The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Emma Mieko Candon
- Language: English
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The letter catches up to Sunai in Ghamor, where it’s always a little too
cold not to hate having fingers. It comes by way of the aunty who runs the
shabby hostel where he stows his ruck between jobs. She says the kid who
dropped it off had Sunai’s description: middling-short, bespectacled, faint
limp, long braid, old eyeliner.
The envelope isn’t signed but for a scrawl across the seam, the sigil of
Leaf 36: “Cascade,” a short poem at the end of the Lay about a rain shower
that becomes a waterfall that drowns a rice field and starves a village, and
eons later becomes a sea. You know—consequences.
The symbolism needn’t be so obvious. Sunai hasn’t led a life that
invites people to write him, let alone figure out which city-state in all the
wilds they should send their letters to. Only one person would go to the
trouble. He must still be nursing the delusion that Sunai will one day try
another way of living—perhaps a way involving fewer professional neardeath experiences, or less ill-considered sex with unscrupulous
acquaintances. Ideally, a way of life that would begin with a long, agonized
reckoning with his shoddy excuse for a brain.
Joke’s on him. Sunai isn’t really alive.
Yet there he perches on the edge of a thin mattress in his usual hostel
room, thumb running down and up and down the sealed envelope seam. His
ruck sits heavy between his booted heels, still dirty from his most recent
trek across the wilds. He never stays long between jobs—just long enough
to drink himself insensible and piss off another pretty man. His need to get
the hell out of town has gone from pressing to urgent.
If a letter can find him, so can its sender.
Stupid, he tells himself as he stuffs the letter deep in his ruck, under his
wilds gear and his battered old copy of the Lay. Stupid and selfish. No one’s
coming for him. No one would bother. Sunai burns his bridges well and
good.
Clearly not well enough.
“And stubborn.” Sunai shoulders the ruck. He means himself,
obviously, but he means the writer too, which makes him a miserable
hypocrite and irritated to boot.
What a wonderful thing, to know a sure cure for giving too much of a
shit.
He drops some pricy tamarind candies in the hostel till on his way out,
gives the aunty a kiss on the forehead in exchange for a cigarette, and heads
for the least reputable hermit-run teahouse he can think of. He has already
decided he will never see the hostel again. He expects to end the night shitfaced in a stranger’s bed or shit-faced on their bathroom floor.
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