Hear the Wind Sing Read Free Page B

with honey while receiving my treatment. It took an entire year, but thanks to all those sweets, I got stuck going to the dentist. With civilization comes communication, he said. Whatever can’t be expressed might as well not exist. Nil, nothing. Suppose you’re hungry. You say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and even that short phrase will suffice. I’ll give you a cookie. You can eat it. (I was now holding a cookie.) If you say nothing, there’s no cookie. (The psychiatrist then hid the plate of cookies under the table with a sadistic look on his face.) Nothing. You get it? You don’t want to talk. But you’re hungry. Without making words, you can’t express your hunger. Here’s a gesture game. Come watch this. I grabbed my stomach like it was hurting. The psychiatrist laughed. I had indigestion.
    Indigestion…
    After that, the next thing we did was ‘free talking’.
    “Tell me about cats. Say whatever pops into your head.”
    I pretended to think about it, then shook my head back and forth.
    “Anything you can think of.”
    “They’re animals with four legs.”
    “So are elephants.”
    “Cats are much smaller.”
    “What else?”
    “They live in the house, and they can kill mice if they want.”
    “What do they eat?”
    “Fish.”
    “How about sausage?”
    “Sausage, too.”
    That’s how it went.
    What the psychiatrist said was true. With civilization comes communication. Expression and communication are essential; without these, civilization ends. *Click*…OFF.
    The spring when I turned 14, an unbelievable thing happened: as if a dam had burst, I suddenly began talking. I don’t really remember what I talked about, but it was like I was making up for lost time, talking non-stop for three months, and when I stopped talking in the middle of July, I came down with a 105
    degree fever and missed school for three days. After the fever, I wasn’t completely silent, nor was I a chatterbox; I became a normal teenager.
    8
    I woke up at six in the morning, probably because I was thirsty. Waking up in someone else’s house, I always feel like I’m in someone else’s body with someone else’s soul stuffed inside. Eventually collecting myself, I rose from the narrow bed, and from the sink next to the door, like a camel, I drank glass after glass of water before returning to bed. From the open window, I could see just a tiny sliver of the ocean. The sunlight glimmered above the tiny waves, and I gazed upon the who-knowshow-many rusty freighters going nowhere in particular. It looked like it was going to be a hot day. All the nearby houses were sleeping quietly, and every once in a while the squeaking of the trains on the rails could be heard, and I thought I detected a faint trace of a radio playing the melody for morning calisthenics.
    Still naked, I was leaning against the bed and, after lighting a cigarette, I let my eyes wander over to the girl sleeping next to me. From the southward-facing window, rays of sunlight illuminated the full spread of her body. She was sleeping with her bedsheets pushed down to below her knees. Occasionally, she would struggle when taking a breath, and her wellshaped breasts would jiggle up and down. Her body was well tanned, but over time, the dark color had begun to change, and with the clear tanlines of her swimsuit leaving those areas looking strangely white, she looked like her flesh was decaying.
    Ten whole minutes after finishing my cigarette, I made an attempt to remember the girl’s name, but it was useless. First off, I couldn’t even remember if I’d known her name to begin with. I gave up, yawned, then went back to gazing at her body. She was a little younger than twenty, and she was a little on the slim side. I spread out my fingers and measured her from head to toe. She was eight handspans long, with a remainder of a thumb. Somewhere in the
    neighborhood of 158 centimeters, I’d say.
    Under her right breast was a birthmark the size of a nickel, and on her abdomen a