The Unfinished World Read Online Free
Author: Amber Sparks
the fur of a Siberian tiger.
Father at forty: garrulous, charming, handsome, and mustachioed, dancing through a series of professional and personal failures. He lectures his daughter on the tigerâs mating habits, explains how important it is that they respect this creature, teach others to respect it. That is what we do, Louise, he tells her, and his eyes are merry and brown and his fingers are light and small as those of the ladies who make lace in the historical village. He, too, is making something lovely: life, complex and grave and astounding.
Not alive, he tells Louise, he is always telling Louise. We cannot strive for them to look like life.
Then what? she asks, puzzled. Her eyes are perfect mirrors of his. What should they look like?
Like a dream, her father says proudly, for he thinks of himself as a maker of dreams. The dream of a tiger, the dream of a rhino, the dream of a squirrel. The perfect form that preceded all the real tigers and rhinos and squirrels.
Louise at fourteen, shy before such brilliance, asks her father if there is a perfect form for everything in the dream. Even me? she asks.
Louise at thirty-four cannot remember now what answer her father made her, no matter how she opens her brain and shakes out the contents like an overstuffed handbag. Louise at thirty-four cannot remember.
It costs an enormous amount of money to keep up the estate, even without servants. Thereâs the lawn service to pay, the estate taxes, the plumbing company because these old pipes are forever breaking, the roofers because this old roof is forever leaking, and a thousand other costs besides.
And of course, there are the property taxes. Those, finally, prompted Louise to accept the offer from a friend of a friend: to meet privately with a very famous installation artist. Noel needed a discreet, talented taxidermist. His previous taxidermist had just died, No, not that sad, dear, he was good lord nearly a hundred so donât worry about that, but we need a new and brilliant one now, donât we? Noel speaks often in the royal âwe,â though his bizarreBrooklyn/posh London mash of an accent sounds more like a bad imitation of both.
She has always considered herself an artist, anyway, and she doesnât like the limelight, so this arrangement suits them both perfectly. Noel pays her well, she pays the property taxes, and she can continue doing exactly what she likes and allowing Clarence to do the same.
And she likes Noel. They are alike, very much alike, except that he is commercially minded and she is not. He is passionate about Audubon and says frankly if he were a better painter he would probably not be so bloody famous. He lost his little boy to brain cancer and his first wife left him six months later. Louise and he have sex sometimes on the floor of her workshop, surrounded by dead teeth and dead skin and the strong smell of formaldehyde. Itâs not really a fetish so much as it is a pact of sadness, a shared wish to sail through the underworld and rescue the ones who left them long ago.
Louise is a scientist. She is experimenting with new things, working toward a greater knowledge of the world, a vague sort of natural philosopher in her way.
Clarence is an archivist. He collects and makes and organizes to preserve the past. He is working toward an understanding of the world through the memories it already holds.
Brother and sister look nothing alike. A full five years separates them, but no one would blame you for mistaking their unusual, unspoken closeness for the bond between twins.
The space between her and Clarence is a world. Sometimes shethinks they are the sun and moon, each rising when the other dies, each dependent on the otherâs careful sleep. Together, she thinks, they are two strange creatures, and yet it is only together that they keep this place in a tense stasis; they are the precarious balance by which the estate holds steady.
Clarence at fifteen tries to be
Father at forty: garrulous, charming, handsome, and mustachioed, dancing through a series of professional and personal failures. He lectures his daughter on the tigerâs mating habits, explains how important it is that they respect this creature, teach others to respect it. That is what we do, Louise, he tells her, and his eyes are merry and brown and his fingers are light and small as those of the ladies who make lace in the historical village. He, too, is making something lovely: life, complex and grave and astounding.
Not alive, he tells Louise, he is always telling Louise. We cannot strive for them to look like life.
Then what? she asks, puzzled. Her eyes are perfect mirrors of his. What should they look like?
Like a dream, her father says proudly, for he thinks of himself as a maker of dreams. The dream of a tiger, the dream of a rhino, the dream of a squirrel. The perfect form that preceded all the real tigers and rhinos and squirrels.
Louise at fourteen, shy before such brilliance, asks her father if there is a perfect form for everything in the dream. Even me? she asks.
Louise at thirty-four cannot remember now what answer her father made her, no matter how she opens her brain and shakes out the contents like an overstuffed handbag. Louise at thirty-four cannot remember.
It costs an enormous amount of money to keep up the estate, even without servants. Thereâs the lawn service to pay, the estate taxes, the plumbing company because these old pipes are forever breaking, the roofers because this old roof is forever leaking, and a thousand other costs besides.
And of course, there are the property taxes. Those, finally, prompted Louise to accept the offer from a friend of a friend: to meet privately with a very famous installation artist. Noel needed a discreet, talented taxidermist. His previous taxidermist had just died, No, not that sad, dear, he was good lord nearly a hundred so donât worry about that, but we need a new and brilliant one now, donât we? Noel speaks often in the royal âwe,â though his bizarreBrooklyn/posh London mash of an accent sounds more like a bad imitation of both.
She has always considered herself an artist, anyway, and she doesnât like the limelight, so this arrangement suits them both perfectly. Noel pays her well, she pays the property taxes, and she can continue doing exactly what she likes and allowing Clarence to do the same.
And she likes Noel. They are alike, very much alike, except that he is commercially minded and she is not. He is passionate about Audubon and says frankly if he were a better painter he would probably not be so bloody famous. He lost his little boy to brain cancer and his first wife left him six months later. Louise and he have sex sometimes on the floor of her workshop, surrounded by dead teeth and dead skin and the strong smell of formaldehyde. Itâs not really a fetish so much as it is a pact of sadness, a shared wish to sail through the underworld and rescue the ones who left them long ago.
Louise is a scientist. She is experimenting with new things, working toward a greater knowledge of the world, a vague sort of natural philosopher in her way.
Clarence is an archivist. He collects and makes and organizes to preserve the past. He is working toward an understanding of the world through the memories it already holds.
Brother and sister look nothing alike. A full five years separates them, but no one would blame you for mistaking their unusual, unspoken closeness for the bond between twins.
The space between her and Clarence is a world. Sometimes shethinks they are the sun and moon, each rising when the other dies, each dependent on the otherâs careful sleep. Together, she thinks, they are two strange creatures, and yet it is only together that they keep this place in a tense stasis; they are the precarious balance by which the estate holds steady.
Clarence at fifteen tries to be
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