Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,57

industrial tin with pieces of green felt taped over the sharp edges back and forth with a motion reminiscent of one snapping out a blanket to make it lie flat on the bed, producing a sound much like thunder if heard from the gymnasium’s seats, while Ruth Simmons and Yolanda Maldonado stood with adult supervision on the catwalk above the row of colored lights for the stage and dropped blue and white bolts of construction paper lightning that we had spent an entire class period using rulers to trace the zigzags of and cut out. My father got permission to leave work early in order to attend the presentation, and even though our mother was again not feeling up to par and could not join him, we had a fun time later recounting for her all that went on, with Terence Velan in stovepipe hat and woolen beard having memorized the Gettysburg Address and reciting it perfectly while his long beard’s glue detached at one side and began slipping further and further down, until the beard came off altogether at one side and was swinging in the breeze of sixteen furiously waving little flags, and Chris DeMatteis forgetting (or never having had the chance to even study, as he claimed) the bulk of his lines and opting to simply thrust his lower jaw and empty cigarette holder out further and further and to repeat, ‘Fear itself, fear itself,’ over and over (my father claimed it was dozens of times) while, backlit on the stage behind him, Gregory Oehmke and several other boys who had access to their fathers’ helmets and tags charged with broomsticks and aluminum foil bayonets (Llewellyn also brought a sidearm that turned out to be real, even though he claimed the firing pin had been removed, and afterwards he got in trouble, and his father had to come in and talk to Mrs. Roseman) against the papier mâché bulwarks of Iwo Jima.

INCARNATIONS OF BURNED CHILDREN

The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child’s screams and the Mommy’s voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile before the stove and the burner’s blue jet and the floor’s pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the Mommy down on one knee with the dishrag dabbing pointlessly at him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she was almost frozen. Her one knee and the bare little soft feet were still in the steaming pool, and the Daddy’s first act was to take the child under the arms and lift him away from it and take him to the sink, where he threw out plates and struck the tap to let cold wellwater run over the boy’s feet while with his cupped hand he gathered and poured or flung more cold water over the head and shoulders and chest, wanting first to see the steam stop coming off him, the Mommy over his shoulder invoking God until he sent her for towels and gauze if they had it, the Daddy moving quickly and well and his man’s mind empty of everything but purpose, not yet aware of how smoothly he moved or that he’d ceased to hear the high screams because to hear them would freeze him and make impossible what had to be done to help his own child, whose screams were regular as breath and went on so long they’d become already a thing in the kitchen, something else to move quickly around. The tenant side’s door outside hung half off its top hinge and moved slightly in the wind, and a bird in the oak across the driveway appeared to observe the door with a cocked head as the cries still came from inside. The worst scalds seemed to be the right arm and shoulder, the chest and stomach’s red was fading to pink under the cold water and his feet’s soft soles weren’t blistered that the Daddy could see, but the toddler still made little fists