Free Tales and Imaginings by Tim Robinson Page A

place an animation which is unusual, for the inhabitants generally move very slowly, look at each other as little as possible, rarely touch, and seem to disgust each other and themselves.
    The truck usually arrives in the morning and is gone long before noon, and the dogs soon exhaust the interest of the city and lope off towards the horizon in twos and threes. Then the day begins to unfold its tedious cruelties at leisure: bluebottles, the smell of burning rubber, blown sand, itching sores. By evening everyone has drifted to the river’s edge. The women, wrapped in dark cloths, perch along the top of the bank, the men squat here and there on the slope below them, and the children paddle in the mud and squabble over the day’s finds. There is usually a shallow mist on the water near the bank, and the farther shore is a mere equivocation between water and sky, but between these limits are vast expanses of clarity and a majestic progress that only reveals itself in the steady driving-on of great driftwood rafts. In the evening light the river bears a cargo of space and silence as necessary to these people as the daily truck-load of food. After nightfall their thwarted desires build wonders out of the murmurous breeze-filled darkness, and the islands of holy delight begin to float by.
    Among these solitaries there used to be one, now forgotten, who kept himself more than usually separate from everyone else, because he had no family, because the skin of his right arm and part of his cheek had become scaly and abhorrent, because he was tormented by longing for a life worthy of his longing, and because he was secretly building a boat on which to leave the city and intercept one of the night-islands that obsessed its people. At the city’s downstream limit, where the barbed wire comes down to the water’s edge, there isa little bay formed by the collapse of a length of the river-bank .He used to keep this stagnant backwater to himself, driving off the children by throwing stones and handfuls of mud. His cabin, hardly more than a bundle of matting he wrapped around himself at night, was just above the bay, against the wire. Every day he used to squat at the margin of the water or on a flat stone in the shallows, and fish with a bit of stiff wire for any floating object that could be added to the boat he was assembling: lumps of polystyrene foam the size of his fist, a metal cylinder from an insecticide spray, a piece of car-tyre, a few sticks. His boat was a sort of raft made by threading these things on lengths of electrical flex or lashing them together with strips of rag; it was more like a basket or a net than a boat. He kept it rolled up in his shelter, added to it when he could, and each night took it down to the river to see if it was enough yet to float him.
    Time, for the city, has no forward motion. The same day passes again and again like a lost dog roving the streets. For this man, though, a day did come that was different from the rest. He recognized it instantly when he woke, but it took him a few moments to realizehe bore its distinguishing mark on his own body, which remembered the pliant and responsive web of the boat; for the previous night he had spread it out on the water and lowered himself onto it, and it had borne him up. He could have left then; why had he chosen to endure another day? He asked the day that question, and it did not answer. Once again he swallowed the food that he blamed for his infection because it came across the scaly plain, and waited under another afternoon filmed over like a diseased eye. He told no one that this was his last day in the loathsome city. At sunset , instead of joining the watchers on the river-bank, he crept into his hut and lay there like a man waiting for his mistress, feeling the imprint of the boat throughout his body.
    When it was almost dark he dragged the boat down the broken river-bank and laid it on the water’s surface. The lumps of plasticfoam glistened