Free The Deadheart Shelters by Forrest Armstrong Page B

turbulence. He was hyperventilating and trying to suppress it, which made him gasp harder.
    “He looks so sad,” Lilly said, letting go.
    “He ain’t sad. He’s scared ‘cause he knows he’s worthless but that’s how slaves should feel. Clean up your mess.” The kid started to wipe up his spit with his hands and Mark struck him again. “Not with your hands! Shit! That’s a whole new mess you think I want those inhuman germ-beds greasing up my eat spot? Hell no. Shit.”
    “You don’t get carried away now, Mark,” Abe said.
    “That’s why you buy these things, old man. Money never allowed for you?”
    “Money allowed. Had no desire.”
    Lilly got a towel for the kid to clean with. He washed carefully, calm returning to him; a fisherman unhooking a fish and releasing it. I sat there speechless, wondering about him. “What’s your name?” and he gave that same instant of eye contact that sank straight to the bottom of you like a baited line. Then drawn up and speechless.
    “He don’t got a name. Why give him one?”
    “Every man needs a name,” said Abe.
    “Not mine. Only reason to ever give a slave a name’s if you got more than one. Him you just call the first profanity that feels right at the moment.”
    “I don’t like that.”
    “Well then buy one and name it. You saint.”
    “He looks so hungry,” Lilly said.
    “He ain’t hungry.”
    “He is. I’m going to make us all something to eat.”
    “He don’t eat with us.”
    “Tonight he does, Mark. Let it be like that. Pete, come with me.”
    Outside I heard the cicada throats that sound so much like anxiety feels. If we didn’t speak of so many things they wouldn’t exist. Lilly’s footsteps beside mine, like being woken up. Sometimes I wished I was an ice cube melting, and the sky like a dead swordfish as the evening drew in and the moon being emboldened by the white ripped down around it was one blank, dead eye. Gasp as if fainting.
    “I’m thinking of other things,” I said.
    “That’s okay.”
    “What if I told people I was named something else? And that I grew up on a ship never anchored? I’d run around and shake them by the shoulders, shouting How are you not amazed by this? We’re standing on a ground that never shifts!”
    “I don’t know why you’d want to do that.”
    “Who says I do? But maybe I might.”
    “Don’t go doing things like that. Okay?”
    I didn’t answer. We got to the place where the tomatoes grew and found two elk eating them already. “We need meat for the supper. Kill one,” Lilly said, but I couldn’t do it. I had the biggest rock I could hold in one hand held above one’s head and he watched, as if saying I understand You have to do this.
    But I couldn’t. They walked away from the tomatoes soundlessly.
    “No meat, then,” Lilly said with a sigh.
    When we plucked the tomatoes they too would sigh from the stem, like they had been holding their breath. Sometimes one of our hands would graze the other’s warmly, but when Lilly put her fingers around my wrist and slid up to my fingers I could feel her temperature dropping. The pale in her face was made of the pale in the sky ripped down and bruised now in the injured night. And I thought It’s sad how each day happens like this, born an ignorant child too fast becoming bed-sick.
    Even as a slave I was excited in the morning, though I knew it came without the freedom of preceding an unwritten day. It was the feeling of being unprepared. Or that each day could be the day you do the thing you haven’t done yet.
    Thinking of the fertility of life, I walked to the apple trees with Lilly. That you could impregnate every moment with something different and wondering if I had lost that. Allowed it to be so. The elk had stopped ahead of us and were crying over what I thought was a colorless puddle, until it spun. Then we both looked up.
    Clyde was hung from the thickest branch, his head tilted in perpetual confusion and his face the