Read Online Words to Tie to Bricks by Claire Hennesy - Free Book Online

it a lot.
    I’ve never wished for anything before.
    I try to remember why we did this, why we came here in the first place. It was important, the reason. We talked about it. Neither of us could remember. That happens here; memories die, new ones
come in to replace them. We tried to eke out our story as we went along. We’d come from a safe place, a happy place, maybe, and we’d been chosen to go out and do this. To reach it.
Whatever it was.
    I can’t remember and I don’t much care. The kind of safe and happy that place made me feel pales in comparison to the kind you could provide. I’m angry. Not at anything in
particular. But I’m angry that you died. I want you back. It isn’t fair, and it isn’t right, and I’m not going to press on because I want you back right now, right now, and
if the ground doesn’t produce you and give you back to me then I don’t know how I’ll do it but I’ll burn this entire planet even worse than it already is, and it will think
back to the cancer ravaging it now with fondness and it will wish it had given me everything I ever wanted because as much as I’m rending and coming undone and splitting apart at the seams
it’s nothing compared to the damage I want to wreak on this worthless excuse for a patch of ground to stand on.
    I’ll do it.
    I will.
    I’ll kill everything.
    Maybe that’s how things got like this in the first place.
    I don’t know.
    Neither do you.
    We can’t remember.
    No one can remember.
    I’m lost and I don’t know where I’ve been and I don’t know where I’m going and I can’t remember who I am and I don’t even have you anymore and soon
I’m going to forget you.

    I jerk awake.
    No. No, no, no, no, no. No.
    But yes.
    It’s what happens, what always happens, the memories will leave and die and then I’ll be alone and I’ll never know I was ever anything different.
    And then I start screaming. And my memory may be working with a skeleton crew, but I know I’ve never screamed like this before. It’s rage and fear and anger and pain and everything
and all of me, all wrapped up in one fatal gesture, and I turn on the Com as far as the dial will go and everyone, everywhere, for miles around will know this sound and they’ll know I was
here and they’ll know how I felt and then, and then,
    Then they’ll forget.

    And I want to make some sweeping gesture, some wonderful speech, a pledge to never forget and to always remember, but no matter what reminders I make for myself, no matter how
many times I carve your name onto my skin, the reality is that the memory will die and then I’ll be alone again.
    Can I even remember your name?
    No. I can’t.
    I chase the memory all around my head. I can’t quite manage to catch it.
    And then my thoughts are quiet for the first time in a long while and I hear the ocean bubbling two miles away and I hear the wind rustle over this bleak rocky wasteland and I hear the gas
shifting in the air and I hear the far-away scuttling of whatever lives here and, I have to say, to me at least, it all sounds pretty much the same as silence.
    And then I see light, cutting through the gas like a knife.
    Emanating from the hole you fell into.
    And I’m only thinking one thing: That light’s artificial.
    No. Sorry. Two things.
    That light’s artificial,
    And that light’s
you.
    No. Not yet. I can’t have you come back and then be torn away like this. I can’t believe it yet.
    I won’t.
    It’ll hurt too much.
    I run to the edge, and I stare down the depths. The beam of light cuts my eyes but does little to disrupt the black shroud below, underground. The light begins to flicker, on and off, and
something registers in my brain, dots and dashes and pieces of a code I can’t name, much less use.
    Your Com is broken. Must be. This is you communicating. That would make sense.
    It’s also impossible. You’re dead.
    Dead. Dead dead dead dead dead and not coming back. I’m not doing this. I’m not hurting