Read Online Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons - Free Book Online

Shortly beforesunset he entered the edge of the forest. The trees were the stately elms and oaks of his Pennsylvania boyhood. Bremen’s long shadow moved ahead of him as he moved deeper into the forest.
    For the first time he felt fatigue and thirst begin to work on him. His tongue was heavy, swollen with dryness. He moved leadenly through the lengthening shadows, occasionally checking the visible patches of sky for any sign of clouds. It was while he was looking up that he almost stumbled into the pond. Inside a protective ring of weeds and reeds lay the circle of water. A heavily laden cherry tree sent roots down the bank. Bremen took the last few steps forward, expecting the water to disappear as he threw himself into it.
    It was waist-deep and cold as ice.
    It was just after sunrise that she came. He spotted the movement immediately upon awakening. Not believing, he stood still, just another shadow in the shade of the trees. She moved hesitantly with the tentative step of the meek or the barefoot. The tasseled sawgrass brushed at her thighs. Bremen watched with a clarity amplified by the rich, horizontal sweeps of morning light. Her body seemed to glow. Her breasts, the left ever so slightly fuller than the right, bobbed gently with each high step. Her black hair was cut short.
    She paused in the light. Moved forward again. Bremen’s eyes dropped to her strong thighs, and he watched as her legs parted and closed with the heart-stopping intimacy of the unobserved. She was much closer now, and Bremen could make out the delicate shadows along her fine ribcage, the pale, pink circles of areolae, and the spreading bruise along the inside of one arm.
    Bremen stepped out into the light. She stopped, arms rising across her upper body in a second’s instinctive movement, then moved toward him quickly. She opened her arms to him. He was filled with the clean scent of her hair. Skin slid across skin. Their hands moved across muscle, skin, the familiar terrain of vertebrae. Both were sobbing, speaking incoherently. Bremen dropped to one kneeand buried his face between her breasts. She bent slightly and cradled his head with her fingers. Not for a second did they relax the pressure binding them together.
    “Why did you leave me?” he muttered against her skin. “Why did you go away?”
    Gail said nothing. Her tears fell into his hair and her hands tightened against his back. Wordlessly she kneeled with him in the high grass.
    Together they passed out of the forest just as the morning mists were burning away. In the early light the grass-covered hills gave the impression of being part of a tanned, velvety human torso, which they could reach out and touch.
    They spoke softly, occasionally intertwining fingers. Each had discovered that to attempt telepathic contact meant inviting the blinding headaches that had plagued both of them at first. So they talked. And they touched. And twice before the day was over, they made love in the high, soft grass with only the golden eye of the sun looking down on them.
    Late in the afternoon they crossed a rise and looked past a small orchard at a vertical glare of white.
    “It’s the farm!” cried Gail, with wonder in her voice. “How can that be?”
    Bremen felt no surprise. His equilibrium remained as they approached the tall old building. The saggy barn they had used as a garage was also there. The driveway still needed new gravel, but now it went nowhere, for there was no highway at the end of it. A hundred yards of rusted wire fence that used to border the road now terminated in the high grass.
    Gail stepped up on the front porch and peered in the window. Bremen felt like a trespasser or a weekend house browser who had found a home that might or might not still be lived in. Habit brought them around to the back door. Gail gingerly opened the outer screen door and jumped a bit as the hinge squeaked.
    “Sorry,” Bremen said. “I know I promised to oil that.”
    It was cool inside and