Page 17, Paragraphs 6 - 8; Page 18, Paragraph 1; Notes

Page 17, Paragraph 6:

Noise. My spit tastes funny. I hear people talking to each other. One's big and old, from the sound of him, and the other's little. The little one is saying "Yes," and then something I can't hear, and then something about water. There's only a little light coming through my eyelids now, and that's good.

Paragraph 7:

Flowers - I smell a lot of flowers, as if it's not autumn now, but spring. I open my eyes and see a hut. One aurochs skin that the hut is made of is now lifted up, and someone comes out bent over, their hair long and bright with a strip of fur around it, and wrapped in skins to their knee. It's a girl by the look of her - no bigger than me. I sniff to smell her vagina*, and I smell nothing, only flowers, but I don't see any flowers - I just see the girl. I don't know whether she's a flower that looks like a girl, or a girl that smells like a flower.

Paragraph 8:

In between her hands she holds a little shape that's all grey. She walks away from the hut and away from me, down off the dirt rise and toward the river. She walks between the reeds but doesn't get sucked down, as she walks a path where the ground is dry. Now she's far away, so that I can't see her above the grass, and the smell of flowers isn't as strong now.

Page 18, Paragraph 1:

Now there's something moving by the hut, which I look back to. The white skin lifts up, and someone big comes out bent over, naked except for a belt and a feast-fur** that covers his penis. It's a man. It's a frightening man.


*My translation of "gill", because "gill" is derived from the Old Norse word gjolnar, meaning "lips", and the only part of the anatomy that has lips that is exclusively feminine is... the vagina.

**Whatever that is

Page 17, Paragraphs 3 - 5

Back at it.

***

Page 17, Paragraph 3:

Now I open my eyes, and I see she is not moving [or "has not moved"]. I open my eyes more because something looks strange, and see that she's changed. She's not a woman now.

Paragraph 4:

Hut. She is a hut with aurochs skins hung all around her, which make her white. She has a pointy top with a long bunch of black furs hanging from it that fly in the wind. I don't now if there's people in the hut, nor how it is that their hut sits here all alone, aways off from the other settlers and their big building up on the hill.

Paragraph 5:

I look hard at the hut, because I don't have anything else to look at. Flies buzz all around me - the buzzing's louder now. I look, and I can see nothing but grey, with a white shape where the hut is standing, and now the white becomes grey, and the grey becomes black, and the black becomes nothing.

Page 16, Paragraphs 3 - 5; Page 17, Paragraph 1 and 2; Note

Page 16, Paragraph 3:

I walk slowly through the reeds and the mud. My belly hurts. It's so empty that it makes everything seem strange to me, and I'm afraid my head will float off, as it did with the sky-beast. The dirt sucks on my foot. Old Dirt, he thinks I'm not giving Mother's foot to him and wants his due, for there's one foot due to him yet and he's taking my foot to make good my debt to him. This thought makes me very afraid, so I pull my leg up high like a flamingo and I go as quick as I can to the trees, which are on drier ground.

Paragraph 4:

I'm by the trees now. I can walked and not get sucked down in the dirt, but I don't have the strength for it. The trees stand in a little thicket, and I can't think about anything except going to the bridge[?]. I walk beneath the trees, and put my hand on them to hold myself up, and keep falling as I'm walking. My leg hurts and burns with infection.* I fall down. I stand up. I fall down. I stand up, and now I'm through the thicket of trees, at the other edge of it looking out. I think I'm going to be okay now, and feel my strength coming back. I fall down.

Paragraph 5:

I can't get up. I'm flat on my back in the grass, with my head laying against a tree root. There's nothing above me, just a bunch of tree branches (that's where the leaves fall from). I look across my belly, legs, and feet, and I see trees in front of the river [?], where the noise of the water is loud. I don't see the bridge. It's not where I thought it was. Maybe I can't find a way to the bridge through the thicket of trees. Now the flies fly around the scab on my knee (which has turned black), and they sit on my leg where I don't have the strength to hit them off.

Page 17, Paragraph 1:

I look toward the river, which is better to look at than my leg. Between the river and where I'm at in the thicket of trees I see a rise of dirt, with reeds all around it. On the rise...







[you didn't think I was gonna end it there, didja? ]

Paragraph 2:

On the rise, there's a thing standing that's all white, taller than two men, on top of which hair flies out in the wind, all black and long. It's a woman, all in white, but she's frighteningly big - bigger than any woman in the world. I close my eyes so she can't see me.


*Obviously, our guy doesn't understand infection the way we do, but the word that he uses ("sick-fire") shows that he knows something is wrong besides the wound itself.