So Long Been Dreaming Read Online Free PDF

and buttocks, narrow ribcage and broad shoulders, to a big head sitting on not much neck. I tried to fill the sculpture of this woman. Something in me resisted, not her exactly, but. . . . Fingertips glided down high cheekbones, broad nose, and full lips to a blunt chin. The supple skin felt good. A middle-aged firebrand in great shape, scarred and battered here and there but. . . . “Nothing significant.”
    “You sound . . . tired.”
    Did he hear something in my voice or was this just code? “It’s the heat, mostly.”
    “After the dinner rendezvous, can you handle an explosive situation?”
    “I can handle anything, as long as the food’s good.” That seemed the right amount of bravado for this body. “How’s the rest of the menu?”
    “Out of this world.” He chuckled, and the connection went dead.
    I felt abandoned. Rubbing my cheek against the phone, I checked through the jacket pockets and found a few ammunition clips for the pistol, a purple beanbag lizard, a fountain pen/flashlight, two packets of extra-strength Frizz Ease, crushed sunglasses, menthol eucalyptus cough drops, and a slip of fortune cookie wisdom:
    The Gods who were smiling at your birth are laughing now.
    My lucky numbers were two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen – and somebody had scrawled “plus five backward.”
    No wallet, no name, and a pathetic bunch of random clues. I dumped one packet of Frizz Ease into my hair and worked my fingers through tight knots. The frizz didn’t ease. Feeling vigilant at last, I scanned the trees for mechanical worms with camera heads. All I saw scurrying along the branches were furry black millipedes squirting stink gland poison at ants. A bug, smudge of mold, blade of grass – they were too simple for a griot drop-in, yet still compelling. The front-runner ants got a blast of lethal funk, curled up into balls, and fell out of the trees. The other ants kept marching forward. The millipedes’ stink glands would be empty soon. I smiled. An eye trained on movement, a scientist hooked on bugs, an assassin with murder on the brain – how to read the signs of life and make a story? That was a griot’s challenge. That’s what I loved: being in a life, discovering the story, no matter how rough the ride.
    The dogs had ripped my shirt to shreds, but putting on a jacket in heavy, no-breathing heat seemed mucho loco. The sleeves were several inches too long and an odd combination of black coconut oil and seaweed smells permeated the lining. The bugs having a party on my skin finally drove me inside the leather – at least until I knew what I was doing.
    Surveying the area, I realized the swamp was actually flooded land in the oxbow of a stream, not a proper swamp. An endless relief of trees and water in every direction offered no perspective. Which way was the white circle and the damn rendezvous? From the marks in the ground at the Biohazard sign, I could see where my body had fought with the dogs. I traced the footprints to a narrow path that led north through the trees. At a flowering tree split by lightning so that it stooped over the path with innards exposed, I found a brown leather knapsack that matched the jacket. The straps were caught in scorched branches and dead vines. Here the footprint trails diverged. My host and the husky had dashed down the path until the two Dobermans jumped out of the bush, then we all hightailed it to the water.
    Thick white slugs, gorged with wounded tree flesh, oozed through black cracks in the bark, like pus. Looking at the charred trunk and boughs made old scars on my breasts and thighs throb. I stroked the mangled tree and disentangled the knapsack from split branches. It weighed almost forty pounds – heavier than I expected. In the top compartment I found a clean tee shirt, packets of dried fruit, which I gobbled down, and Soya Power Bars, which I saved for later, despite how hungry I was. Three bottles of Fluid Mineral Recharge, bug juice, antiseptics, and