Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Missing Dog

I sat in the upstairs bedroom of the dark house reviewing the User's Manual for my new Canon 40D. Into the heavy silence, my phone vibrated and I reached for it. A few seconds later I was tiptoeing quickly down the stairs and towards the front door, trying to make as little noise as possible. The girls were asleep. I opened the door to a beaming Cameron, and crossed the threshold to hug him. He picked me up, kissed my head, and swung me back across the threshold. As he placed me on the floor I whispered, " Shh, the girls are asleep." I pointed to the lofted corridor above our heads. A door opened onto a dark bedroom that was lit from within by the soft pink light of a nightlight. I was spending the night with the girls that I nanny for. Their mother was away on a business trip. We tiptoed our way back to my upstairs bedroom, Cameron exaggerating his movements the whole way because he knew I would laugh at him.

"Here it is," I said, picking up the camera by the lens and handing it over. He took it almost reverently and studied the back that I had pushed toward his face. I showed him the on/off switch and a few of the other major buttons and then left him to discover the rest for himself, or at least to ask me; we both preferred to do things on our own. We were browsing through the photographs I had taken that day when his phone beeped. He looked at it then said, "Do we have Teeki?" We looked at each other quizzically. "It's my mom. She can't find Teeki."

Thus began one of the most harrowing nights of my recent life. Teeki was our dog. I had gotten her from a backyard breeder almost exactly a year before and although Cameron had been upset that I had done it without including him in the decision, he had quickly capitulated under her soft, brown puppy-gaze and now considered her his own. And, because I had pushed her towards him in those early months, so that he would love her and accept her, months later I sometimes wonder if she doesn't have a stonger bond with him than she does with me.

Calls were made. We called Cameron's mom. Cameron's dad called us. Cameron's brother texted us. A friend of the family who made no secret of the fact that they wanted to steal Teeki from us texted me, worried. There was a tight little circle of worry that night. Turns out, Cameron's sister, who lives an hour away and has a new baby and thus was the only person NOT notified of Teeki's disappearance, had a dream that Teeki went missing and came back the next morning.

The thing was, Teeki had run off before, always to explore and always returning within an hour or so. We lived on a dog-friendly street in a neighborhood where two or three people were out walking their dogs at any given time of the day. So we didn't worry about her. But this time was different. This time, she didn't have her collar on. This time, it was 11 pm and she had not returned. After Cameron left, I began to obsess. What if she explored too far away this time and a cruel person found her? Or someone found her and decided to keep her for their family? What if she had been hit by a car with a mean driver who wouldn't report it and then I'd have to spend the rest of my life wondering what happened?! I thought that I could never have children if the pain was this bad just for a missing dog. How much worse must it feel as a parent with a missing child? I couldn't even imagine. I felt that falling asleep would be a betrayal of her. Why should I get a good night's sleep in a soft, comfortable bed, my guilt-riddled mind thought, while she was wet and cold (though it was definitely a warm, dry Georgia summer night) and most likely injured, lying half-covered by underbrush in a ditch?

So I set about researching the best methods for getting her back. I foraged through the internet. I sent links to Cameron's inbox. I made a composite poster of Teeki photos.

Photobucket


The next morning, I woke up with a start, jumped out of bed, unloaded the girls at school, and drove home. I then commenced to printing out 5 full-color posters and 30 flyers before Cameron's mom called with the good news; she had found Teeki. A neighbor had taken her in the night before and told all of the neighborhood moms that morning about the dog she had found. I hurried to the neighbor's house to collect my sweet, precious, uninjured, very-much-alive baby. She's back home with us now and her mommy and daddy agree that she is never, even for a moment, to go without a collar again.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Character Intimidation

Today, I decided to stop being scared of a friggin manuscript. It's imaginary. The characters are ME! I will no longer care what Wynlow thinks of something I made him say. Or made him do. Or think. Who cares about him and the snide remarks he might be making to Palan when my back is turned? If he's disgusted by my manipulation of him and thinks that he can do a better job of being him, then fine, he should take over. Until that happens, though, until he flows effortlessly from my fingertips and his ideas and mine on what he should say, do , and think are in harmony, well, I guess he'll just have to settle for existing at all. Besides, he's a minor character, anyways. My charcters become so real to me that I begin to feel intimidated by them... What will he think if I make him do this? Will Palan disagree with this decision I've made about the plot twist? It's a good thing, I'm sure, to feel like your creations are real people. However, if, in the creation of them, they become so real as to impede you from developing them any further...then, isn't that a little self-defeating? I'm going to go tackle this scene and if Wynlow doesn't like wat I've written, then he'll just have to wait for revision season to have his say. Who knows, maybe he'll be so thoroughly disgusted and so impatient to speak up that revising will be a breeze. We can all dream...

