I stepped down off my perch and navigated through the sacks and boxes farther back into the room. Several small wooden crates lay close to the wall on the floor and bottom shelves. Halfway to the corner, I found one open. Scattered pages lie on top of its contents. As I picked it up, the obscuring dust rolled off the page in tiny avalanches to reveal Clovis' Japanese calligraphy. I couldn't help but smile as I thought of him, both a prisoner of the past and fugitive from the future. He seemed the picture of patience and perfection, writing stanza after stanza of his epic, each day taking only a page length measure.

I fanned through the pages beneath in bewilderment, unable to break away. I could not interpret the Japanese characters filling each sheet, but did notice they seemed unnaturally similar to one another. An uneasy feeling came over me as I inspected them, like shuffling through a deck of cards expecting to find a normal variety of suit and rank, only to find the two of spades following the two of spades following the two of spades. The margins were the same on each page and identical characters appeared in exactly the same place as though they had been copied from a template instead of from memory. 'From memory,' I thought as I stood up and stepped around the corner.

Empty ink bottles ran down another ten feet of shelves to the back. I reached down and raised the dust-covered lid of another short crate. The brittle yellowing edges of the pages cracked as I thumbed through them, again each one the same. He didn't put down a single page from the poem each day but instead stroked the same stanza every day, for countless days, each done with patience and perfection.

My head began to swim with the realization as I counted dozens of identical crates filling the shelves around the corner. My eyes darted from clasp to clasp, wanting but unable to open them. I sat the bottle down, stooped to close the open lid and folded the page gently into my pocket. The door creaked again as I pulled it closed.

I walked back to the kitchen, each successive stride lengthening and quickening as I tried to outpace the anxiety that followed me out of the storeroom. Without warning, I veered off to the right for the bedroom and immediately packed my possessions. I had no thoughts except leaving. The bag landed in the back of the wagon with a thump that startled the grazing horse. My breath seemed to compress in my chest as soon as I stepped back into the house. The noonday sun glowed through the thatched roofing. I grabbed the dagger next to the lifeless fish and placed it snugly in my waistband. Cane in hand, I stood in the open doorway looking for anything that I'd forgotten. I forget nothing.