Free Beast by Paul Kingsnorth Page A

into the world with our own tiny task but we don’t know what it is? Maybe our task is to write a great book or speak a certain word or love a certain person or discover a certain thing or walk a certain street or kill a certain creature or dream a certain dream. What if each one of us has to find their task and then complete it and if we don’t complete itwe are born in another form and given another task and everyone and everything will keep being reborn in every form there can ever be and given these tiny tasks to find and complete and only when all of them are done will everything be done. Maybe then all the suffering ends maybe then the game ends and we find out what’s really going on behind the scenes and who the gamemaster is.
    Everything is rising and falling expanding and contracting the universe grows and shrinks a million times every second. Or there are eleven universes all running in parallel and whatever you are doing now you are doing in all of them. Or there are hundreds of these things hundreds of these universes thousands of them rising and falling expanding and contracting beating like great hearts entwined. Sometimes it all falls away and there you are beating with all of the other hearts with every heart in every universe beating and beating. You are a cell in the heart you are part of it and it cannot beat without you. You are hurtled into the void and then catapulted back towards the beginning again. It takes a billion years and happens a million times a second and here you are and there is the void and it is everything and it is coming for you and it is fine. This is just how it should be. Everything is the same anyway.
    I drank almost all of my water up there on the stone. It was too hot. One bottle wasn’t enough. I still wasn’t hungry. I slid down the stone I felt the roughness of the granite beneath my hands. The stone was warm like it was alive and it comforted me after all the heather. I felt a kinship with these stones. Lying here like abandoned lovers like sleeping elephants like the dead with all of their sadness they comforted me. Everything was so still so silent so white. How long had it been since I had seen another creature? The stones felt like creatures to me. I wanted to throw my arms around them and nobody was watching so I did. I leaned on the biggest stone and I embraced it and it seemed so long since I had been embraced and I wanted to be. I wanted arms around me I wanted to be comforted. I remembered arms around me now I remembered someone who did that and for a second I saw her face and smelt her and saw what was in her eyes for me and then it was gone and all I had was stone. I needed something I could slip into because this was too much now this was all too much. I needed a heart to speak to mine but there was no heart there was only rock. I wanted to stay here but there was nothing here for me and so I had to keep walking.
    It took a few hours to complete the grid. I saw nothing. No evidence of any creature no evidence of anythingexcept heather and one dry stream bed and in the end the footpath that took me back home again. But that was fine. I had completed my first task. Tomorrow I would complete my second.
    In a wood a man rose from a bed of leaves by a pool. They were autumn leaves dead and brown and the man was brown also and covered in hair. There was thick orange fur all over his body. There was a drumming sound in the forest all around him it was the rain the sky had opened up and had woken him from his sleep. He knelt and looked up to the sky. He tilted his head up and opened his mouth to receive the rain. The rain was falling over everything in the world. The surface of the black pool was dancing with it.
    Something was different the next morning. I supposed it was the morning. I felt like I’d slept for a long time. It had been a hard day yesterday. But something was different and when I had climbed out of my sleeping bag and moved over to the table for my