The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

Author:Kevin Brockmeier [Brockmeier, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: prose_contemporary

***

Not long after she found the journal, Laura resumed her routine of counting and pacing, numbering off her steps just as she had in the hut on the other side of the mountains. It occurred to her that maybe she was trying to walk away from everything. The station's rooms were arranged in a ring, with doors on each of the connecting walls, so that she could keep going for hours without ever reaching a dead end. Sometimes she would find herself counting into the thousands and the tens of thousands, taking one step after another in the same sort of blind compulsion that drives suicides to the edges of buildings, crossing through first the front room, then the kitchen, then the dining room and the bedroom and the living room, over and over again, until finally she would stop without thinking by the couch or one of the beds and collapse backward onto the cushions, falling with her legs rigid and her arms stretched out like a child playing catch-me.

It was one of those mind-emptyingly repetitious activities that people take up in order to suppress their anxiety. Some people rocked back and forth, or danced, or drummed their fingers on a tabletop. Some people exercised with heavy machinery. Laura paced.

Her walk was quick and steady – a march, almost – and it always cleared her head. At least for a while. But as soon as she stopped to rest, she would begin thinking about her friends and family again, begin thinking about even the most glancing acquaintances. She would remember her smallest interactions with virtual strangers, people who were very probably dead now. She would hear all the things they had said to her, bumping around inside her head like flies against a window. Bump – and Martin Campbell, the boy she used to baby-sit, would hop onto her lap and say, "Can a lion beat up a tiger? Can a shark beat up an alligator?" Bump – and her mail carrier would knock on her door (this was during the week she came down with the flu) and say, "You can't just let your letters pile up like this, Ms. Byrd. I won't squeeze anything else into that box until you empty out what's already there. Oh, and God bless you." Bump – and her boss would tell her, "I don't care if you think you got suckered into it. You can't back out on me this late in the game, Laura. You're our woman, you're going to Antarctica, and that's the end of it." Bump – and she would hear them all at once, not only her boss and her mailman and Martin Campbell, but everybody, a tremendous crowd noise, as though all the people she had ever encountered were clamoring to her in their millions of voices.

She had been at the station for three or four weeks already, and her body had slowly repaired itself. She was no longer sore when she got out of bed in the morning.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.