Subject Delta

Delta was back in the park.

He was there for the same reason that he had spent a lot of time there in the last few days--the air, the sun, the trees and the way the grass felt under him. Sometimes he walked. Sometimes he sat on the grass with his eyes closed and his face turned up to the sun. Sometimes--and this was always the nicest on the days when he forgot to put on a shirt, though he was almost perfect about remembering pants--he rolled in the grass, ending up on his stomach or back with the sun warming his bare skin.

Those times, sometimes, he would just sleep for the sheer pleasure of sleeping.

What was less pleasurable were the dreams.

But he wasn't thinking about that now, because now he was also here on a mission. He was tired of the paper and the pen--they worked well enough given the alternative, but with everyone else talking around him, the words in his head were like pressure building against a valve; a little release here and there was only a stopgap.

Sooner or later something was going to blow open and flood.

He sat in the grass with a yellowing paperback book open in his lap and a frown twisting at his brow. The book had come from one of the broken-open shops; he had taken it on a foraging expedition, at first on a whim, though the title of the thing itself--and really, the cover, if he was being honest--didn't much appeal to him.

But there were words. Words that weren't his. And reading was like hearing. And maybe if he heard--maybe he could remember how to spit what he heard back out again.

It was worth a try, anyway. As much worth a try as anything else he had tried.