The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

The moon was full again and the kitchen was alive with pale energy.

I lay on the floor, let fear cover me, and I tried to keep breathing while it shook me like a dog shakes a rat.

He should rrad dune lol

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

It was a surprise to me that she smoked, but I found out later she carried around a pack just to give a mooch to people when they asked.

But I was only physically born that day, you see. The way my life has gone, I was born several other times. I picked a date out of those important turning points to be my birthday.

was getting ready for our annual summer powwow this coming weekend.

During which some shit will go down

Dune was a fat paperback with three black figures walking a desert beneath a massive rock. I opened it at random and read something about a boy filled with a terrible sense of purpose.

Eavesdropping was a habit now. My sneaking came of needing to know that there was no other way, that I had to do this.

they could move with dignity under the weight of all this tradition, and not collapse.

I’m going to call this like it is. Murder, for justice maybe. Murder just the same.

Done for the day, I felt almost euphoric.

Then I went upstairs and fell asleep for an hour and woke into the same great wash of dread I began with every time I woke up. I’d have to do the same thing tomorrow

there were moments I forgot why I was there. I would get up to leave, thinking I was crazy. Then I remembered my mother stunned and bleeding in the backseat of the car.

Around here we don’t speak badly of the dead and he caught himself.

Made a mess of him like a kid shooting at a hay bale. Then one clean head shot.

Brother, I said, what made you come to the overlook? I was always there, said Cappy. Every morning. I always had your back. I thought so, I said. And then we slept.

They wanted to believe me so much that I saw they’d make every effort to believe.

spoke childishly, in a sudden fury of excitement that wasn’t fake.

remembered my mother climbing to that place of loneliness from which we feared she never would descend. No, I thought, as I crept into my bed, I’ve got Cappy and the others.

occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring. I

wanted to add that he did not die easy, that he knew what he was getting killed for, that he saw who was killing him. But then I’d have to say it was me.

Lol cask of amontillado

Margaret Nanapush, the grandma of the Margaret in my class at school, the girl at the powwow I turned out to marry, told

Linda’s house was extremely neat in the usual way, but also in a way that disoriented me until I figured it out. Everything had a double, though not an identical.

Your father is a very good shot. He is? This was of course a big surprise to me. Everybody knows that. He brought down anything he aimed at as a young man. Kids don’t know their parents’ history.

Can I trust you? If you have to ask me that? No.

His mother couldn’t face what she did to her baby, but even more: that what she did could not destroy me.

I should have felt happy watching them across the table, but instead I was angered by their ignorance. Like I was the grown-up and the two of them holding hands were the oblivious children.

Something’s fighting in me, Joe, my father said.

There was no question of his guilt. He may have even wanted to get caught and punished.

It could be argued that Lark met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law.

He’d said I was now safe, but I was not exactly safe from Lark. Neither was Cappy. Every night he came after us in dreams.

At that moment, we exchange selves. Lark is in my body, watching. I am in his body, dying. Cappy runs up the hill with Joe and the gun, but he doesn’t know Joe contains the soul of Lark. Dying on the golf course, I know that Lark is going to kill Cappy when they reach the overlook. I try to call out and warn Cappy, but I feel my life bleed out of me into the clipped grass.

had worked on Bugger’s hunger and turned him around so I could get back my bicycle. But I’d never asked him what he saw.

The plot wasnt ready

She was in the construction site, the earth mounded over her. I couldn’t help the picture from forming. Us jumping our bikes, flying back and forth, and her below.

in spite of what I’d done I was still the kind of person who thought ahead and made lunch,

I took one and wrote my parents that I was going on a camping trip. They should not worry, I’d be with Cappy and I was sorry for the short notice. I said that we’d be gone for three or four days. I’d call them.

The sun burned forever and stayed balanced on the horizon for an age, then flared red from below that dark line for another eternity. So it seemed that time stopped. We rolled effortlessly in a dream.

After this, I think, said Cappy, it will all come out. There’s still that file with his name on it. So why not? She was jailbait, Mayla. He’ll go down for sure, I said then. But Yeltow never did.

We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.