Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth Read Free Book Online

trading: I’d already enticed some of the other people to
give up a fragile object by offering them something else in
exchange for it, so I could get it away from them before they broke
it. But I really couldn’t understand why someone would give up
something in exchange for these little pieces of paper. The pieces
of money were sort of pretty, but there were lots of prettier
pictures you could trade.
    In the wallet, I also found a couple of little
plastic cards with numbers on them. I remembered that these were
like money, only their operation was even stranger and more
mysterious, because when you gave one of these cards to people,
they wouldn’t keep it, like they would money. Instead, they would
give you what you wanted, plus give the little card back to you.
Both the money and the little plastic cards made me feel uneasy in
some way, and I stuffed them back in the wallet and then stuck the
wallet between the cushions of the sofa.
    Besides these, there were two other plastic cards
with a picture of a man on them. I had found a mirror among all the
stuff and I looked until I found it again, which took me a minute,
as I had hidden it with the other breakable things. The picture was
of me, though I had to touch my face, it looked so dry and grey
compared to the picture. But it was definitely me. Both these and
the other cards also all had the same name on them—”Wade Truman.”
It was my funniest experience yet, as I concluded it must be my
name, but of all the things I’d seen and heard so far, this one
held less familiarity than many others.
    I tried to make the sounds of the name, in case
hearing it would help me remember, but of course it didn’t come out
right, so that was no help. I just had no connection between the
name and myself. I thought the first name reminded me of water and
I thought that was good, as I always felt so dry and thirsty all
the time and it’d be nice to have a name that sounded like
something as good and pure as water. And I knew there had been a
president named Truman, but that was a long time ago, and I wasn’t
even sure what a president did and I was pretty sure there weren’t
any anymore, at least not around here.
    One of the cards had “Department of Motor Vehicles”
at the top, and the other read “Stony Ridge College” above my
picture. I knew the general implications of these places, but not
how they specifically related to me. I knew what a car was and that
this card proved I knew how to drive one, but I didn’t remember if
I had a car, or what it was like, or how it felt to drive it. And I
knew what a college was, but I didn’t remember being in one or what
I did there, but I suspected, since I knew so many strange facts
and ideas, that maybe I was a professor. That seemed kind of nice,
though I suspected that, like presidents, there probably weren’t
any of those around anymore.
    Unlike the other cards or the money, the ones with
my picture didn’t make me uneasy. In fact, I sort of liked them, so
I put them in the pocket of the new pants after I put them on. I
felt a little funny, getting undressed there in the open, but once
Milton and Will had left, I didn’t really feel like I was being
watched, even though the other people who couldn’t talk milled
around near me. The other clothes I put on weren’t new, of course,
but they were old clothes that had been packed in big plastic bags,
so they were dry and clean, and not all stiff from caked-on, dried
blood, like the ones I discarded. These clothes smelled nice, too,
like soap, and I had to admit that everything on me and on the
other people around me smelled foul. Our clothes were dry, dusty,
used up, like dead leaves—not even the wet, slimy kind you find in
puddles or under other leaves, but the dry, brittle kind that are
getting closer to being dust than they are to being leaves anymore.
I was glad to have new clothes.
    They were kind of loose on me, but I thought they
looked nice enough. There was a flannel