Hawk Mountain

by Conner Habib

‘Whatever tracks you leave in the mud or the sand, the wind smooths them over. Bit by bit. Soon, no one knows where you’ve been or even that you were alive at all. That’s what Maine is like. It carries you so you can sleep.’

Now he was . . . he couldn’t think of another way to say it to himself: blended out. Like he’d been taken apart, smoothed into something that was more like a void, like the ocean.

And now, along with his heart, he could feel his breath, warm, against his own face. He was breathing in the air that came out of him, he was being turned inside out.

No one will read that book again, and not because things have turned from their path now, a perversion of a normal life. 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.

because memory isn’t like a leaf unraveling its surface to the sun that’s not there; memory is like awareness of death: a flower opening, and just as it unfolds, it is about to die itself.

So much of a person’s life, Todd thought, was invented to be forgotten.