So Long Been Dreaming Read Online Free PDF Page A

moving. The trees threatened to turn upside down and stick the sky under my shaky toes. Blood and white froth spurted out of the puncture wounds in my leg, and one arm looked liked mincemeat. Tatters of a taupe cotton shirt stuck to blood and muck on my belly and breasts. I ripped off a piece of pants that wasn’t swampy or piss-yellow and tied it tight around the leg wound. I tried touching myself all over to feel who I was, but I was too raggedy. Settling down in a tree root throne, I watched thin spears of sunlight bounce off my shark navel ring and cut through the haze. Glints of metal among the branches made me blink and squint.
    The trees had eyes, and they were watching me. Mechanical worms with camera heads wriggled up branches into blossoms and clumps of foliage. I should have checked them out. Instead I convinced myself I was paranoid, hallucinating, and what I needed was to sit still and gather myself, not chase spooks. Dizzy from the heat, sore and itchy from sweat, bug bites, and dog gouges, I didn’t feel excitement for a new life, just fear at a moral chasm opening before me. At each drop-out, specific memories from a finished life slipped beyond consciousness. Body historians dropped into a new life with old lives repressed, except for the Edges, the first and last moments, or there’d be no space for new experiences. Damned serial amnesia was working my last nerve – getting me all caught up in patterns I didn’t remember – or why else would I be too lazy for paranoia and morally outraged over a dog killed in self-defense?
    Because at a certain point, you get tired of being a gig slut.
    I couldn’t tell if this thought was griot creed, from past lives, or from my current body. One thing I did remember – if you got too full of life, a historian could unravel into chaos, into a jumble of nothing. That wasn’t going to happen to me. I made myself listen to the birds singing squabbles and love songs. Occasionally I heard a war.
    Sharp mechanical sounds clashed with the nature music. Bells and whistles mashed together in nagging bursts. My new life was calling. I had to get on with it. Body historians, griots of the galaxy, we didn’t diddle ourselves in jungle paradises, we inhabited flesh to gather a genealogy of life. We sought the story behind all the stories. Collecting life’s dazzling permutations, however sweet or sour, was our science, religion, and art – nothing nobler in eternity. I peered in the direction of the nasty noise. At the south end of the mucky water where the trees thinned out, I saw a leather jacket, one sleeve inside out, flung across a signpost. The sign read: “Biohazard! No Trespassing!” in English with a vividly drawn skull dead centre.
    Damn!
    Everything hurt. I’d sat in the tree root throne for quite awhile. Stiff muscles and joints protested as I stood up. At least the ground stayed still and the sky didn’t fall. I limped along the shore to the sign and jacket. A cell phone jangled in the breast pocket. I didn’t want to answer, especially not knowing who I was or how I wanted to deal. And it seemed like I’d been hating phones for over a hundred years, but you got to start somewhere.
    “What’s up?” I said in full-throated mezzo irritation.
    “If you got the hot sauce, I got the stew,” a male basso said in Standard American English. I couldn’t fix a more specific point of origin.
    “Diablo sauce,” I said without thinking. “Sets your mouth on fire.”
    “You get the recipe?”
    “Yeah.” I wanted him to mention my name, what I was supposed to be doing, where I was, but somehow I knew it wasn’t the sort of operation you discussed on an open line.
    “Twenty-six hours or we lose the bonus.” His voice tickled the backs of my knees and under my arms. “You’re almost inside the white circle. How you holding up?”
    I looked at the bloody rag around my leg. Claw marks on my breasts raked over old scars. My hands slid across muscular thighs