B. Catling Quotes

After they departed the river, the beach, and the raised lip of land, it all readjusted under the towering awareness of the trees. The pebbles lost the stain of human warmth. The water shook off its taste of sweat and the flattened grasses slowly clicked back into their vertical semblance of the rest of the forest. The breeze cleared the air and the birds changed their tune of alarm and disgust into a softer conversation about being here, there, and now. The ants and the clustering insects stopped waiting for the bodies to be still and foraged elsewhere, and the omnipresent mosquitoes reassessed their menu. In one hour all traces of the intrusion were lost and decent time settled back, oblivious to the rubbed-out moment of blight.

All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts.