It's been a year since the catastrophe that we caused by naming
things. Winter, as devastating as hunger, as abject as head-churning
thirst slowly came and slowly went. Spring then found us, a surprise to
feel relaxation spread, a pleasure to sense sunshine. We're now in
autumn, having survived a dry, sweaty summer where the dust was high.
My
eyes were taken by a mad dog who seemed to take pleasure in ripping the
sight out of me. With one briefly surviving eye I observed my
mis-treatment. Finally he gobbled up what was left of those eyeballs of
mine and I was left screaming in new theatres of pain, alone.
It
was a good thing that loneliness didn't last all the way until now.
After a traveller took pity on me, we spent some of the winter together.
In a temporary hut, leaking, creaking in the wind and only just about
warmer than the outdoors, he fed me soup, which smelt bad, both rancid
and bland at once, but tasted like an opening up of every taste bud. We
had hunks of ancient bread.
In spring I was slowing him
down. We'd barely spoken, but the conversation we had the last time we
sat together was our longest, well, he spoke a lot anyway. "Adam, stay
warm when you can"; "don't give up, Adam," he kept saying. He liked to
convince me there was some point left to life. He left me on an uneven
rock by the side of the road.
Now that summer's given hope
to many, and its sparse fruits and faint tastes still linger, people
seem more abundant. I sometimes encounter more than one a day, but I've
stopped speaking. For one thing, no one must ever know that this
terrible future was my making, and for another, I cannot bring myself to
utter any animal's name, which leaves vast, often unbridgeable gaps in
my conversation. Also, there's fear, I'm so sure only bad things will
happen when I speak that I'd rather stay silent.
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