321 Am – Nick Pirog

I pull the shirt off my face and squint. My eyes won’t focus. They zoom in and out. I shake my head and stare at my hand. In the soft twilight, I can see every line on my palm one second and a blur of pink the next. I push myself up. Lassie and I are sleeping on the sand. I’d draped my T- shirt over my face so I wouldn’t get sunburned. I pick up the shirt and wipe the sand off the back of my head.

I reach down and feel my left leg. There is a surface cut and a deep bruise. It could have been far worse. The moose had been gentle on me. He just wanted my fish. I walk to the river and take a long pee. “Captain’s Log,” I say. “Today is June 25th. Day four in the Alaskan outback. Day five without food. We’ve traveled ten miles. Lassie still can’t walk. I was almost killed by a moose. Mosquitos devour me each night. Itching is unbearable.

Saw an eagle…” I continue to ramble and when I finally look at my watch, it is 3:06 a.m. I turn around and walk back to where Lassie is still asleep. I stop. Squint. “What in the hell?” Five feet above where Lassie and I slept, is a large pile of black pebbles. I lean down and inspect the perfect pile.

They aren’t pebbles. They are berries. I shake Lassie. He opens his eyes. “Where did you get these?” Meow. “These, where did you get these? And how? I thought you couldn’t walk.” Meow. “Well, I didn’t get them.” Did the river sweep them up? Did they fall from a tree and roll down the bank? No, they are in a perfect pile. A hundred of them. I didn’t really care where they came from, only that they might be food.

Meow. “You try one.” Meow. “Sometimes I wish you were a guinea pig.” Meow. “Black is not the color of death.” “Okay,” I say.

Copyright © 2014 Nick Pirog Smashwords Edition License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the author’s work. 1kitap1.com/en 1kitap1.com/en Chapter 1 June 18th Alexandria, Virginia It had become part of my routine. Sometimes it was only a glance, other times I would pick it up, walk around the room with it, spend a couple minutes toying with the notion of opening it.

But when you are only awake for sixty minutes a day, those couple minutes are a precious commodity. Those are two minutes I’m not kissing Ingrid, or rubbing Lassie’s belly, or playing cards with my father, or making trades, or running, or showering. Two minutes I’m not living my life. But I could never bear to open it. I could only postulate the words and images that lived inside the red folder. “Honey, we need to go. It’s a twenty minute drive to the airport,” Ingrid shouts from the living room.

I gaze down at my cell phone. 3:32 a.m. The Potomac Airfield is located ten miles away, on the other side of the river. It would be much easier for everyone if we arrived before 4 a.m., though I am certain Ingrid made arrangements for a wheelchair to be waiting. Just in case. “I’m coming,” I yell, my eyes still locked on the folder lying on the middle shelf of the four-foot tall safe in my closet. It had been eight months since the President of the United States handed me the red folder.

When he handed it to me, he said, “I have to warn you, there are things in there you can’t unsee.” He read it. He knew. Knew what my mother had done to me. But it wasn’t my mother who concerned me. It was my father. If what Director LeHigh had said was true — that my mother was an acclaimed CIA torture specialist and the reason I was only awake from 3 a.m.

to 4 a.m. each night wasn’t because I had some one-in-a-trillion sleep disorder named after me (I’m Henry Bins and I have Henry Bins) but because she had conditioned me through sleep amplification — then where was my father when this was all happening?

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 9d4a30d1dd721252
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,205,822 bytes (1.15 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 106
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 123.84 minutes
• Total Words: 24,769
• Total Characters: 129,375
• Average Words per Page: 233.67
• Average Characters per Page: 1220.52

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