Our Dried Voices Read Online Free

and sunken eyes, the comfortable loungers by living corpses almost too weak to move. Across the meadow one colonist moaned. Half-chewed green blades spilled from his mouth. The others ignored him. They drifted over the sun-soaked meadow and waited for anything that would take away the feeling of life, a feeling which had become all too painful among the living.
    * * *
    On the morning of the fourth day the colony remained lifeless, the people staying in bed as long as possible. But had anyone been awake about an hour after sunrise, they would have seen a woman emerge from an opening in the wall of the low building attached to one of the meal halls. The woman rubbed her eyes as she stepped into the bright morning light and walked off in the direction of one of the sleeping halls. There she took a pillow from an empty bed, went back outside, and fell asleep in the building’s shadow. She met a few people as she entered the sleeping hall, those who could no longer bear the hard sun beating against their closed eyelids and had crept out into the meadow to wait for darkness. They did not recognize her. No one in the colony would have recognized this woman, for there was nothing particularly distinctive about her physical appearance. No one would have recognized her, save Samuel. For she was the woman with the bright copper eyes who had struck his attention a few days earlier.
    When the bells sounded, a few colonists drifted into the meal halls, acting out of boredom or habit or the faintest ember of hope that the food machines might have been miraculously repaired. And in fact, when the first person stepped up to the hole in the back wall, the red light flashed and there was a familiar clicking and whirring sound. And then a plate of food appeared in the opening.

III
    W ithin a few days it seemed nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the colony. Laughter returned to the meadow. The big cottony clouds that signaled the next day’s rain rolled in and blotted out the sun’s heat. All the food machines functioned regularly once more. Most colonists took their meals and ate outside, reveling in the idyllic weather. Samuel arrived late to the midday meal. He ate his cake and walked along the river that wound idly through the center of the colony, occasionally stopping to dip a toe into his shimmering reflection. Groups of colonists splashed about in the shallow water, their wordless, playful cries diluted by the drowsy babble of the stream. Others napped in the shadow of the halls or the few trees dotting the meadow. Samuel wiped crumbs from his hands and turned away from the river for a shady tree of his own.
    A female colonist intercepted him, stepped into his path without a word and batted her eyelashes, her face blank save for an overwrought attempt at a fetching half-smile. Samuel would not have recognized her a second time. She moved a step closer to him as they converged at the edge of a low-hanging tree. Reached out, laid her hand on his inner thigh. He slipped a hand under her tunic. Pushed her into the shadows. There was the slight curve of her breast that marked her sex. Not that it mattered.
    Under the tree it was stagnant, windless. The willowy boughs drooping from the gnarled and stunted trunk washed away the sounds of the meadow. Their brown skin rubbed and smeared. Their breaths commingled. Shallow. Rapid. Climbing. Their heat filled the emerald shade and cocooned around them. Mottled leaf-shadows wavered across their bodies until they shuddered and fell still. They shared one final breath together, their chests falling heavily.
    They separated intact. Samuel picked up her tunic and pulled it over his head. Neither noticed. She donned his tunic over smooth skin that glistened with sweat and ran her hands down the front, ironing out invisible creases. It was just slightly loose on her.
    She turned her moony face toward him and forced another grin. “Thuvyuvarymuch. Lunkyubye,” she said, repeating a variation of