Aquarium by David Vann Page A

winter. When everything is unbearable and exposure too much, the air too hot to breathe. My mother the best person in this world, the most generous, the strongest, but this was her dry season, when she was more like a storm than a person, wind-blown dust, accelerating from somewhere sourceless and vast, and I knew to hide.
    Lungfish can slow to one-sixtieth their normal metabolic rate, but this slows time, also. One night becomes sixty nights. This is the price for hiding. Just hold your breath for one minute and find out what a minute becomes.
    In the morning, I tried to remain invisible. I looked down at my cereal and never looked up. My chewing took forever. We ate again with only the small light from over the sink, which made night shadows of everything, large and distorted.
    He has nothing to lose, my mother said. This whole game costs him nothing. I pay, but he doesn’t pay. Same as it’s always been.
    I knew not to say anything. Anything I said would be an attack. I looked up only in quick glances, my mother’s face in shadow, hidden, the light behind her.
    And what you don’t know is that things can be lost quickly. I can lose Steve, and it only takes a few nights like last night. Only a few, and it won’t matter everything we did together before. All of that can be erased. All you have to do is hold out a little longer and you’ll take him away from me. Do you want that? No more Steve?
    I’m not trying to do anything.
    You can cut that crap, too. You know what you’re doing. You haven’t listened to anything I’ve said about the past. You don’t care what he did to me. And don’t start crying. I’m sick of that whole self-pity thing. Your life is easy. We have to go now anyway or we’ll be late. And do you know why we have to go so early?
    I wasn’t looking at her. I looked at my bowl of cereal and tried not to hear.
    We’re going because your mother gets to be a slave all her life, so that the little princess can have a better life. This is what parents do.
    Parent, I said. One parent.
    Oh, that’s beautiful. So you really do want to fight.
    I tried to do better than the lungfish. I tried to burrow down and turn to stone. No hole of dried mud to emerge from at the first rains, but my body turned to rock.
    You’re not going to say anything more? Just that little gem and that’s it?
    I thought my mother would hit me, but she didn’t. She stalked away and grabbed her stuff and opened the door. We’re going now.
    I was tempted to stay. What would happen if I just didn’t move? But I was afraid of her, so I stood up, grabbed my backpack and coat, and slid past her out the door.
    Cold, snowing, cones of yellow flakes in the streetlights pressing downward and come from nowhere, only black above. I held the handrail in case of ice. I could feel the air in my nose and throat.
    It’s gonna be great at work, my mother said. What a pleasure to be outside in nature, with all the steel beams and slush and oil and hydraulic fluid and grime and salt sprayed everywhere, and great to know this is still the beginning, that it’ll be about four more months of the same. More rain than snow, but still cold. What a great pleasure. What an honor.
    My door was frozen shut, so I had to yank to break it free. My mother was scraping ice off the windshield. No one else around at this hour, the cars and apartments dark. The ground cracking beneath us. I slid in to the bench seat, my legs instantly cold through my jeans. I sat on my gloved hands and hunched over to conserve warmth. If we just sat here for a few hours and did nothing, we could die.
    My mother cranked the engine, and it was slow to start. She revved it, smooth fans of power, no sound of pins. And then we drove slowly down our street onto East Marginal Way South going north, taillights of other cars ahead now and lights of the city beyond.
    My favorite part, my mother said, is when I get all sweaty and then we have to wait awhile, just standing around, and the