Free Our Dried Voices by Greg Hickey Page A

top cross pole began to ease out of its hole.
    The meadow around him was empty. The mountains loomed closer than they had ever seemed before, powerful and timeless across a short expanse of lush green field. Samuel put both hands on the post and pushed hard. The pole leaned sideways under his weight. He pushed until it tilted far enough to remove the top cross pole from its hole. The other end of the cross pole slid easily out of its place in the opposite post. The upper cross pole in the other direction came out with even less effort, and then the lower cross poles after that. Samuel worked methodically for the rest of the day, neglecting his evening meal. When the sun set, he lay down next to the fence and slept. He awoke with the sunrise and continued his task. Soon he had removed more than two dozen poles from the fence. The morning bells reminded him he was hungry, and he set off for the nearest meal hall. As he walked, he estimated that he must have enough wood to at least make a start on repairing the bridges, even if he could not complete all of them. He now needed to move all that wood from the fence at the very edge of the colony to the river in the middle, and once there, attach it to the remaining framework of the bridges.
    Despite the time it would take, there seemed no alternative to carrying the poles by hand from the fence to the river. Samuel knew there was no hope of enlisting the aid of the other colonists, and after their last conversation he was not sure whether to ask Penny for help. He resolved to do the job himself, so he devoured his morning meal and returned to the fence to begin the task.
    He found he could carry two poles at a time by cradling them horizontally against his chest. It took him about ten minutes to move the poles from the fence to the nearest bridge and then walk back to the fence again, so it was almost time for the midday meal once he had completed the job. He ate under a tree by the river and rested.
    Having brought the wood to the river, Samuel still faced the problem of how to fit and attach it to the bridge’s now-dilapidated framework. The fence poles were too long to neatly fit the width of the bridge and much heavier than the planks which currently spanned the walkway. He would have to cut them down somehow. He recalled the broken piece of the meal hall window latch he had stored in the pocket of his tunic. He took it out and struck the broken end against the nearest fencepost. The sharpened edge sunk a few centimeters into the wood. It was an imperfect tool, but it was all he could find. There still remained the problem of affixing the wood to the bridges, but given that he was already limited by available materials, Samuel decided some of the bridges would have to be sacrificed, at least for now. He scouted the five bridges in the colony and estimated he could salvage enough nails from three of the bridges to repair the other two. He promised himself he would mend the other three as soon as he could acquire the necessary materials.
    The next morning, Samuel began his work in earnest. It was the first time in his life he had performed any manual labor for an extended period of time, and the small muscles of his hands and wrists quickly grew knotted and tired from hours of holding, manipulating and cutting the wooden poles. By the end of the first day, several blisters had formed on his hands and most of them had torn open. His back ached from stooping over the poles, his shoulders and forearms from chopping at the wood with the broken latch. Yet there was a part of him that reveled in this physical discomfort, a part of him that saw beyond the slow and painstaking work and envisioned the end products of his labor and all the tiny steps in between, all the pieces of himself he thrust greedily, feverishly, into his work, so that each single solitary moment during his time by the river was transformed into something that was entirely his, that belonged solely to his mind and