I listen. I strain to hear everything. It’s not me that’s an empath, and it’s not my warthen who’s an empath. It’s all of us. But there’s a scab over that sense, like the shame of not crying in front of older boys. Something we protect. We dare not share, so we dare not hear. Claire was right: it was something that happened in the trenches. It was something that happened the day I refused to set off that bomb. I’d seen too many children like me die for nothing, and I could feel and hear all those unborn alien minds, not yet scabbed over, still able to listen to the cosmos the way the GWB
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