Body and Bread by Nan Cuba

muscles twitching. “How, someday, we won’t be alive.”
    I rocked, still holding my legs. The concrete felt warm, gritty. “I wonder if you dream when you die.”
    “Shh no.” He rubbed his palm down his jeans. “Your body gets cold and clammy.” He leaned toward me. “You don’t feel nothing.” His voice was husky, his breath like steam. “You don’t even think. It’s like, clunk, it’s over, for good.” He flipped the ball toward the mitt.
    “But Gran says our souls go to another world so we don’t need to be scared.” She’d held my hand one night as we knelt by her bed, her knuckles a row of marbles.
    “I don’t know about any of that.” Sweat dripped from underneath his cap, down the side of his face; he rubbed it into the shoulder of his t-shirt.
    “You don’t think there’s such a place?” The possibility of Sam’s disbelief panicked me. If he was wrong, he was doomed to burn forever. If he was right, I was doomed to rot.
    “I believe there’s just dead.”
    The ball smacked. My teeth pressed dashes into my knee.
    The others stayed in the kitchen to watch TV while I sneaked to Sam’s room. He sat on his unmade bed, holding his moss-colored, Chinese water dragon. A fluorescent light warmed its aquarium, bathing a branch and pebbles in a hazy glow. The lizard’s tail curled across Sam’s lap, the spikes along its back like miniature daggers.
    “Come here. I’ll let you hold her,” he said, rubbing the top of its head until its eyes closed, sleepy.
    “Uh uh.” I took a step backward.
    “Chicken,” he said. “She can’t bite.”
    He’d once made me touch a crawdad and, later, a fish. Light-headed, I sat on the edge of the bed. When Sam held out the lizard, it waved its front legs twice, froze. The spidery claws clutched my hand and wrist, its skin soft, not slimy.
    “I’m sorry about what happened downstairs,” I said.
    “Mama’s so stupid,” he said, flopping on the bed.
    “She must’ve had a reason.”
    “You don’t know anything.” He grabbed a tennis ball next to his bed, bounced it off the wall. He caught it, threw it again. Every time it hit, a gray smudge appeared. He tossed it into the corner. “Come on.” He snatched his cap. “I’ve got something to show you.”
    He left a note next to the telephone in the kitchen: “Sarah and I have gone to play softball.”
    We trudged across yards, up streets, down an alley. “Wait,” I whined, trotting. Dogs yapped along their fences; cars sped past. Downtown, an empty Woolworth announced “For Rent” in its window; boards sealed the double doors of the town’s less popular movie theater. Over the years, each block’s expanding quota of broken glass and graffiti had correlated with the accumulating window cracks and water-stains at the GC&SF station. Trains still lurched every day into its yard, then left again with an occasional passenger, grain-heavy hopper, log-filled flatbed. But most cars rolled along, their wheels clicking, their linked bodies empty.
    The sky stretched a fading blue, cloudless; the sun inched behind First National. Half an hour later, we turned a corner to face Latimore Memorial Hospital, its complex of buildings and covered walkways sprawling.
    Sam led me to the oldest wing, where my father taught anatomy. “Dad brought me here,” he said, knowing I’d never been invited. “There’s something you’re not going to believe.”
    The construction was granite brick with Gothic oval windows, ledges of dark limestone, balconies on the west and north sides. The same architect had built the GC&SF station—ornate, clumsily reminiscent of European cathedrals.
    The concrete stairs led to heavy front doors topped by a cut glass window inscribed “Nugent Sanitarium.” An arch of carved Greek heads in profile bordered the entrance. Instead of starting for the entry, which was locked Saturday evenings, Sam turned toward a side doorway partially hidden by pyracantha bushes. He pulled it, motioned