Read Online Fell of Dark by Patrick Downes - Free Book Online Page A

This shouldn’t matter to me, or to anyone, since it’s still text. If I look close enough at the symbols, I can make out a story, a poem, or a true fact. Almost all the books are in English.
    You’d be amazed. Right now, in a rack behind the bathroom door, there’s a book of political cartoons; a biblical concordance; the
New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons
;
Getting Even
, by Woody Allen; and a book of math puzzles. There are stacks of books everywhere, and the shelves where books live are all bowed. They’ll collapse at some point.
    Maeterlinck,
The Treasure of the Humble
, 1899; Westcott, Cynthia,
The Gardener’s Bug Book
; Kurlansky, Mark,
Cod
; Voltaire,
Candide
; Williams, Margery,
The Velveteen Rabbit
; Neely, Henry M.,
A Primer for Star-Gazers
;
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats,
Volume 1; Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell,
Guitar for Dummies
, 2nd edition; White, Carolyn,
A History of Irish Fairies
; Goldman, William,
The Princess Bride
; Elder, George R.,
The Body: An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism
, Volume 2; Dahl, Roald,
James and the Giant Peach
; Thomas, Dylan,
Under Milk Wood
, London, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1956; Joyce, James,
Dubliners
; Lagerkvist, Par,
The Dwarf
; Kawabata, Yasunari,
The Master of Go
; Shakespeare,
The Sonnets
; Wodehouse, P. G.,
Right Ho, Jeeves!
;
National Geographic World Atlas,
8th edition;
1000 Years of Irish Poetry
; all of Agatha Christie, and an armful of Asimov.
    This is how I’m growing up.
    I know my mother never stopped buying books after my father died. It was his passion, I think, though my mother’s a reader, too. She told me he would come home with boxes of books from library sales or garage sales, and he would sit up until all hours, reading the books, picking at them. Most he would keep; some he would give away again. “Such a mess,” she said once. “But you ate them, too.”

    I was born with a book in my hand, she said. The haiku of Basho.
    Now I see her face,
    the old woman abandoned,
    the moon her only companion
    Or:
    In the moonlight a worm
    silently
    drills through a chestnut
    I see the silent worm. It’s like the wiggly, slippery thought that keeps me awake, right? I want to sleep but I can’t. Worm. Worm.
    And who is that old woman? She’s a real woman, but she’s also the old woman inside me who will be left by everyone. Why won’t she die? Tick, tick, tick, tick. She’s a watch that won’t stop ticking, and she has to go on when all the other watches have died.

Purpose
    THE REASON I’M ALIVE at all. How am I supposed to know? Only God knows. Maybe you know.
    Maybe I’m meant to build bridges, cut tumors out of the brains of children, or find stars in the folds of space. I sometimes wonder if I’ll die a hero, protecting the world or just one person from death, from fire or murder. Why else do I bleed if not for something big and rare? I look deeper, get quieter, trying to find what makes me want to live.

Confessions
    THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS and the Seven Princes of Hell: Mammon, the demon of greed; Belphegor, the demon of sloth; Satan, the demon of anger; Beelzebub, the demon of gluttony; Lucifer, the demon of pride; Asmodeus, the demon of lust; and Leviathan, the demon of envy.

    I think the money in another person’s pocket is meant to be in mine.
    Last week, a woman dropped her wallet on the sidewalk. I picked it up, and I wanted to take her money.
    When I think of myself as a grown man, if I haven’t made the vow of poverty, I’ll live in a house where I can sit in an armchair looking over the world through a wide, wide window. I will listen to music playing from a very expensive stereo. I might want to make money without working. I’d own a big luxury car, one of those British kinds, a Bentley or Rolls-Royce, which would be like driving around in my living room.
    Mammon rubs his hands.

    I want to confess to the things that make me cry. I don’t