A Matter of Life and Death or Something Read Online Free Page B

someone hunting ducks. I’d heard the same sound lots of times before, but it still scared the heck out of me and it was still good to use my excellent reflexes just in case. I slowly got back up and sat on the rock. I felt a little bit sick when I thought about how something had probably just died, so close to where I was. I mean, something probably dies every millisecond, I know, but still. I thought that a duck would have a family, and if it wasn’t an idiot it might have friends, and maybe even a girlfriend if it wasn’t an ugly duckling or anything, and if it was rich. Anyway, there were other ducks out there, somewhere, and when that one duck didn’t show up at home that night, they would wonder where he might have gone and probably be excruciatingly depressed. I shivered but I wasn’t cold.
    I took a swig of milk from my thermos. It was very relaxing, sitting on the sea turtle rock drinking milk and ice cubes and forgetting about death and things. I tipped my thermos up and took another sip of milk with the bright sun closing my eyes, and when I tipped my head back down I saw something strange on the ground. Down the hill a ways, there was a corner of something sticking out from some leaves. I figured I probably had a milk moustache as usual, so I shaved it. Then I slid off the rock and climbed down to check out the whatever-it-was.
    It was a book. A splotchy black and white notebook, beat up and damp, half covered in leaves. I knelt down and pulled it out from the mucky leaves and brushed it off like a palaeontologist. I looked around for a second to check if there was anyone else on the hill, or up in the clearing, anyone who might have lost it. But I realized that the thing looked like it had been there for ice ages. Obviously, whoever owned it must have lost it a while ago and had no idea where it went.

    The cover was black and white like I said, this small speckly pattern of strange black shapes and strange white shapes crashing into each other and covering each other up. Someone had written their name on the cover, but their last name was all smudged.
    I hiked back up to the rock again and sat and opened it up. I examined the first page. Faded and sketchy handwriting filled the paper, written in black ink all attacked by the rain and wind and bugs and racoons and whatever else it had dealt with. I flipped through the rest of the book and found a bunch of pages pretty similar to the first. Most of them were filled with black handwriting, and each page was numbered in the top corner, because the book must have came with numbers already printed in it. Big parts of the writing were really hard to read because of how wet they’d gotten, and the ink was so runny. There were a couple diagrams, and there was a lot of stuff that was crossed out. Some pages looked like they were written carefully and slowly, with nice loopy letters and perfect spaces, like an intelligent sloth might write, but then some pages were more mashed together and had writing at weird angles, kind of angry looking. It must have been someone’s journal.
    â€œAaaarrrr-thurrrr!”
    I was almost all the way to the beach but I could still hear Simon’s voice. It was time to eat.
    I went over and put the book back on the ground where it was, but then I picked it up again. I was having a mid-life crisis. For some reason, I skimmed through the pages over and over, like I was having a case of Alzheimer’s right there in the woods. Like I said, I’d found lots of things in the woods, all the time, but I always put them back where they came from. I’d just never found anything that was so obviously someone else’s before.
    â€œAaaaaarrrrrr-thurrrrrr!”
    â€œOhhhhh-kayyyyy!”
    I put the notebook into my little white backpack with my thermos and my sketchbook and my field glasses. Before I zipped it up, I looked at it again, and I looked at the spot where I found it. I measured it in steps, and