He saw himself in his mind's eye reading: body still, head bent, eyes moving over the black slashes of ink decorating the white paper pages. It dawned on him that he was staring at a block of wood, thinly sliced. And that the words on the page would be a meaningless secret code if it were not for his own mind conjuring a voice out them and making that voice live vividly within himself for a brief moment, the imprint of another mind desperate to share on a different block of wood, in another place and time, what it understood of life. It felt odd to think of those once-upon-a-time people who now lived forever within him, trapped in the wood except for his curiosity and never-satisfied hunger for more.

Would anyone bring his voice back?