...n strips of the rotting platforms of the train stations of all these small towns, he had listened to sounds. Then a game of exhilaration instead of a ... ...s to obstruct memory--a morning with shanty stations as gateways to shanty towns, rice fields and banana orchards with coconut trees occasionally spew... ... in the damp putty of his brain. In reality they were as behind him as the township of Udon Thani that the train had now passed through. They had part... ... few feet from the window) the swath of fields and outlying roads of small towns hurried past him in an incessant green and grey smudge of flat images... ...of this world. As if it were not ironic enough to lack superstitions about ghosts and all else and yet have his mind so discomfited by the creeking, r... ...ow all that was tactile, all that he could touch, was the air which was as ghostly as his thought. Whether his inaction came about from a brain so act... ...ome external aim instead of a constant churning of old redundant ideas and ghosts of memory haunting him with their illusionary palpability as though ... ... truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and moving to the foreground o...

...nable to break the food chain by starving, lived beyond the town's borders. Ghost—not his birth name but the one he had chosen—worked in secret, con... ...hable by death. TripStone had joined a small band of accomplices. They kept Ghost's activities and location secret from the community and snuck Yata... ...ly to him and knelt. She took his hand in hers and wanted to tell him about Ghost. But no, he would be horrified. When TripStone looked into NightSh... ... strips were contraband. TripStone had secreted away as much as she dared. Ghost would not want the full measure to which he would be entitled were... ...e would have to return to Basc inside the protection of a Covenant ritual. Ghost's cabin blended into the woods, draped in fronds and bark. TripSto... ...happy—until the wagons rolled away from town, the hubbub died down, and the townsfolk repaired to their silent, somber homes. He had responded with... ...ng and carrying their children back to the throng. TripStone stood with her townsfolk, waiting in cleared space between the transports and the Yata.... ...e trio, the top of her head level with their breastbones. TripStone and her townsfolk knelt as one, their heads bowed. "You do us reverence," The Ho... ...per his tomfoolery. Soon enough, what innocence remained would be gone, the townsfolk would obscenely celebrate his ascendance into the guild of hun...

...ed her people. An accomplished hunter in the Masari village of Crossroads, she is charged with the ritual slaying of the sacred Yata. Her comrade Ghost tries to end Masari dependence on Yata meat by performing experiments punishable by death. His jeopardy increases when he shelters a teenage runaway sickened by fasting. Their worldview shatters when they harbor a Ya...

...ck, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock rock. 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, twelve o'clock rock - Ghosts won't find me. Ready or not we'll find you. Then there were those... ...t he could eat a meal before going into those lessons. People in these small towns would not acknowledge his handicap of linguistic ignorance. They de... ...ements like "Chop che bop, chushipshio" (chop che bop, please). But in small towns even a waitress who had experienced him before would come forth wit... ...s passing in and out of memory, which was nothing but the night sky for such ghosts, what then, he asked himself, were one's dreams? The fantasies and... ...gods as was the case with the cat-goddess, Bast of Bubastis, but many of the towns found that once they attached the word "Re," the commonest name for... ... little girl flattened out as she had been by the tank, still floated like a ghost in the ethereal parts of her imagination. She told herself that sh... ...ce of exploding into something quite large and horrid within the presence or ghost of Osama Bin Laden. One day they went to visit a boy of one of tho... ... eat some leftover pie to wash a pan. Somewhere into 2:00 in the morning the ghost of his sister, Jun Jin, eclipsed over his brain and he woke in the ...