Crow's Reading Notes

She’d been strong for a skinny-armed, thin-shanked woman, the way she toted that rucksack. It would sit upright on the ground, sagging at the top, and she would bend at the waist to hoist it. Her wrists would poke out thin and white from the sleeves of her too-big anorak, her fringe would hang down and her jaw would come forward a little way. A sound would come from her lungs as she held the strap of the rucksack and took its weight and swung it onto her back. One time he had offered to help and she shook her head. She would notice him watching her. Sometimes she would smile and sometimes she would not, but she would never look him in the eyes until the rucksack was up on her back and the straps were tight. More than once in Afghanistan Kellas had caught himself thinking about the sound, the exhalation with voice, which came from her involuntarily as the weight pressed on her. He thought of the air in her breast, and the rush of it in her larynx, and the bones containing them, and the flesh around them. He’d recognised the things of which this tiny sound was the centre: a fascination. A fascination was what came about when a single life wasn’t enough to contain the presence of someone else inside him. He needed to be running two or three lives at once. Not even words had made the fascination, just the flex of her limbs and the tiny sound as she took the strain of her pack. Just those things had crossed into him, and faint as the chances were, he wanted to follow them back to their source.