Swamped

You see a few titles of interest, and skip to one in the middle of the book. You don't quite understand all the words in it, but hopefully you can get enough.

Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen

Living out in the swamp by yourself isn't easy. You have to take care of every little thing, because who in their right mind is going to wade through a pile of unrecognizable word to fix a hole in your wall. And heaven help you if your chamber pot breaks - aside from the obvious inconveniences of exposing yourself out in the wild, the scent makes you far more trackable.

So of course, the way to deal with this problem is to have a supply shed. But you can't just put it in the swamp, otherwise it's just as prone to acts of nature (or, more often, acts of unrecognizable) as the house itself. So the obvious thing to do is to put your supply shed on the outskirts of the swamp. Sure, it takes an hour to get there and just as long to get back, if you're lucky, but that's better than the days it takes to reach civilization.

But every solution brings a new problem. You can't exactly watch the supply shed if it's an hour away, so you need to lock it up in case someone decides to help themselves to the supplies you worked so hard to gather. And where are you going to keep the key?

The answer I finally settled on was keeping one key in my travel gear, one in my dresser, and one in the shed itself to use as a replacement if I lose one of the other two. If I lose both, then I suck it up, walk to town, and talk to the locksmith, who gives me the last spare key and a new lock with a new set of keys.

The point of all this is, there's no way for anyone to break into my supply shed unless they either steal one of my keys or steal the locksmith's key. So when I headed out to the shed to fix up my chair leg, and I heard noises inside the shed, I was more than a little surprised.

But I was even more surprised when I opened the door and found myself face to face with unrecognizable. It unrecognizable my arms, unrecognizable right in my face, and then unrecognizable until I unrecognizable.

I'm amazed I survived the encounter.

Oh, wait. I didn't!

You can't help but feel that knowing all the words wouldn't really help you process that ending as anything other than sudden and desperate. And the story on the whole isn't that different from the other ones you glanced at.

On the other hand, it's a better sleep aid than Juliet's book about the caterpillar. You can give some thought to what it says about Pepper's imprisonment later.

You drift off, and begin to dream. What do you dream about?