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

from her back and held it up for him. When he had taken it, she wiped the hair out of her mouth. Bending down, she took a double handful of water from the gourd and rinsed her face with it. “Come,” she said. “Leave that and come down into the sun. I bet you’ve been inside all day.”
    Mr. Sarnath shook his head. He stared out at the shadows on the grass. Then he turned. The brown skull watched him from the center of the desk.
    “Come down,” cried Cassia. And there was something in her voice that changed his mind and helped him to decide. Carrying the basket, he disappeared indoors, and then returned almost immediately holding an old cloth bag. It had once been yellow.
    “Vanity,” said Mr. Sarnath. “Vanity is still the hardest.”
    “What?” Cassia had come up to stand behind him. Surprised, she watched him wrap the skull in parchment and stuff it down into the bag. The bag had a long throat. He twisted it, then tied it in a knot.
    “When you light the fire tonight, use that paper.”
    He motioned toward the tabletop, where the six hundred sheets of his own handwriting lay scattered. Then he turned around to face her.
    “But you worked on it so long,” she said.
    “I was deluded.”
    He slung the bag over his shoulder and walked down the steps. The heat of the day was now abated, and the sun was shining through the long trunks of the trees. He scuffed his sandals in the dust—an area of crushed stone near the steps. Then when his toes had settled in their thongs, he set off toward the wood, the strips of alternating sun and shadow causing minute fluctuations in the temperature of his long cheeks.
    His people did not sweat, not like the humans, whose skins were always damp. He could tell that she was close behind him by her smell, for she was quiet as a cat, and in the movement of her greasy limbs he could hear none of the incidental noises that he made when he walked. None of the small creaking, the whisper of the flesh rubbing the bone, just the silence of a wild animal, her and her brother. Then he paused, and turned to her and smiled, aware that his own disappointment had turned outward, as it sometimes did. Hundreds of nights of wasted labor hung suspended in his yellow bag.
    She smiled back at him, and then they walked companionably into the wood, following a path that ran in back of the cabin, past the garbage dump, and left the crest of the hill at right angles to the way that she had come. “Where are we going?” she asked once, but he shrugged his narrow shoulders. He had decided, and in fact the path led only to one place. They pushed through a dark undergrowth of spiderbushes, rhododendron, jacaranda. Stepping carefully downhill, Cassia had to raise her forearms to protect her face against the branches whipping back. In a few minutes she came out at the lip of the ravine, a cleft between one hill and the next. Mr. Sarnath was standing in the sunlight on a bare place on the rock.
    The ravine followed a break in the forest canopy, and the yellow sun was shining, its strength not yet used up. It was cooler here than on the hilltop, and the air was fresh and smelled of water. Deep below them at the bottom of the hill where it was already dark with shadow, she could hear the gurgle of a stream.
    “This will do,” said Mr. Sarnath. He was standing on the edge, his arm outstretched, the long bag dangling from his hand. He opened up his fingers and the bag dropped down, bouncing off the incline and then rolling in a scatter of black dirt until it disappeared into a crevice in the rock.
    He turned around. “The sun leaves here last. It’s perfectly safe.” In fact the rock seemed free of beetles and corrosive slugs; it was a wide flat piece of limestone. Mr. Sarnath sat down suddenly, collapsing on his creaking knees. Perched cross-legged, he looked like a gaunt bird atop its nest. Cassia took a seat more gingerly. She was very thirsty.
    “Now,” said Mr. Sarnath, leaning toward her. “What