P.S. Go here http://annawrites.com/blog/2009/07/31/plandraftrewrite-stumbling-across-plot-character/#more-901

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Cherry Blossom Front: Audrey

Audrey Franklin felt the blush that was creeping up her neck and quickened her pace, hoping to reach the end of the hallway and turn the corner without being spotted. The hallway stretched for another twenty feet in front of her before turning a corner and continuing to the large French-style doors that opened into the main courtyard. Blast this, she thought, trying to compose herself. Dr. Hansen was just a man, like any other, and she had better convince herself of that because she would be working beside him every day for at least the next few months.

“Ah, Nurse Franklin!”

Audrey turned around and smiled at the doctor who had called her name, hoping that Dr. Hansen had not heard the exclamation from his office a few feet further down the hall. She fought down the urge to bolt for the courtyard.

“Oh, dear! You look flushed! Is everything alright?”

“Oh, yes, yes, oh, yes I’m fine,” Audrey stammered, and felt a wave of warmth roll over her as blood rushed to her face. “It’s only the sun,” she continued, catching her breath. “My skin, you know it’s so fair, and it’s not used to the sun yet. This happens every spring.”

The doctor who had called out to her was named Teddy Shears. He was thirty-four and balding and, ironically, resembled a teddy bear in both expression and shape. He was one of Audrey’s favorite doctors at the Protestant Missionary Hospital of Nanking. Now his jovial face took on a look of concern.

“Well then, I believe you should avoid the sun more, young lady, until your skin can adjust.” He looked back toward his office, out of which he had stepped to call after Audrey. “Say, you wouldn’t mind running over to the cafeteria and grabbing me a hamburger, would you? I’m backed up on charts and just can’t leave.” He looked at her imploringly and Audrey smiled, grateful to be sent on an errand that involved walking to the opposite end of the sprawling grounds.

“Of course I don’t mind, Dr. Shears. The regular? Chili, mustard, and pickles?” She kept her voice low.

“Sounds great, Audrey.” Dr. Shears smiled and disappeared into his office. Audrey turned to go.

“Oh, and Audrey?”

Audrey turned back around.

“If the fries are crispy today, would you bring me some of those, too?”

“What if they’re not crispy?”

Dr. Shears paused. “Oh heck, get them anyways!”

He laughed and Audrey laughed with him and then she turned again for the corner and her escape.

“One for me, as well, Audrey?” The voice floated out of an office further down the hall and Audrey knew from the lilting rhythm of the sentence and the peculiar accent that it belonged to Dr. Hansen.

The Ancients: The Forest

Reslyn sat with her legs crossed, trying to find the pool of light with her mind. She had glimpsed it before, unexpectedly, in meditations practice, but had never been able to reach a state of relaxation and clarity pure enough to get any real sense of what she had, in those few moments, felt a hint of. She sighed, fighting frustration and her restless mind. She was balanced on a log that was laid horizontal across the 10 ft. gap between the two banks of a river. The river itself ran fast and cold, buffeting her body and drying the sweat that sprang from her pores. It was a hot, humid day.

Reslyn looked upward toward the sky (excusing herself for this distraction because hadn’t her mother told her to watch the time for she wanted her home no later than mid-day so that she could take lunch over the other families?) and saw, through the filigree of branches and leaves, that the sun was making its way toward its apex slowly today- she had plenty of time.


She turned her head toward her left shoulder and, craning her neck upward, noted the clouds that were approaching, steadily and almost resignedly, the soaring and jagged peaks to the West. Though brilliantly white now, she knew that they would soon grow pregnant and grey, heavy and cumbersome with water. They would proceed orderly enough until the warm arm propelling them could no longer loft their weight and then they would drop away, snagged by the peaks that seized them, until the windward side of the range was overwhelmed with over-ripe clouds. Then they would shed their burden, dropping their dark weight onto the trees, lakes, rivers, and plantations of Praar. She returned to her meditations, trying not to acknowledge the disappointment that had arrived with the realization that she had hours left to spend in this fashion.

