After Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

against the warehouse wall.
    “Hey, go on then,” Aiden said as he held up his hands. “You called me to do a favor for a sick kid, remember?”
    “Hey, he’s not sick,” Daniel said. “You’ve got no idea what kind of sick we’ve been through. Don’t talk to him like that.”
    “Tour around by yourselves all you want. I can’t fix you, nobody can,” Aiden said.
    Cessini breathed to himself. He rose back up and straightened his shoulders, then lowered his hand from his face. A ringed welt radiated from the strike point at his temple. It stung down past his cheek. A red streak looped around to the back of his neck and disappeared below his collar.
    Aiden stumbled back. He glanced up to the condenser. “You know, you people scare me. I don’t know if kids like you should be held closer, or kept away.”
    Daniel shuffled Cessini away from the building, and then stepped forward toward Aiden. He raised his elbow, cocking his fist. “Listen old man, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Aiden cowered away from Daniel’s turn. Robin wrapped Cessini into her arms, but he pushed her away, and instead took in the rudeness of a man he had only just met. He walked alone toward the high metal towers in the lot.
    “Aw, come on now,” Aiden said. “I was just having a go at you.”
    “Well, you shouldn’t. Not at his expense. That was completely rude,” Robin said.
    “Didn’t mean nothing by it,” Aiden said. He softened his weight on his hip. “We all right?”
    “We’re right,” Cessini said as he kept walking. Meg caught up but he pulled away his arm.
    Aiden reached out for balance against the red rusted wall of the building. For a moment, he looked like a sad, crooked old man. He stumbled off, then around, not really knowing where to turn. “Hey, kiddo,” he said as he limped with a pivot and called out with a bite, “You need to toughen up!”
    Cessini stopped under the first tower and stared at the man. Aiden gave in first, waved him off, and then left.
    Cessini fell into the seat in the back of the Jeep and slammed his door shut. Meg slipped in at his side. He couldn’t look.
    “You okay?” she asked.
    He covered his neck with his left hand. He pounded the door with his fist. “Why does this only happen to me?” He throttled the headrest of Robin’s seat to his front. “Tell me why? Tell me how to fix me.”
    Daniel squeezed the top of the steering wheel, and then rested his forehead on his knuckles. “Don’t you worry about him. You’ll never see that man again,” he said. Then he relaxed his once fisted hand and turned the key in the ignition. “I don’t know what happened. I would never have hit that man.”
    Cessini calmed his own thrash. “A memory,” he said. “Nothing more. Nothing less. Let’s go. Just drive.”
    Robin sank deeper into her front seat and pulled her door shut. Her head fell back. Her eyes longed for a clear prayer view to the sky, but were stopped by the roof of the Jeep. She wrung her hands into the pit of her waist and cried out a desperate sob.
    Cessini’s window was closed as they drove farther away. He rested his forehead on its tempered glass and overlooked the dry hills of the valley below. Only a growing distance through silence could drown out the power and percussion of the water they had left behind.
    *
    Packet sat up straight against his pillow on his hospital room bed and buttoned his pajama shirt for the night. An uneaten tray of turkey dinner and gravy congealed on his nightstand. The tube and its watery bag that dripped from the pole were gone.
    Meg was on the edge of his bed and dabbed a cotton ball into a jar of cream. “We brought you back. You’re in the mainframe. You think you’re sitting here in your own self-image. Your dad thinks it worked. He said it was true. But I’m not so sure. I think you’re just running, reliving sad, old home movies. And no one likes to watch the same old stock ten years in a row, least of all