The Deadheart Shelters Read Online Free PDF Page A

addressing me. Their jawbones shifted under the skin like cats under blankets and when he opened his mouth to talk I could see his tongue flapping like a black sail. “If it didn’t feel like that it would mean you’re always dreaming, and nobody wants that.”
    “Nobody does?”
    “Nobody. Look at your friend,” he said, gesturing. “He has been asleep behind the wheel of his body for years.”
    “But he fixed me.”
    “Fixed you? Nothing can fix you. You will always be the same.”
    From far behind the trees a movie was playing that we couldn’t see, but the brightness reached us like a thousand caged moons and we could doze off to the soggy violins of its soundtrack. At one point I was bumped awake by the man who’d finished cooking his shoes and I chewed on rubber for a while then dozed off again. The violins like a hearse-carried casket we could sleep in.
    We woke up on the roof of a barn and couldn’t figure out how to get down. “What happened?” I asked, and he said “This kind of thing is usual. Don’t be afraid.”

I left him the next day. When I first found him I thought my head was a drained pool I should offer in my palm, and I came to learn that his was too, that all heads are perforated heads. I’ve learned enough since then to know I already knew most of what I wondered about.
    Headed for the direction I thought society must be, imagining myself a magnet to see where I get tugged, I walked through the woods beyond him, where pale infants yet un-blossomed hung from tree branches like the mobiles in the slave room. I was watching them spin, thinking how much like children we were (who ate what was fed and slept when commanded), when a full-grown man came out placenta-spattered. I might have shouted or in my mind it echoed. I alternated approaching and jerking away as his eyes resisted opening, but soon they became lighter, the sun drying the muck off them and making it less.
    “Ah,” he said, turning to me and smiling, “my first friend in reality.”
    Despite my alarm I was able to bring myself close to him, and soon I sat. “I don’t understand anything.”
    “Are you freshly born?”
    “No, freshly escaped.”
    “From what?” He pulled himself up and crossed his legs. “Wait, I have to interrupt. I feel like I’ve been living so long. I forgot it but it’s still there. Lots of darkness that happened to make me.” He looks up at the cracked shell he left. “Sorry. From what?”
    “I can’t tell you. You might turn me in.”
    “Oh, one of those kind of things. I vaguely know what those kind of things are.”
    “I don’t understand. You were just born?”
    “Yeah. Think how much easier it is. So no womb need ever be occupied.” He stood up, so I did too. “Man, my head’s a strange-textured thing.”
    “What do you do now?”
    “I was just about to ask you that. I think I’m supposed to wait for someone here.”
    “Maybe it was me. I’m here now.”
    He concentrated on me, tensing his new forehead that hadn’t yet developed creases. “No, I don’t think it’s you.”
    “Well here I am. And I’m trying to find the rest of the people, if you want to come.”
    “What people?”
    “Everybody except the ones I used to know. I want to go to the place where men choose how they live.”
    “I’ll come. Gee, these memories. I can’t get over them. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. It’s as if I walked here from there and only fell asleep very briefly. I remember.”

He knew the way instinctually, and guided us from the birthplace of his pulse, where all the other child-seeds held motionless like headstones in a cemetery. In memoriam, not to be born. Yet inside all of them men like him were growing and developing minds that fool themselves into thinking birth is just another day beginning. Sometimes he would stop to sniff the air and tell me “I feel a warmer wind coming from there. It’s that way.”
    I realized soon that I didn’t know his name. When I