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This is the impression you get. He is dry like the feel of cornstarch, dry like the taste of chalk, dry like those DO-NOT-EAT packets they put in the meal bags. Not a hot sort of dry, necessarily, or a cold sort of dry. Dry. Maybe "barren."
That's it. That's all you have. The totality of Cameron M.S. Garvin, as ascertained by your PURE AND KNOWING HEART, is "dry and maybe barren." You observe this impassively, having muted the typical shrill, but there's still a certain something left that wonders if this can possibly be all. And it's this same something that sends you bobbing back up, briefly, long enough to recognize that for all this talk of "you," you don't seem to have a particular location. If you're in your body, you can't feel it, or see out of it. You see nothing and feel dry. Now that you're thinking again, this is unnerving enough to make you attempt to recall (of all things) a Richard lecture. What the hell did he say? Blah blah blah, something something, chain of— oh, yes. If you hope to comprehend anything in a mind— and surely this is the outer fringes of one?— you must interpret it. You must impose sense.
Easy enough, surely. Having a location comes naturally, as does having a body in it, though you keep looking down to find four fingers or seven, and you move frictionlessly. You surroundings are smudged and gauzy, nothing like the lifelike clarity of a manse, but are at least evocative. The horizon is steeped in listless twilight. A stiff dry breeze toys at your clothing. The land is invisible under the skulls.
The skulls are dingy and porous, but perfectly clean of flesh, as best you can tell. They are human. They are probably human: you turn your head and they shift and lengthen. They crunch where you don't-step. There is nothing but skulls and sky and dry wind wherever you look.
So you dig. (Which is to say you think of digging, and it is dug.) Under the skulls there is older skulls. Chipped skulls. Skull-fragments. Horse-teeth. Then bone powder, which clings mercilessly to your six or eleven fingers. A deep, thick, dry layer of bone powder, then the gradual stain of barrel-brown silt, coarse but not even damp— and clean, too, not a single worm or root or boring clam. No disturbances.
It is exactly like that for some time: hours or minutes. You continue powered on nothing but vague spite. You may be in a tunnel: if you are, the sky is a keyhole. If you are not, the dirt is mounding so high around you you may as well be. To hell with this, you say finally, in far less words. Stupid Horse Face. I hate Horse Face. I'm giving this one more—
(4/5)
