Our Dried Voices Read Online Free Page A

words Samuel had spoken many times before.
    The branches swept closed behind her. Samuel ran his tongue around the inside of his dry mouth. He walked to the river and urinated into the current. Then he knelt and drank. The slow tide gurgled as it lapped over the bank. He swished some water around in his mouth, imitating its sound. He bent again and rinsed the sweat from his face. The stream slipped on immutable, bearing his heat away.
    * * *
    In the evening the air was cool and fine. The clouds darkened with the sunset and stained the land a faded silver. Tomorrow it would rain. Samuel had slept the rest of the afternoon under the smallest and last unoccupied tree in the meadow. He awoke before the sound of the evening bells and was the first to arrive at the nearest meal hall. He ate at a table by himself, before any other colonist could join him. Outside the sky coalesced from ink and milk to solid granite. Samuel strolled through the crisp breeze, content in the passage of another day.
    The other colonists scampered through the meadow, oblivious to their recent brush with disaster. In the measured transition of sun to moonlight, the meal halls glowed faintly opalescent and the river sparkled as it meandered through the colony, under the simple wooden fence that enclosed their little plot of meadow and away toward the sleepy mountains in the distance. Beyond the fence, there was only gray and empty darkness, kilometers of untouched meadow all the way out to the shadowed peaks on every side. Samuel played a game with himself, picking out the faint jagged horizon between earth and rock, then closing and opening his eyes to find it again. Open. Close. Open. Close. The dim silver line winked at him from out of the gloom.
    Night blackened the sky within a few moments, then broke into faint streaks of light behind the thick clouds. Lightning, distant and beautiful under a silk cloak. Samuel turned away from the mountains and fell in with the other colonists already on their way to the nearest sleeping hall. They chattered eagerly, giggled together, their voices tripping over one another like the days rolling over and onward. They crawled into soft, pillowed beds with fresh, starched sheets. Samuel fell asleep almost instantly. He did not dream. A night breeze whispered through the windows of the hall as the thunder lolled a faint lullaby.

IV
    T he next morning it rained in the colony, just as it had seven days ago, and seven days before that. And then the storms continued into the next day. On rainy days, the colonists typically took refuge in the sleeping halls, which remained open all day long. But when the first colonists raced across the sopping meadow after their morning meal on the second cloud-darkened day, they found the hall doors closed and locked. Two straight days of storms was unprecedented in the colony’s memory. Locked sleeping halls were unreal. By nightfall of the second day, the doors still did not open and the rain kept falling.
    On the third morning, the vast majority of the colonists nestled damply in the seven meal halls around the colony. The soft drizzle continued on unabated. Fortunately, the food machines remained functional. The people of the colony may have forgotten the previous incident, but the same sense of foreboding returned to them now. They shrunk against the walls, their eyes downcast, most of them alone. No one moved. No one said a word. The stark furniture waited empty in the middle of the hall as the high windows wept in little gray rivulets.
    Samuel sat on the floor in one of the halls and scanned the long celestial-blue room. He found himself expectant, almost curious, as though he was sitting down to hear the beginning of a long story. He had been one of the first to enter the halls the previous day after he had tried two of the sleeping halls and found their doors locked. Unlike most of the other colonists, who suffered their cold and damp conditions hopelessly curled up in the