As she shifted her weight, she felt something small and hard hit her shoulder and glanced up. The trees above her were full of glanos, the large round seeds that fell to the ground in the hottest months of the summer, swollen and hard. She looked down at the river as it raced beyond her log and disappeared into a bend, around a copse of rimu trees, but the seed had been lost beneath the green froth instantly. This river, officially named the Praar, but known as the Graveda by her clan, was at its tamest as it passed through these lands, owing to the many tributaries that sapped its strength and fertilized the region. Even so, cold and swollen, made pregnant at its origin by both the sudden arrival of the spring rains and the runoff from the mountains above of melting snow and ice, the Graveda in the season of growth was a river to be feared. The Montero villages that had lived for centuries along its ancient banks had long ago adapted themselves to the river’s swelling rage and lost only a handful of people a year to its wrath.


Reslyn felt another impact on her shoulder, this one harder, and looked toward the sky again. A third glano hit her, on the head this time, and Reslyn felt her frustration at her meditations giving away to anger. Glanos were raining down on her at a constant rate now, a steady rate that nature could not possibly generate and Reslyn yelled up into the canopy.

“Arjun Miko! Stop that!”

Reslyn scrambled to her feet and scanned the branches high overhead. There weren’t many, for the trees on the river’s bank were mostly tall and straight; very few leaned over to join their brothers from the opposite bank.


“Hey Reslyn! I’ll stop when you can find me!”

Another glano struck Reslyn, on the arm this time, but her anger had lessened witht he realization that he was testing her.

She and Arjun shared most of their daily training classes and consistently beat the rest of their peers. With only each other as serious competition, the two had formed an unlikely and hesitant friendship, and they often incorporated the most recent lesson work into their play periods.


Reslyn rooted herself into the rough bark of the fallen tree and imagined drawing its strength up into her body, through to her shoulders, steadying herself. She leaned back slightly, felt the river’s wind slough against her slight frame, and gazed upward. The light from above was muted and grey, filtered through damp clouds. The sky, at its brightest point, was brushed steel, and only darkened further toward the west, where clouds were piling up on the windward side of the ridge.

Reslyn focused on the pattern that filled the sky overhead. She relaxed her eyes and felt them slide out of focus. Glanos were still hitting her, bouncing wildly off the plains and curves of her body like hail in a storm. She didn't feel them at all. She stayed that way -arms spread wide, face turned up towards the tree tops, eyes open and opaque- until she felt a shift inside her mind, a feeling of cogs falling into place and grabbing hold, moving forward, and pulling pieces into place.

She blinked and continued to gaze unfocused at both nothing and everything until one shadow, one bumpy shape, popped out and filled her vision, shocking in its incongruency. Though pattern vision was one of the first talents Reslyn had perfected, it still surprised her how glaring the anomaly became, once spotted. The outline of Arjun’s body, contrived and intrusive within the organic and curving patterns of the branches, stood out now in her vision and she wondered how she had not been able to see him before.


A glano splashed into the water to Reslyn’s right, and was followed quickly by another that cracked off of the log. Reslyn continued to look up into the trees and shifted her body to the right, moving along the log slowly as if she was trying to gain a better vantage point. She lifted her hand to her face and held it above her eyes, acting to shield them from the diffused light above. She heard the approach of the next glano and dropped suddenly into a crouch, grabbed one of the round, flat stones that she always carried in the pocket of her skirt, and hurled it up into the canopy, at the dark shape sitting among the leaves. She was rewarded immediately with a grunt of surprise.


“You could have pointed,” his voice drifted down.

“I could have done no such thing,” Reslyn retorted and walked along the log toward the right bank of the river, where Arjun was now deftly making his way down the trunk of a rimu. She watched his descent and saw that his hair, always worn tied back severely from his face and usually pulled into a tight not of intricately arranged braids, had fallen partway down and was now loose on the right side, giving him the appearance of a girl child.

He seemed to sense the cast of her eyes for, when he came to the next branch where he could rest his weight, he removed a hand from the trunk of the tree and rubbed vigorously at the right side of his head, brushing the hair there back and off of his face. As he turned his head back down toward the ground to negotiate his next move, Reslyn noticed the pinkening of his neck beneath the dark interwoven bands of his crest tattoo, took pity on him.


Unlike many of the other children who shared classes, training times, and play periods with Arjun and her, Reslyn took no pleasure in others’ discomfort. On the contrary, she felt pain, as if it were her own self who was enduring the careless jeering and ugly attention of the abusers.


“I’ve noticed your knot is loose. It is strange to see it so, but you must know that I will not mock you, Arjun.” She waited to see how he would react to her blunt acknowledgment of the awkward situation before them.

