The Deadheart Shelters by Forrest Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

I stop pretending and the pond face gets calm again. It’s like putting your head underwater in a hot tub.
    Ah Lilly you are a cigarette burn in my brain! I pretend I love you and it’s like filling my mouth with cotton until there’s no opening for breath and my face turns purple. I am more demented than usual. I am the kind of person that buries himself under the debris of car wrecks just for the relief of being unearthed.
    Lilly it could be that you are just more weight in a brain perpetually collecting weight and if I could I would go back to before I met you, so my head could still be a kite. You who anchor me to the daily revolution of the moon. Breathe and count down from ten until your problems diminish to zero. Orange peels.
    Lately I have this repeating dream of a man falling in slow-motion and his skull cracking and gray matter rushing out in slow-motion and the walls becoming pleasant-colored. Which must be how so many people end up doing so little with themselves.

Then a young kid named Pablo collapsed in those cellars and it took almost a minute for the men to stop hammering. I watched the dust come up and float slowly back down. When they did drop their tools more dust rose and fell, and from their now-frantic footsteps, so we could hardly see each other. I followed the shapes for I had grown used to following shapes in my sleep. We emerged into the daylight dragging Pablo by the armpits and I thought of Thomas dragged, then we laid him on his back.
    They realized he was deeply unconscious and wiped the black off his face and teeth, and turned his head sideways to wash out his mouth. Then there was nothing to do but listen to the oceanic rasp he made breathing (like a newspaper folded, unfolded, refolded) and see the streams of black leaking out. For three days he lay in a bed asleep, leaking the black and breathing like that and when he’d cough small clouds of black would puff out. Many went to visit him; I did not. Eventually his sleep decayed into the eternal, un-waking sleep, and no more black came out.

The money we made eased the memory of death, as it does all things. I’ve learned this already and it’s one of the things I know most now. The money put cushions underneath me and Dirt and let me soundproof my walls, so I could pretend I was still in the place I left. We worked up the money for our own place. Once alone in a room just mine, I started talking myself to sleep at night, because these were the sorts of things I missed.
    But the money was warm milk in my pocket that didn’t soak through; I kept my hands dipped in it. One morning we were in the mines, working on getting more.
    “You shoulda seen the guy last night,” Felt said. All of us were hammering along the wall, letting the dust powder our shoes. The kid who’d taken Pablo’s place came by sometimes to shovel up what he could. “He begged.”
    “Don’t tell us,” Dirt said.
    “No, you wouldn’t want to hear about it, would you?”
    “It’s wrong what you do.”
    Felt’s grip slipped and he hit himself on the fingers. He tried to shake the pain out, leaning back and biting his bottom lip, then turned on Dirt with the hammer. I stood in between, and soon he enlightened.
    “I won’t kill him” Felt said. “I’m working now. But remember you would have died that day if not for my word . You’d be dead.”
    “It’s wrong.”
    “Dirt, be quiet,” I said.
    “Listen to your friend. You ought to pretend you aren’t what you are. You’d prefer it.”
    Both of us made believe we were different things. The scars on my cheeks got soft enough to be unseen; I was just an ordinary man. Dirt never spoke up about the newborns again. If asked about his family he’d say, “They’re dead. I don’t like to think about it.”

“Shit’s fucked up in the city,” one man said on the block that smells like brewer’s yeast. “Don’t look down.”

I liked being ordinary. I took to simple things. When we didn’t have to