The Seventh Day Read Online Free Page A

hides them away.
    The pages of my newsprint he does not enjoy, for he cannot make sense of letters. I am smoothing my crumpled pages when he comes to lean close to me and to study the page where there is a large colourful likeness of the 172 February female. I have seen her before, but the words above her say that she has now left the world, for she had passed her twenty-sixth year.
    I think Lenny likes to look at her long dark hair and her large dark breasts, but I like her name. Names are important. ‘Feb-ru-ary.’ I say. Perhaps she knew my mother. ‘Feb-ru-ary.’
    Because of his young limbs and yellow hair, I have found a brief remembering of mother since the day of Jonjan. If I close my eyes tight I can see her golden hair spread in the dust. If I press my fingers hard into my ears, I can hear her words.
    Honour her. Honour her.
    She had no feature that I recall, only the hair and the cold hand that would not hold me. I press my fingers to my eyes striving to see that hand, to grasp its image, but it blurs and washes away like paint from my brush when I stir it in the grey oil spread.
    I remember the leaving of her and the crying, and the dark, and the falling, and the knowing that down was the way I must go. Always down. I remember the wandering through rock and rough scrub and the gouging cuts in my flesh and my hopeless weeping until a small light led me in.
    Then Granny. Out of the silence, out of the night she came, and her hard hands held me, bathed my wounds and washed my face while I screamed.
    Though memory of my mother is scant, Lord, how well I remember Granny. She was the scent of cedar wood and age. She was wild yellow grey hair and her skin, a patchwork of parchment, stretched taut across rigid bones. She was books and a long stick, and in her ending, five granite teeth and blind sapphire eyes. It is an ugly thing, death, but Granny in life was no beauty.
    Her stick burned well in the stove; I did not burn her books for they have been my life and I have lived my life within them. I have swum in pools of ancient words, hidden in forests of ancient words that weave for me tapestries of life more wonderful even than the woven scene on Granny’s bedroom wall, where a brown rabbit cowers beneath the green tapestry bushes, hiding from the slavering tapestry hounds.
    â€˜Be a rabbit when they come for you,’ she had said to me many times, so I have become as that rabbit; I cower beneath the misty places of my mind when the grey men come.
    Heat hangs heavy today. It clings to the air, burning each breath dry while perspiration prickles, trickles, but to the south the sky is alive. Lightning darts and licks at the earth with its many tongues, and if I breath deeply, fill my lungs, I can smell the scent of water blown down from the hill. I love that scent.
    Jonjan smelt of cool water. When I think of his death there is a place deep within me that aches, as my back ached when I was a careless child and fell from my freedom tree. I did not climb so high again. And I will not think of him again. He is dead, so it does no good to think of him, yet today I want to climb my freedom tree, climb high, higher, climb so high like Jack of the Beanstalk so the grey men may never find me again.
    They are very small, but very important city men, who wear their names on splendid shoulder ornaments of gold. There is Sidley, Stanley and Salter, though I think it would matter not if they each wore the same name. They are as one. Thin, hairless, grey scalp, grey face, grey overall and grey gloved hands that move me to their will, as Lenny moves a fallen tree to his will. Cut by the screaming city machine, trimmed, drilled often and threaded through with silver wire, that tree becomes a fence support, useful, but dead.
    The grey men did not waste time with me last night, for the testing of my heat was not as they wished, thus there was no Implanting. They studied the blue pill container, issued on the night of