Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth Read Free Book Online Page A

shirt and some pants and
they felt coarse, but also comforting, like a scratchy blanket. It
took me forever to negotiate the buttons, both on the clothes I was
removing, and even more so on those I was putting on, because with
those, I didn’t want to tear any buttons off as I fastened them. I
got so frustrated when I’d gotten part way through and saw I had
more buttons than holes left to match up with them, so I had to
undo them, line them up right, and start over. But by the time the
sun went down—which was pretty late, because it was getting to be
almost summer—I had everything on, even some comfortable shoes.
    I would’ve said it was time for a walk, to show off
my new outfit, but I still wasn’t very good at walking. Also, there
wasn’t anyone around who would show the slightest interest in my
appearance, so there seemed to be little point in such an
exertion.
    I dragged one of the chairs outside the storage unit
and sat down. It was an old lawn chair, the kind with green and
white webbing across an aluminum frame. The frame was a little
bent, and some of the nylon straps were torn, but it was still
usable. After the day’s discoveries, it seemed the perfect night to
sit outside and dream of all the things I would find and learn in
the days to come. I looked up into the purplish dusk as the sun’s
light faded and the stars came out. I wondered if I’d ever know
what kind of a professor I was. Maybe I was a janitor at the
college, or a security guard, or a cook in the cafeteria. Without
anyone to see whatever was wrong with my smile, I went ahead and
smiled at that thought, as it really did seem quite amusing.
    I folded my hands in my lap, and as I did so, I
suddenly tensed and my body seemed more numb than normal. It was
another of those things I hadn’t noticed, another obvious thing
that hadn’t occurred to me, like leaving the city hadn’t occurred
to me for so long. I felt a ring on my left hand. I felt it with my
fingertips and it was smooth, just a plain band, without any stone
or setting. And unlike the college identification card, that could
mean only one thing: there was a Mrs. Truman, and, quite probably,
even little Trumans. Or at least there had been at one time, back
in that time and place and identity before I woke up. And even more
disconcerting and far less amusing than not knowing if I were a
professor or a janitor, I realized I knew nothing of these people.
Even if I could look for them, I wouldn’t know them if they walked
right up to me. Maybe it was just as well. Milton had said some of
us were nicer now than we had been before. Maybe I hadn’t been very
nice, and the rest of the Truman family would remember that. Or
maybe they were violent and angry now, like many of the other
people I had met.
    I tilted my head back to look up at the stars again.
They looked very small and cold, and in an odd way, mocking. I
wondered who or what it was that could be punishing me by taking
away the memory of myself, my life, and my family, and leaving me
only with such random, disorganized, but most of all, meaningless
knowledge.

Chapter 5
    School was not quite over for the spring, so the day
after I went shooting with my dad, I was back in class. Our
community didn’t have enough kids to divide us into age groups, or
“grades” as our elders called them. Since there weren’t many people
born right around the time the old world ended and ours began,
bigger kids like me were in classes with anyone ten or older. We
used part of an old school building for classes, so I had some idea
of the enormous scale of the old world, but I still find it hard to
imagine that those rooms were once filled with children. To
multiply that by the thousands of towns and cities I see on an old
map—that makes it harder to grasp than the idea that there were
once billions of people on the planet.
    It almost frightens me, the idea of all those people
jammed into cities, all those children packed into schools. I