Our Dried Voices Read Online Free PDF

place and avoided his eyes. He gave his tunic one final wring and started for the door, driven as much by his desire to pursue this woman as by a sudden distaste for the other colonists seated around him. Their eyes bored into his back as he exited the hall.
    The woman was already well across the meadow, and he quickened his pace so as not to lose sight of her. She walked to the nearest sleeping hall and turned back and stared at Samuel through the distance between them, a gray shadow against the hazy backdrop of the hall. Then she rounded the corner of the building and was lost from sight. Samuel followed her to the hall. The door was open. He went inside, dried himself with the blankets from one bed and fell asleep in the bed next to it. He did not notice the second woman, the one with the large dark eyes, enter the hall about an hour later and curl up two beds over for the night.
    He awoke the next morning from a dream of the copper-eyed woman. The first rays of sun peered through the high windows of the sleeping hall. The rain had stopped. The image of the copper-eyed woman remained fresh in his mind, and with it a single word seeped out of the deep folds of his subconsc ious. Hero . The copper-eyed woman was a hero, and thereafter Samuel would remember her as “the First Hero.”

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    S amuel did not see the First Hero again for some time. The woman simply seemed to disappear from the colony. About a week after her departure, the toilets broke down. At first this problem was scarcely noticeable, but within a few days waste began to accumulate in the toilets and the stench around the buildings became overwhelming. One morning the next week, the colonists approached the meal halls to find the doors locked. Few realized that the sun had just slipped over the horizon and the bells had sounded well in advance of mealtime. Sometime later, it stopped raining entirely, and the grass in the meadow turned brown and the trees began to wilt. Every one or two weeks a new incident arose: the doors of the toilets were locked, the beds in the sleeping halls disappeared, the meal and sleeping halls were not cleaned (although few of the colonists realized that they had ever been cleaned at all), and so on and so on.
    But with every few crises, new heroes sprang up one by one from the uniform anonymity of Pearl’s population to meet the tests facing the colony. And one by one they all disappeared. Only those few, like Samuel, who were perceptive enough to realize they were different from the other colonists, ever appreciated them. They would be seen one day, striding coolly from the site of the most recent incident, their movements quick and precise, their faces aglow with some inner vitality, and the next day they would be conspicuously absent, with no hint as to their whereabouts.
    Yet the fact that each of the many challenges was solved in relatively short order did little to subdue the fear that began to permeate the whole of the colony. The colonists continued to avoid one another, no longer engaging in idle play or lovemaking. They spent their days creeping across the meadow from hill to tree to hall, sometimes slipping to the stream for a drink, which they would take in several short sips, lifting their heads in between to gaze around them guardedly. They scurried over the open field, trying their best to keep a safe distance from anything that might possibly harm them. No one had any idea where the next crisis would originate, and so very often two colonists would find themselves averting some phantom terror, creeping backward into the protective shade of the same tree or hall, only to collide with one another in their blind fear and turn on the supposed intruder with the growl of a cornered feline.
    At meal times, each colonist received his cake and slunk away to hide in a secluded corner or behind a shaded hill and eat with ravenous desperation, body hunched around his food, eyes wide and furtive. The people returned to the