From the Corner of His Eye

suspicious and figured that his new eyes were totally out of control and spinning like pinwheels.
        "CAN WE LISTEN TO A TALKING BOOK AFTER BREAKFAST?" asked Miss Velveeta Cheese.
        "The one I'm about to start is Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is maybe pretty scary."
        "WE DON'T GET SCARED."
        "Oh, yeah? What about the spider last week?"
        "I wasn't scared of a dumb old spider," Angel insisted in her own voice.
        "Then what was all that screaming about?"
        "I just wanted everyone to come see the spider, that's all. It was a really, really icky interesting bug."
        "You were so scared you had the trots."
        "If I ever have trots, you'll know." And then in the Cheese voice: "CAN WE LISTEN TO THE BOOK TALK IN YOUR ROOM?"
        Angel liked to perch sideways with a drawing tablet in the window seat in Barty's room, look out at the oak tree from the upper floor, and draw pictures inspired by things she heard in whatever book he was currently listening to. Everyone said she was a pretty good artist for a three-year-old, and Barty wished he could see how good she was. He wished he could see Angel, too, just once.
        "Really, Angel," Barty said with genuine concern, "it might be scary. I got another one we could listen to, if you want."
        "We want the scary one, 'specially if it has spiders, Pixie Lee said squeakily but defiantly.    
        "All right, the scary one." "I SOMETIMES EVEN EAT SPIDERS WITH MY CAVIAR." "Now who's being gross?" The morning that it happened, Edom woke early from a nightmare about the roses.
        In the dream, he is sixteen but racked by thirty years' worth of pain.
        The backyard. Summer. A hot day, the air as still and heavy as water in a quiet pool, sweet with the fragrance of jasmine. Under the huge spreading oak. Grass oiled to a glossy green by the buttery sunshine, and emerald-black where the shadows of limbs and leaves overlay it. Fat crows as black as scraps of night that have lingered long after dawn dart agitatedly in and out of the tree, from branch to branch, excited, shrieking. Branch to branch, the flapping of wings is leathery, demonic. The only other sounds are the thud of fists, hard blows, and his father's heavy breathing as he deals out the punishment. Edom himself lies face down in the grass, silent because he is barely conscious, too badly beaten to protest or to plead for mercy, but also because even to cry in pain will invite more vicious discipline than the pummeling he's already endured. His father straddles him, driving big fists into his back, brutally into his sides. With high fences and hedgerows of Indian laurels on both sides of the property, the neighbors can't see, but some know, have always known, and have less interest than the crows. Tumbled on the grass, in fragments: the broken trophy for the prize rose, the symbol of his sinful pride, his one great shining moment but also his sinful pride. Clubbed with the trophy first, fists later. And now, here, after he is rolled onto his back by his father, now, here, roses by the fistful jammed in his face, crushed and ground against his face, thorns gouging his skin, piercing his lips. His father, oblivious of his own puncture wounds, trying to force open Edom's mouth. "Eat your sin, boy, eat your sin!" Edom resists eating his sin, but he's afraid for his eyes, terrified, the thorns pricking so close to his eyes, green points combing his lashes. He's too weak to resist, disabled by the ferocity of the beating and by years of fear and humiliation. So he opens his mouth, just to end it, just to be done with it at last, he opens his mouth, lets the roses be shoved in, the bitter green taste of the juice crushed from the stems, thorns sharp against his tongue. And then Agnes. Agnes in the yard, screaming "Stop it, stop it! " Agnes, only ten years old, slender and shaking, but wild with righteousness, until now held in thrall by her own fear, by the memory of all the beatings that she herself has taken. She screams at their father and strikes him with a book she's brought from the house. The Bible. She strikes their father with the Bible, from which he's read to them every night of their lives. He drops the roses, tears the holy book out of Agnes's hands, and pitches it across the yard. He rakes up a handful of the scattered roses, intending to make his son resume this dinner of sin, but here comes Agnes once more, the Bible recovered,