Hawk Mountain

by Conner Habib

“Someone could just glance past you at first but then, suddenly, you’re just . . . there, and someone realizes they can’t stop looking at you.”

But he’s dimly aware that there’s something off about the books that he reads, that they all read. Every one of them is meant to elicit some feelings of sympathy based on . . . similarity. They don’t read any books about other cultures or any other kinds of people.

No one will read that book again because that is the nature of most books: read once, if at all, then shelved with the words locked inside.