The Overlook Press

Walter R. Brooks

Illustrated by Kurt Wiese

The Overlook Press

dozen other animals who were resting after their dip.

You didn’t have to be so rough, Jinx,” he complained. “I wasn’t doing any harm

If someone wants to pour earth over our faces, we can just avert our gaze and keep on as we were. Like the herders of the Altai. That actually is how we live, you know, every day.’

‘But doesn’t that leave us incredibly isolated? If we can’t convince a single person, not anyone at all, and if no one has any interest in our graves, you say we can simply turn away and go alone into the wilderness. Without knowing
where it is we’re going. We might have to spend our days with only the sheep and stars to gaze at. The stars die and are born again, and it must be the same for the sheep, mustn’t it?

‘By now you will have become aware that the third cave corresponds to the third hole of the flesh and blood body that belongs to me. But the cave also belongs to you. It was only through you that it acquired its particular character. The body is a passageway – a channel, without which the two of us would not be able to exist in the way we do now, the way I know you and you know me. Without their mirror images, our original forms would not exist. The third cave is the third mirror. Love is the act of wandering in search of an unknown cave. Somewhere underground, deep, dark, echoing, amplified, frightening, bewitching, and utterly private, a secret for me, a single ship, a single concealed place.’

The candle left out on the windowsill had melted without ever having been lit; the wax collapsed pathetically under the sun’s fierce rays, its shape suggesting the peculiar
way love concludes.