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By Root 611 0

Aunt Perasia put a handful of paper in the grate and lit it. Adela grasped the cockerel by its neck, and held it over the flames to scorch off the remaining feathers. The bird suddenly spread its wings in the fire, crowed once and was burned. At that Aunt Perasia began to shout and curse. Trembling with anger, she shook her fists at Adela and at Mother. I could not understand what it was all about, but she persisted in her anger and became one small bundle of gestures and imprecations. It seemed that in her paroxysm of fury she might disintegrate into separate gestures, that she would divide into a hundred spiders, would spread out over the floor in a black, shimmering net of crazy running cockroaches. Instead, she began suddenly to shrink and dwindle, still shaking and spitting curses. And then she trotted off, hunched and small, into a corner of the kitchen where we stacked the firewood and, cursing and coughing, began feverishly to rummage among the sonorous wood until she found two thin, yellow splinters. She grabbed them with trembling hands, measured them against her legs, then raised herself on them as if they were stilts and began to walk about, clattering on the floor, jumping here and there across the slanting lines of the floorboards, quicker and quicker, until she finished up on a pine bench, whence she climbed on the shelf with the crockery, a tinkling wooden shelf running the whole length of the kitchen wall. She ran along it on her stilts and shrank away into a corner. She became smaller and smaller, black and folded like a wilted, charred sheet of paper, oxidized into a petal of ash, disintegrating into dust and nothingness. We all stood helpless in the face of this display of self-destructive fury. With regret we observed the sad course of the paroxysm and with some relief returned to our occupations when the lamentable process had spent itself.

Adela clanked the mortar again, pounding cinnamon; Mother returned to her interrupted conversation; and Theodore, listening to the prophecies in the attic, made comical faces, lifting his eyebrows and softly chuckling to himself.

The Night of the Great Season

Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.

We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother's life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-wilted shoot, more tentative than real.

What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought stunted, empty, useless days—white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist.

There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters.

Ah, that old, yellowed romance of the year, that large, crumbling book of the calendar! It lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it. Ah, when writing down these tales, revising the stories about my father on the used margins of its text, don't I, too,