Free The Deadheart Shelters by Forrest Armstrong

You just let things happen.” He finished his wine and put the glass down, turning away from the land. “I ain’t afraid. Life’s been too good to me.”

I turned to Dirt and said, “Don’t be afraid to die. To have lived at all is lucky.”
    Dirt shook his head. “Life hasn’t done anything for me. It just started and it’s just ending and all that happened in between was all this black . It’s all I ever see anymore. If I get out of here I’m quitting on the spot, I’m leaving, and trying to figure out what was really supposed to happen.” He was breathing heavily, now, as if the breaths were weighted down going in and out of the body. His skin, in spots where the black wasn’t, got paler. “What about you? You gonna quit?”
    I opened my eyes at him. “Why would I ever?”

I tried to remember the spot I left off in my soap opera, but now when I looked at the fields all I could see was Clyde, tranced in melancholy under the hiding of an apple tree. I had ignored him before.

Two days passed uninflected in that room. The mice crept in with their white fur they’d managed to keep from dirtying, and stayed with us, like they could sense our loneliness and stayed to say Everything is lonely. You are not alone only in that you are alone. We began to get hungry but I had gone long without eating before, it was only the thirst that bothered me, but Dirt couldn’t stop moaning about both and nothing would pacify him. “Don’t waste the air too—the air is limited.”

Soap opera. It was me and Lilly and we were just kids so I had to pretend I knew what we looked like. Her hair by the time I met her was a wheat field, with the bronze and gold stranding together, darkened by the shadows wheat fields hold in them; but in my imagination’s counterfeit of her youth it was if you could trap sunlight in transparent strings. Drifting like a silk napkin in the windless. Her eyes were softer than her eyes now; the way bread innocently gets stale. She was beautiful then as she is beautiful now and O the desire is not the beauty but the beholding it.
    I was hiding in a tree disguised as a sparrow. The gray bark was warm and smooth and I was rubbing it, simulating it was her. But this is how things work. She stooped down in the overgrown grass and pulled up parts of a crashed airplane that must have rained like clouds rain as it fell, for the bulk of the plane was nowhere. Only fragments that escaped the smoke’s swallow. When I thought of flying to her I held the branches tighter, reminding myself I am wingless.
    (I must be losing my fucking mind for love) (None of this could be a soap opera Nobody would watch this)
    (It only matters to me. It’s sad when you realize things like that but it shouldn’t be. You always know these kinds of things, unspoken.)
    Clyde tried to hang himself and each time the rope broke and he couldn’t stand up for an hour. He didn’t sob; if you saw him you might mistake it for boredom.
    This hasn’t happened yet. Let’s pray for never.
    Lilly put everything she found in a funnel and let it spill back onto the floor. Then she stepped over it, like she forgot it was there.
    I watched her do this repeatedly and fell deeper in love. The drowning man who doesn’t try to swim—“It is what God would will it.”
    When she saw me, I fell out of the tree, and she knew I wasn’t a sparrow.

“Tell me about the slaves,” Dirt said. He had been looking progressively worse; growing so thin the pressure of constant shrinking alone could kill him without the hunger. Every breath or word that left his mouth wore the black dust over it like a dress. So, this time, I obliged.
    “What do you want to know?”
    He leaned back and thought awhile, for we had the luxury of time. It meant he did not have to say what first came to mind. “Did they realize their burden?”
    “I’ve been away from them long now and I still hardly realize it.”
    “You’re lying.”
    “Okay, no, I realize it. But I