Hunting and Gathering Read Online Free

sweetheart . . .”
    â€œI thought your brother was building freeways.”
    â€œFreeways, and spells and undoing spells, you name it.”
    Camille rolled her eyes.
    â€œWhat about me?” Samia burst in. “Can he find me a guy?”
    Mamadou walked past her, clawing at the air in front of her face:
    â€œYou give me back my bucket first and then we’ll talk!”
    â€œShit, stop bugging me! I don’t have your bucket, it’s mine. Your bucket was red.”
    â€œGet lost,” she hissed, walking away, “damn.”
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Mamadou hadn’t even finished climbing the steps and already the van was rocking. Have fun in there, thought Camille, smiling, as she picked up her bag. Good luck . . .
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“We going?”
    â€œI’m coming.”
    â€œWhat’re you doing? You taking the métro with us?”
    â€œNo. I’ll walk home.”
    â€œThat’s right, you live over there in the fancy neighborhood . . .”
    â€œYeah, right.”
    â€œSo long, see you tomorrow.”
    â€œ ’Bye, girls.”
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Camille was invited for dinner at Pierre and Mathilde’s place. She left a message to cancel, relieved that she had gotten their answering machine.
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The ever so light Camille Fauque went on her way, her feet on the ground thanks only to the weight of her backpack or, harder to gauge, the weight of the stones and pebbles which rattled around inside her body. That’s what she should have told the doctor about. If she had really wanted to . . . Or if she’d had the courage? Or the time, maybe? Time, surely, she reassured herself, not entirely convinced. Time was a notion she could no longer grasp. Too many weeks and months had gone by that she hadn’t even been a part of, and her tirade, earlier, that absurd monologue where she was trying to convince herself that she was just as resilient as the next girl, was nothing but a pack of lies.
    What was the word she had used? “Alive,” was that it? That’s ridiculous; Camille Fauque wasn’t alive.
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Camille Fauque was a ghost who worked at night and piled up stones by day. A ghost who moved slowly, spoke little, and with a graceful shimmy made herself scarce.
    Camille Fauque was the sort of young woman you always saw from behind, fragile and elusive.
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But we shouldn’t trust that little scene we just watched unfold, however casual it might have seemed. However easy and natural. Camille had been lying. Merely trying to feed the right answers to the doctor; she made an effort, controlled herself, and answered, “Present” to avoid drawing attention.
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But she couldn’t stop thinking about the doctor. She didn’t care about his cell phone number, but she wondered if she hadn’t missed an opportunity, all the same. He seemed the patient type, more attentive than the others. Maybe she should have . . . at one point she had almost . . . She was tired, she should have put her elbows on the desk too, and told him the truth. Told him that if she wasn’t eating at all, or almost nothing, it was because the stones were taking up all the room in her belly. That she woke up every day with the feeling that she was chewing gravel, that even before she opened her eyes she was suffocating. And that the world around her had become meaningless, and every new day was like a weight that was impossible to lift. So she cried. Not that she was sad, but to make it pass. The flood of tears, in the end, helped her to digest the pile of stones and get her breath back.
    Would he have listened? Would he have understood? Of course he would have. And that was precisely why she’d kept quiet.
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She didn’t want to end up like her mother. She refused to become confessional. She didn’t know where it would lead once she started. Too far, much too far, too deep and too dark. All things being equal, she just didn’t have the guts to look back.
    Give