Booktree.ng_Forgotten-Witness

He stared at the street. This was so different than the place he
shared with his girl.
His chin lowered.
His lips went slack.
He was listing.
He was forgetting.
Then he did not tremble. He did not cry. He did not think.
Ian Francis was gone, so Ian Francis’ body moved on.
***
The paper was so old and rolled so tightly the sheets seemed
laminated. When Josie finally managed to flatten it, the paper
simply rolled back in on itself. With nothing to weight it, Josie
reversed the roll on the edge of the table. Finally, she spread it
in front of her and what was on it was splendid to look at.
The pages were filled with exquisite, near-microscopic
letters so uniformly formed that they appeared to be typeset.
The space between each letter was the width of an eyelash,
between words maybe two. The writing stretched from edge to
edge, top to bottom. There was no hint that the author had
penciled in guidelines to help his hand stay straight on the
once-blank paper and yet every line was arrow straight. Josie
knew only two sorts of people wrote this way: convicts
because resources were precious and mental patients because
they herded their words together so they wouldn’t fly away.
Ian Francis, she assumed, learned his craft in the mad house.
She squinted at the writing. It was English but that was
about as close as she could come to making sense of it. The
neatly printed words were a jumble leading nowhere and
numbers adding up to nothing.
Rememberrememberemembermk