The End (41 page)

BOOK: The End

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“And the sound broke on my mind—you remember the sound, a sound of exquisite suffering with something else in it. Something I could not . . . refuse, a sound of what suffering is on its backside; it was the hopeless sound of a child’s laughter.

“A minute later the old man gave a terrific stomp and they all started in again with the banjos and the singing. I could not catch my breath. And you let go my arm and touched your lips to my ear and said, ‘Stop this crying.’ But I did not know I was crying until you told me. I thought I was laughing. I believed I was laughing, like the boy’s saw, like a child laughing. I believed I had no hope at all. I had no hope at all. I could not stop myself from laughing. The clock over the stage read seven thirty. There was the smell of tobacco spit and popcorn.

“And if ever. Should you ever—so you must open your mouth and drink something warm. If you were to. Then—you know this, so you must help me, you must open your mouth and drink—then you would plunge me irretrievably to the bottom of the dead and irretrievable past.

“You remember, don’t you? How there was a boy with fierce eyes and wispy yellow hair on his cheeks, and how you put your mouth on my ear as though we were alone, and how the old man whooped? We drank our supper. The old man, at length, climbed down from the stage, took a seat by the stove in the middle of the room, and fell asleep.

“And we stayed till eleven and listened to the lads play.”

Acknowledgments

This book was written with the aid of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Michener/Coperni cus Society, the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, and the Corporation of Yaddo; and with the indispensable advice of Rick Barot, Sara Becker, Sarah Braunstein, Bill Clegg, Michael Dumanis, Tim Earley, Jaimy Gordon, Vanessa Hwang Lui, John Michael MacDonald, Fiona McCrae, ZZ Packer, Roger Skillings, Jennifer Sprague, Justin Tussing, and Emily Shelton.

SALVATORE SCIBONA
’s first novel,
The End
, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. He administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The End
has been set in Adobe Caslon Pro,
a typeface drawn by Carol Twombly in 1989,
and based on the work of William Caslon (c. 1692-1766),
an English engraver, punchcutter, and typefounder.
Book design by Wendy Holdman.

The End (41 page)

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