Forget Yourself Read Online Free Page A

taken—like Frederick the artist, and Rings who sewed things. I was unemployed, which meant little except boredom—I had no idea what I had enjoyed before this new life. Did I read books? What were they about? I thought of books on a shelf, an endless array of smart blue spines, gold lining without words. They all looked like our book, our one book. Perhaps I sang, but how did singing work, when it can’t be proven that tunes have words? Ketamine had been unemployed as well. We had enjoyed each other.
     
    That evening I awoke, huddled under a collection of clothes and blankets: the night was cold. The noise drifted toward and away, a blunt thud thud thud, dim like blood pulsing through my ears. I lay on clammy foam, wondering if the dull clanging noise was real or not. The darkness was heavy. I had so much space. I didn’t want it. Promises of sleep seemed to slip away.
    It was my time with the book tomorrow. Thud, thud, thud. Was that noise there? Through the window I could see the crisp moon. It drifted toward and away.
    Then I saw it, as clearly as with my eyes.
    A woman made of stone. A woman made of stone with an arrow in her hand and a dog at her feet. The stone woman’s lips were painted berry red, her cheeks flushed pink. She looked at me.
    The stone woman.
    The stone woman was poised in elegant action. Her arrow was raised above her head, a bow strapped to her back. She was hunting, hunting some unknown creature.
    Behind her were dogs, a dozen of them, all racing, bounding, snarling forward; all hard, all immobile.
    The woman was looking back at them now, face frozen in wide-toothed grin, eyes fixed and alert. Two dogs were ahead of her, frozen, unmoving.
    Her mouth was open. She unleashed a cry in silence. Her bow was in her hand.
    Her bow was aimed high, the stone arrow tense, ready.
    The arrow was gone.
    She and her dogs were gone.
    It was a memory and it was mine. I tried to hold onto her, to grasp at her, but her image faded and she’d come away in soft wet clumps between my fingers, fizzling away into the sweat-soaked air.
    All that was left was me, the bed, the hut and the compound, thick arching walls to keep the world away. I had remembered something, however strange and wordless. I had remembered something.
    The foam coiled around my skin, hugging my ears and hair, sticky and tickling my arms and my legs. It was too much. I carefully shifted myself from my bed, to my sheet-door and into the night air. The moon coyly hid itself behind rapid clouds, occasionally flashing me, spreading glimpses of naked light over the ground. Crunched sand and dry grass massaged my feet as I made my way past silent huts. With each step my eyes grew heavier, my limbs more leaden.
    There was a whiff of fruit-filled stench, of decomposing, of decay and entropy.
    Then it was gone. All I could trust were my heavy legs, carrying me toward—carrying me toward the courtyard. That’s what I wanted, to rinse my face in water. That’s what I wanted.

THE BOOK LAY PEACEFULLY BEFORE me, my fingertips gently pressed against the rough paper. Slices of sunlight worked their way into the magic of the book’s very own hut, worming their way around sheets of corrugated iron. In here it was always cool and dry. In here, far away from life and houses, it was quiet.
    The book was serene.
    It knew it could rest before me, that I would never have a chance to befoul its pages with ink-tainted memory. I had no pen. I wouldn’t be writing my memory of the stone woman. I was just going to read as always.
     
    “You’re just going to read as always.”
    That’s what Pilsner had told me. He’d found me in the courtyard, prone, slumped over the water tap. The sun had stabbed at my eyes with the hot anger of day. He’d been stood above me.
    “Can I get to the tap?”
    “Tap?” It was wrapped in my arms and pressed against my chin. My neck ached. “Oh, right. Sorry.”
    “No problem,” his shadow moved toward me as I uncrossed my stiff