Men always wore their hair pulled back from the face and twisted ornately into braids and knots. It attributed to a man’s subtle power if his knots were thick and convoluted, shiny and black with a blue cast. It said even more about a man if his knots were thick yet fine, as well, convoluted yet simple, and shiny and black, yet muted by an arrangement governed by humility. Men’s knots were their pride and to see a man with his hair down, looking exactly as a girl would look- hair loose and floating freely- was to see him at his weakest and most vulnerable. Only mothers and wives were ever allowed the sight; mothers because they are the Keepers of the Knot and wives, only if they were sufficiently loved and obedient enough to earn the privilege. Reslyn herself knew that her mother and father shared the love of an un-knotted union, and she had secretly seen her father with his hair loose many times. But of course, Arjun would know none of that.


Arjun continued to look downward, avoiding her gaze, which came from the river to his right, so she continued. “I see that it is in the trunk knot and, if you don’t tell on me, I’ll fix it for you so that no one will know.”

The statement, called softly and in a muted voice, brought a mischievous smile to Arjun’s face and he raised his head slowly, shame forgotten in the face of this new knowledge. Reslyn smiled back at him, happy that her tactics had diffused the situation. Sure, he will never cease attempting to discover how I learned the sacred knots, but at least he has forgotten about his pain. Now that my secret is at his mercy, his pride is restored.


Arjun flitted down the lower branches of the tree and sprung to the ground, bounded off of the earth, and raced toward Reslyn. Deciding that the stump on the opposite river bank would seat them well, Reslyn turned as Arjun arrived breathless at her side, and walked across the log.

“The clouds are growing heavier,” she said loudly, turning slightly so that her words would carry to Arjun above the roar of the river beneath them. A pause told her that Arjun was inspecting the sky for himself.


“It is still too early in the day. It must hold off longer!”


Reslyn caught the edge of tension in his voice and wondered why he would be anxious. It was she who would be scolded terribly if she were to arrive home wet, dress dragging behind her and face veiled by the runoff of the scarlet ink her mother had applied to the crown of her head.


“An early rain won’t excuse us. The Elders will merely say that we should have arrived home early, anyway, in order to better prepare for the feast.”


They had reached the far side of the river now and could talk normally. Reslyn led the way to the stump from which her bridge had been felled and sat down. She gestured to the mossy ground at her feet and Arjun sat down, facing the river, back pressed against the smooth bark.


“Do I need to take down any more hair?” Arjun asked, impassively watching the river as it raced by.


“I must take down the damaged braids in order to fix them but no, you don’t need to take down all of your hair for this.”

Reslyn set to work, first finding the damaged string, then unknotting it, unbraiding it, restoring to it the escaped hair, rebraiding, and -finally- reknotting it. Her hands moved with calm assurance, pausing only briefly now and then when she had to search her memory for a particularly complicated section of the design. The fish-scale sheaths on her forearms glistened in the sun, reflected dancing bubbles of light onto Arjun’s hair as she worked.


Arjun cleared his throat. “How could you tell what knot I wore from so far away?”


Reslyn smiled to herself and watched the light sparkle across Arjun’s knots as her arms, instead of slowing, began to move more quickly. “The trunk knot is one of the simplest knots. It also seems to be your mother’s favorite and you wear it on nearly every festival day.”


Arjun made to turn his head, as if to look at her, and Reslyn held it still, gripping the braids in her hands firmly.


“So you guessed! You didn’t know it was a trunk.”


Reslyn heard mild resentment in his voice. “I bluffed. There’s nothing wrong with that.”


She completed a short but complicated series of twists, tucks, and knots and flicked him on the neck. “The rains are sure to come soon; we must go.”


She could see from his face when he stood and turned to walk back across the river that he was thinking hard. Asking her about her secret would be a delicate task and she knew that he must fear harming their friendship; he was sensitive and so naturally imagined everyone else to be as well. Reslyn considered speaking up, telling him willingly so that he could stop torturing himself but she knew that she wouldn’t. She found that you could know a person best by witnessing their solutions to challenging problems. She felt that she knew Arjun as well as she knew anyone, but she also sensed about people that there was always more to learn and so she let him continue his internal struggle as they followed the footpath away from the clearing on the river’s edge and toward the shade and density of the forest line ahead.


