And so on, back and forth between wet and dry—but in a way that is just barely perceptible, something felt more in the mouth and throat than consciously registered in the mind: a form of embodied cognition. In this story’s subtle figurings, breath is akin to smoke, to wind, and the men themselves are tantamount to dry wells or ashen chimneys, through which air and smoke flow. And here is the problem: to be a dry well or a chimney—to be dry—feels dead. It feels ashen. Something cancerous about feeling your throat as a chimney, coal-dusted and wrong. But to survive N must go dry, the very thing
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