دانلود رمان انگلیسی “فقط یک خورشید”

THIS IS NOT A REWRITE OF THAT STORY IN WHICH PLANTS AND animals and people keep winding up dead over the course of a school year, but it starts the same, and it feels odd not to acknowledge, so I will. I just did. Things kept dying. My father first, in June, then the puppy my ex-wife had adopted to help the children get over their grandpa, and then the school janitor, Lane. Right after Halloween, Lane had died during lunchtime in the cafeteria, in front of the kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, my son, Ernest, came home from school and told me that he hoped there was no afterlife. “I hope there’s no afterlife,” he said. We were in the living room, looking through the window, waiting to see if the rain would turn to snow. “I hope he’s not watching over me.” I asked who he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about my father, but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. I didn’t think it could be the dog. “I just don’t want there to be an afterlife, is all,” Ernest said, after thinking about it for a few seconds. “For anybody. I think when you’re dead you should stay dead.” I had him and his sister for the weekend. Sally, who was now eleven and exploring Catholicism (to her mother’s alarm), kept talking about her hope that my father was watching over us. My father had been very fond of her. He’d taken her to the Art Institute every Wednesday, taught her painting techniques and a lot about art history. They’d been obnoxious together, playing games like who could most quickly recite the titles of all the artworks in Gallery 397 (Sally’s favorite), or all of Pablo Picasso’s middle names in order. (The full name was ###Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, a succession of sounds I came to know as well as the alphabet.) A few weeks before my father died, he had asked me if he could take Sally to the Venice Biennale, where one of his paintings was being shown. We both knew that this would likely be his last trip abroad. I’d told him he could take Sally to Venice if he took Ernest, too. “Ernest doesn’t care about art,” my father had said. “He’s eight years old,” I’d said. “He cares about his grandpa.” They’d all spent two weeks touring Italy— Venice, Florence, and Rome—a trip Sally still mentioned at least once a day. A trip that I, alone with my father as a child, had also taken a version of.