<><><> • <><><>


Kasita, the village of river and rain, lush forest and rich soil, was a hidden place. Its bounty was concealed far away from the paths that constituted the main travel routes along the foothills of the (Mountain Range) and located as it was, a great distance away from the well-known passes, there existed almost no chance for it to be accidentally discovered. The village was rich and its people were blessed and every day dawned with new reasons to plan festivities and to honor the spirits.


As Reslyn and Arjun walked out of the leaf-fringed shade and into the cleared brightness of the village outskirts, they were greeted by a boy and girl running toward them. The girl’s hair was bright and flaxen and floated around her head as she ran in weightless curls. Her eyes were sparkling and blue, her skin light and luminescent. If she was day, then the boy beside her was night, for his eyes and hair were dark and his skin had a richly tan tint to it, as though he were of the sand people about which the children had heard tales.

The two of them slowed to a quick walk and greeted Reslyn and Arjun; two pairs of hands pressed forward, palms out, fingers pointed toward the ground. Reslyn and Arjun returned the greeting and pressed their palms against the others’, fingers pointed up toward the sky. The couples grasped each others' wrists and then released, formally stepping away from each other.


“Reslyn, your mother sent us to warn you of the rain,” Rideti said, apologetically, for it was plain to all of them that anyone with eyes could tell that the rain was soon to arrive.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Ancients: The Mountains 2

I hope those memories are memories and not dreams, I thought. I had heard people talking, heard conversations about myself, and I was now operating on what information I had gathered. I hesitated briefly at the end of my corridor, not sure which way to go. The hall that branched to the left led into the mountain. There, the wall of glass met seamlessly with one of rock, and the rock continued back around a sharp corner, gathering oppressive shadows along the way. The hall to the right continued along the face of the mountain, and so the wall of glass stretched away from me indefinitely. Light reflected off the age-worn wall opposite the glass and mica in the stone glittered faintly.
I turned left and tried to quicken my pace, heedless of the noise I was making. Everyone would be worshipping. I had weaved my way between dreams and wakefulness for the better part of the last two days, but had not, since the day I had first glimpsed the glass wall that extended and encircled the sanctuary, had the strength to move from my bed. Today I had awaken abruptly, clear-headed, and anxious to flee. I didn't know from whom or from what, or even if there was truly a reason at all. In fact, I had realized upon awakening that I hadn't the faintest idea as to who I was or what I was doing here, or even where here was. Action, I knew, was a poor substitute for knowledge, but when the one is lacking, the other must attempt to make up the difference. And so I was fleeing.
I cleared a sharp corner, gaining momentum, and then closed my eyes instinctively as a large shape blocked the light in front of me. The shock of the collision forced a gasp from my lips and I took a series of steps backward, trying not to fall over. My shaking legs complained but held me upright. I placed a hand against the wall for support and then turned my head to see who had just very nearly knocked me to the floor.
It was a boy, or at least seemed to be from what I could see of him. He was most definitely taller than I was -indeed; most everyone was- but was so thoroughly hunched over as to prevent me from seeing his face. I found myself looking down upon a head of dark, tousled hair.
The head of hair tilted upwards awkwardly.
"Oh! It's you!"
Apparently startled by the identity of the personage before him, the boy lost his grip on the wrapped parcel at his torso. He clutched at it and I took a few more quick steps backward as he lunged after it, trying to keep closed the wrappings, which had been jostled in the collision and were rapidly coming unraveled. He was certainly not going to succeed on his own.
"Hold still," I said, and reached forward to clasp the package closed. My hands were steady and I inhaled deeply as they retied the wrappings. My senses quietened at the innocent smell of him; dried thyrus ink and the subtle musk of moldy paper. A scribesman, then. Finished, I took yet another step back and regarded him, rubbing vaguely at the middle of my chest where his shoulder had caught me.
"You honor me," he said.
While I had worked, the boy had evidently taken the time to compose himself and stood straight now, smiling across at me. I saw that, despite the safe smell of him, his eyes, creased just so and tilted at such an angle, hinted at thoughts more mysteries and mischievous than the life of a scribesman or scholar should call for.
"Your honor is mine," I returned automatically, my thoughts confused, distracted. I had caught sight of the corridor behind the boy. Wall sconces, placed at regular intervals along the walls at shoulder height, took up where the natural lighting from the glass walls left off and illuminated a passage to- nowhere, it seemed. The hall appeared to come abruptly to a dead-end.
"So... you're feeling better?" His voice was quiet, as though he knew he must speak but didn't think it necessary that I must hear. Or maybe he doesn't want anyone else to hear, I thought.
I returned my gaze to him and only then thought to wonder what he was doing in the living quarters during the most sacred hour of the day. There was a certain leanness in the planes of his face and a maturity in his posture -its composure newly restored- that told me he was older than I had at first thought. Perhaps even older than myself, though surely not old enough to have attained a rank sufficient enough to allowed him to wonder along halls unsupervised and at such a speed during the hour of the dead.
"I'm not sure." I paused. "Where am I?"
"Oh, we're in the East Tower of the Glass right now. I'm sorry we had to move you so far, but there are no living quarters in the West Tower, where we found you."
I thought for a moment, then said, "you found me?"
"Well, we didn't find you, of course. A group of herbalists. From Holdi, the village down near the foot of the..." He trailed off at the look of confusion on my face.
"You really don't remember anything, do you?"
I looked at him numbly. "How do you know that?"
"The Well-Speaker- he said that when you roused it was always in confusion. He said you always asked where you were, who he was, even though you had seen him many times before."
When I didn't say anything he continued.
"He said that you must surely have been forsaken by the Gods to have called down such a curse upon yourself. To forget your past… well, it’s a most harsh punishment, is it not?" The last had been spoken solemnly, in hushed tones, but he must have seen something in my face, because he smiled to lighten the words.
"It's a good thing they council empathy and moral condemnation in equal measure or you might not have found this place such a haven. The Fathers mumbled a great deal. There were those who thought it a bad idea to succor one so cursed by the Gods; they argued that it must surely go against the will of the Ancient Ones."
My face must have shown some sign of the alarm that had crept into me with his words because he added hastily, "Oh, they were but few- a small portion of the Fathers. They are the most zealous of our sect. Come, you must not worry."
He took a step towards me then, as if to offer comfort, and then lunged forward as I fell against the wall. The planes of his face, rigid with effort, drifted before me. I tried to lift myself up, to help him, and then I saw only darkness.

