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

work we sat in the park watching the kids fly kites, and the plump pink birds laid eggs on the water. Their eggs bobbed on the surface, clicking together like bocce balls, and the sound made us tired and relaxed our jaws. It was easy not to think of things and if you closed your eyes you’d half-dream of the clicks, pebble-dotting the blankness of the mind. I liked to watch and listen to these things and not think about them.
    My work seemed to me a tongue that dissolved time placed onto it. I forgot it was there, usually. I stopped minding most things and got tired a lot, which made it easier to go into the place where things didn’t matter. Sometimes I’d think of Lilly but stopped thinking before it could hurt. For the absence of despair I’d give the absence of all else. I did this.
    In the park with our eyes closed, Dirt said to me, “You know how I used to get so worked up about how weird things were? The way my mind is always fooling me, what it means. I stopped. I don’t care anymore.”
    “Good.”
    “We don’t have time to care, do we? Or at least it’s not important to.”
    “I can’t imagine what good it does. Where I came from, we never had anything to do but care, and it never got us anywhere. We wondered and suffered. Now I don’t wonder and everything’s here.”
    “I just want to be like everybody else.”
    “You are.” I opened my eyes to see him smiling. Both of us felt good. I found that it was easy to feel this good and let nothing bother you. We went to the mines when we went to the mines and the money kept happening. Soon I bought a television set.

The city felt like a moving elevator again. All I could hear was the woosh of unicyclists passing me and in the road they were marching, slapping the ground with hairbrushes. Four of them, all covered in vinegar and charcoal, dragging a cradle made of dislocated plumbing by ropes behind them.
    “Make noise!” one of the men dragging shouted, fighting for breath as he spoke. “Make noise!” The people around me got loud in one syllable uproars of lazy sound. Like they just opened their mouths and pushed. I did it too, and then they pulled the cradle closer.
    In the cradle was our king, wearing a rhinoceros head with stems of grape bunches in the eye sockets. You could see his eyes multiplied through them like mosquitoes but each one seemed focused on a different one of us and looking directly into. He pounded the railing twice, so you could hear it only barely like bats on telephone poles, and everyone stopped.
    “Today the sun told me he will float to a different planet if we don’t feed him. He is hungry,” the king said. “Who would like to feed the sun?” Then I could feel it in all the people, something strange like when you try to touch two magnets together that don’t attract. He looked over us like we were a grocery market. “Why don’t you want to feed the sun when he is hungry? Would you rather it be dark forever?”
    “Don’t worry,” the man beside me whispered, hardly moving his lips. “The sun never leaves. It can never leave. He’s lying.”
    “You!” The king pointed at him with the tip of a machete. “Come here.”
    The man pretended not to hear him.
    “You! You in the sunglasses and soiled shirt, come here!”
    He acted like he was surprised and walked up to the cradle. “Yes, my king?”
    “Why do you say things like that?”
    “I didn’t say anything, my lord.”
    “I heard you. I hear everything— ” he said, looking up at the rest of us, “—when you turn in your sleep, I hear your bedsprings creak. I know which block you’re walking on when you pause to tie your shoes—I know how long it takes you to tie them. There’s nothing in this city I don’t hear. What cannot be heard, the sun tells me.”
    “I believe you heard it, but it wasn’t me who spoke.”
    The king looked down at him, the man trembling and trying to hold his breath to stop but shaking even more every time he relapsed.