Free The Cult of Loving Kindness by Paul Park, Cory, Catska Ench

oil lamp, that he understood.
I will bring a bag of pearls,
Enough to spell my name out on the ground.
And you will spell my name out on the ground,
And you will spell it “ANGKHDT.”
    He had written “Onket.” He had stared at the unfamiliar word, testing it in his mouth for the first time. Then he had sat back. His hand and pen had fallen slackly to his side.
    That day, almost for the first time, his meditation had seemed bitter and unprofitable to him, and he had risen from his cushion prematurely, with aching knees. Now the sun was going down. Long shadows slunk across the floor of the veranda. With his thumb he rubbed along the maxillary bone, along a sleeping image of the master. Then he paused, remembering the statue of St. Abu Starbridge, which he had kept upon his desk that last night at his post in Caladon. He remembered the golden star inlaid upon the saint’s copper palm, glinting in the moonlight. Perhaps that too had been a sign. A moth was drowning in a bowl of light—one tiny circumstance had led him on a long and weary path. But perhaps also it had been the image of the saint that had led him to the place where he now sat, a mental journey just as long and complicated as the physical had been, through swamps and forests just as thick.
    He raised his eyes. There at the clearing’s edge, Cassia stood beside the banyan tree, her skirt rucked up around her hips. She was standing with her hand outstretched, her fingers buried in an enormous tassel of roots which hung down near her, searching for the ground. She was carrying a basket of fruit upon her back—jackfruit, selamat, and durian.
     
    *
There was a place for him to lie invisible above the pool. He lay crouched behind a boulder in the mouth of an old culvert, which had fed the dye pit of some ancient factory. Near his hand crept one of the fat rael bugs that had given him his name, its carapace clicking in the dirt. When he was a child he had been able to imitate the sound.
     
    The silver pool was a round concrete cistern, perhaps fifty feet from edge to edge. Opposite where he lay hidden, a narrow waterfall coursed down a slope of bricks, pure water from the stream above. But whether there was still some residue in the bottom of the cistern, or whether some of the numerous pipes which hung out over it still dripped some ancient effluent, the pool itself retained a milky color, a distinctive smell.
    Birds circled overhead. Near Rael’s hand, lizards crept among the mossy pipes. On an overhanging ledge a monkey and a dinko grimaced at each other; one threw a stone. Apart from that it was a peaceful place. The waterfall provided a soft, comfortable clamor; it ran down into a steep-sided basin at one end of the pool. But at the other end the slope was gentler. Shyer larger animals came down to drink at a beach of concrete rubble intermixed with pebbles of worn glass—small forest antelopes, and tapirs, and wild dogs. At sunset it seemed as if they had a pact among themselves. Once Rael had seen a tiger squat down by the bank to clean his paws, while nearby slept a fat potbellied pig, dug up to her nostrils in the silver mud.
    But there was another beast, one whose malevolence and hunger never rested. This pool was its stalking ground. When it was hunting, the temperature around the pool subsided, and there was milky scum upon the surface of the water. When it was hunting, Rael could feel a prickling on his skin, an ache in his back teeth. It exuded a small sound, an intimate small whispering that seemed to touch Rael in his inner ear. Then he would crouch down out of sight and wait until he saw a movement on the other bank.
    He had waited at the pool a dozen times, and felt the change in temperature, and smelt the scum upon the pool; he had watched the creature make a dozen kills before he knew what he was seeing. Only when it was finished he had gone down to the little beach, and he had looked at the creature’s track in the wet sand. And he had