The Ancients: The Mountains

My room let out onto a corridor dark with the light of a setting sun. Its walls were made out of glass; thick, green, and mottled. When I first saw it, I had stared in amazement and walked forward as if in a trance until my hand –hot with fever- made contact. The feel of its icy surface, hard and liquid at once, had brought my addled mind into focus and I had pressed my entire body against the substance- dragged my hands down the length of it as I let myself fall to the ground. Bathing in the strange, nebulous light, and the cold waves rippling off the surface of the glass, my senses had ached with joy.
It had been before mid-day and the glass had shone soft and luminous with light that swept through the corridor like a river threatening to overflow its banks. I still remembered the faint apparition of myself in the glass, face flattened into a severe oval and outlined by hair black as night. My eyes had reflected crystalline blue in the glass, stark against the blinding whiteness of the light.
That was two days ago. I felt pretty sure of that, because I had spent all of my waking hours since then holding onto lucidity, counting the hours, and willing the delirium- and the fever that brought it- out of my body. Today's light was of a quality completely different from the cleansing light of two days before. I looked past the glass and noted that the sun had left behind its zenith and was curving steadily downward, falling quickly toward the ancient and crumbling mountain peaks below. Now shadows pooled in the long seams of the corridor and seeped along the glass floor. What little light fell through the glass floated where it could, weak, green, and dying.
Quelling the damp chill that crept along my spine, I walked into the corridor and turned left, my slippered feet swirling through the shadows. Few bedrooms opened onto my corridor but the few that did were all empty, for it was the hour of the dying and their occupants must therefore be gathered in a distant building, hunched over and speaking in low, hurried breaths, joined together in the unity that their religion brought them.
Was it truly two days, I wondered. Or has it been five? Ten? I leaned against the wall on my left, and pressed my forehead to it. My head ached, and the effort of walking had increased the pain. I reached up and settled my fingers gingerly on the bandage that circled my head. I was pretty sure that I had figured correctly, had stayed coherent enough since my awakening to string time together correctly.
I had woken up in a dark room and tried to move, only to realize that my limbs were heavy and weak, and my head thick with fever. I had forced my feet off the bed and onto the floor, my body after it, and walked unsteadily, legs trembling with weakness, across the featureless expanse of floor toward the door. I didn't see the girl, sleeping heavily in the deep shadows of an alcove, until I was already beside her. I kept walking and passed her by without hesitation, feverish and intent on reaching the door. The door turned out to be a curtain of heavy fabric that I pushed aside only with great effort. The glassy corridor wall, and the comfort of its illuminating brightness, had greeted me.