety of herbs. So Matty swept the wooden floor each day and straightened the bedcovers: neatly on the man’s bed, with haphazard indifference on his own, in the room next to the kitchen. He cleaned the homeplace, though cleaning bored him. He lived with the blind man, the one they called Seer, and helped him. His face was becoming manly, he thought, though childishly he still enjoyed making scowls and frowns at his own reflection. Or, moving back in the high grass, he could see himself reflected in the glass pane. Once he had stood only to its sill, his forehead there, pressing into the wood, but now he was so tall he could see inside without effort. Sometimes, standing outside the homeplace, he measured himself against the window. Matty was no longer a boy, but not yet a man. There was something he needed to do, a thing that scared him. He wished he were grown so that he could decide when to eat, or whether to bother eating at all. MATTY WAS IMPATIENT to have the supper preparations over and done with.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |