The Book of M by Peng Shepherd Read Free Book Online

Nashik—attempting to drum up interest in a group of twelve children they were trying and failing to dub the Nashik Cherubs, a terrible rip-off of the Angels of Mumbai—who turned this from a curiosity to a tragedy.
    Their cameraman and reporter started sending video back to their little news studio in Los Angeles, but within minutes it was all over the international networks: the Nashik Cherubs were also starting to forget things.

Orlando Zhang
    ORY TOOK THE NOTE OFF THE REMINGTON. 4—Max can’t touch the gun.
    The shells were in a box on the floor of their closet, like a pile of discarded body parts. He loaded the gun, then in pairs he fed the rest into the pockets of his pants until the box was empty. Then he grabbed all three of his moth-eaten sweaters and put them on one over the other, and covered them with the red Elk Cliffs Resort—STAFF windbreaker he’d found in the housekeeping office. Max’s clothes were still there in neat piles, but it looked as though some were missing. A shirt or two. Maybe she had seen the stack on her way out of the shelter and still been clearheaded enough to take some. Ory hoped that’s what had happened. There was no blood anywhere, nor signs of struggle, so he had to believe that she had left by herself and not as someone’s hostage. All he had to do then was find her. Find her fast.
    Next was supplies. Matches, first-aid kit, flashlight. Again, some of it seemed like it was missing. He was sure they’d collected more boxes of matches than what was in the drawer. Maybe they hadn’t. Or maybe Max had forgotten the exact number they owned and thus changed it, the way she had with the color of the knife handle. Ory stood there at the useless sink, cabinet drawer open, staring at a pair of scissors and the blank space beside it where he could have sworn they kept a spare. It was hard to tell.
    Last, a photograph of Max.
    In the floorboards by his side of the bed, he’d carved a simple trapdoor. He pulled his old wallet out and gently wiped the dust off. One debit card, one credit card, four dollar bills, a gym membership card, and his driver’s license.
    Ory eased the license out of the plastic window. If the Forgetting ever happened to him, this would be his tape recorder, he thought. Name, date of birth, height, weight, a tiny photograph of his face. It wouldn’t tell him anything he really needed to know, like that Max was his wife and he would step in front of a bus for her, that they had no children, that they met at a football game he almost didn’t go to and then almost left early from, that he was absurdly good at skiing, or that he was secretly terrified of bees. But it would at least tell him his name. And it also was a shield for the thing that really mattered. A wallet-size photograph of Max.
    It was from the night before Paul and Imanuel’s wedding—after the shadows had disappeared in India, Brazil, and Panama, but before it had gone much further than that. That evening the guests all had been in the hotel ballroom just downstairs from where he was standing now, eating chocolates and drinking champagne. Paul and Imanuel had opened some of the gifts early, and one of them had been a Polaroid instant camera that produced tiny, refrigerator-magnet-sized instant photos.
    The camera was passed around as the party got later, and when Ory got ahold of it, he took a picture of Max. She had been standing right at the open French doors that led out into the courtyard, but the light from inside was bright enough that when she turned to look at him as he said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” her face was bathed in a yellow glow that made her eyes shimmer. “Blue,” he said. He snapped it just as the smile had started to spread across her lips.
    One of the other women pulled her away to gossip about something before it was done developing, so Ory stood there in the night air just outside the doors, shaking the