SALT AND OIL, BLOOD AND CLAY
Jennifer Bresnick
Aenetlif Press
Published in the United States of America
Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Bresnick
All rights reserved. This book, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission from the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
PREFACE
Salt and Oil, Blood and Clay is a collection of short stories, poems, and vignettes that have been featured on Inkless: A Writer’s Blog over the past several years. It also includes several unpublished works. While thematically diverse, these pieces all attempt to explore the impact of solitude, sorrow, hope, and longing on how we see and believe in the world.
CONTENTS
The Terracotta Girl
April Mornings
He Belongs to the Sea
Manu and the Wall
For Love
Sunset
High O’er the Mist
Salt and Oil
Memory Lane
Collecting Dust
On Angst
The Book of Yew
Melted Cheese
The Myth
My Mother Named Me Harthacanute
Autumn Words
Give and Take
The Earthstepper’s Bargain
THE TERRACOTTA GIRL
Each day she sits by the wheel, my girl of tears and clay, watching it spin lumps like her into pots and bowls of use and grace. With fingers moist and nimble, a push, a nudge, a swoop, a pinch, transforms the soil into phoenix form, but she remains the earth’s favorite creation.
I watch her watch her father, sitting still, crouched like a frog as only his hands dance, and the hired boy’s feet gallop on the petals like mud-covered catfish dancing for a fly. He hums a song to himself to keep the time, his vacant eyes barely watching the master at his art, the extraordinary turned mundane by long hours waiting for his bones to grow too long for such a simple task. He is not the first, and he is one of many, and his life will trace a circle like the lives of his fathers before.
It’s the girl who is special. The fine arch of her brow; the delicate tracery of a tendril of hair that curls around her ear like a whisper, and her almond eyes that watch her father, cool and unblinking, as he watches his fingers and the curve of the clay, minutely adjusting, pressure and light and a flick of his wrist.
I love my terracotta girl. The fall of her robe over her shoulders, the straightness of her back as she waits with infinite serenity, hands folded, patience and contemplation written in the soft arch of her brow. She does not watch me. I am not a creature of tranquility, and I hold no interest for her. She does not feel my love. What she feels is rain and wind and curiosity, a nod of approval or the tap of a fingernail that cannot believe her before a man wanders away.
She learned her ignorance from her father, who pays no mind to anyone who comes near her without a coin. The boy must eat, and so must he, but my terracotta girl abstains. She hungers for nothing; she consumes only my heart. I watch her, unperturbed, as her father cleans his hands at the end of the day, the water flicking onto her flinchless face and running down her cheeks as she mourns her nightly solitude. She will wait for him, and I will go inside my house, waiting for the day my terracotta girl will learn to smile.
APRIL MORNINGS
With warm weather comes the promise
That the steel of my heart, tempered
With short, cold winter afternoons
Will soften a little in the sun –
Just enough to let you see
That it’s hollow inside,
And rings like a bell
Every time another
Blow is struck.
HE BELONGS TO THE SEA
It was nightfall when the blood came. William had been set to sitting and watching, so the surgeon could attend to others. He had never seen so much before. The fall had cracked the old man’s ribs, a crunch and a cry as he hit the rail before tumbling over into the water, but he had swum to the rope that had been cast for him, and hauled himself back up onto the deck.
Only later, after the sun had fallen and a spray of stars had replaced its light, had he shown any sign of illness. The weakness came, and under the break was the blood. The surgeon had shaken his head and lashed him into his hammock, and told William not to take his eyes off him as his chest rose and fell with the rocking of the waves. Dutifully, he had watched as the man slipped into fever, knowing that for him to see the next day’s dawn would require the wings of a miracle. He had seen death. He just hadn’t seen so much blood.
“I don’t think he had any family, sir,” William said when the surgeon had closed the man’s startled eyes, wiped the gore from his beard, and asked William the question that was asked of all men when they died. “He belonged to the sea.”
The surgeon nodded and didn’t look too surprised. On one hand, it didn’t matter that much. The man would be sewn up inside the bed where he died, a pair of cannon shot at his feet and a prayer read as quickly as was decent, so the rest of the crew could return to what was important after sliding the body into the waiting embrace of the gleeful ocean, coldly cruel, ravenous and riled. If he had a wife, she would go on living for months until the ship returned to port, bearing bad news and little memory of one more hand sacrificed to the deep.
It didn’t matter that much, William thought, threading the needle. No one who went to sea could reasonably do so with the hope of return. There were storms and sharks and savage men, and sickness lurking in the lonely isles. There was his Nancy, waiting for him on a long-forgotten shore. His pretty Nancy, who wrote him letters that she could never send, sitting by the window, helpless, never trusting the strength of her prayers to bring him back to her as the mistral winds shook the rattled glass in the attic. It was the only place she could see when the tip of a mast ghosted into harbor. She would run down the stairs and skip to the wharf, hoping against all her hope that it was the one she wanted.
He had seen death before he finished stitching closed the canvas over the pale and passive face of the empty man’s corpse. But there had been no blood with Nancy. There had only been her joy, transforming, transfiguring in the moment before her slipper tripped her on the top of the stairs. He had come for her by land, a lover’s trick that had indeed surprised her as she tumbled, tumbled down to him, a cry cut short as he pressed her lips to his, hoping against all his hope that there remained a ghost in her.
There was no blood with Nancy. There was a stone with a view of the harbor, and isles best left alone. She would wait for him, and he would trust the strength of the sea to reunite them, a prayer and two shot at his feet, tumbling, tumbling down at her mercy, helpless, trusting to the mistral winds for one last lover’s trick, transforming, transfigured into reunited joy.
MANU AND THE WALL
It was wrong to sneak out of the house every night, wrapping soft rags around his bare feet to stifle the sound of his footsteps on the rusted tin roof of the first floor as he lowered himself carefully out of the upper story window. Manu knew it was wrong.
The window shutters wouldn’t be bolted shut if he was supposed to leave. His mother wouldn’t firmly keep her back to the door, a sliver of dirty light slanting through the small, misshapen hatch that let in their food and let out some portion their rubbish and waste every day. His father wouldn’t sit in his chair, tucked into a corner far away from that cold block of sun, surrounded by high piles of everything that he wouldn’t let escape: old newspapers and boxes from the weekly food packets an
d clothes that no one had worn for years.
If it wasn’t wrong to leave, maybe his parents would do so once in a while, instead of having Aunt Yeno and Cousin Sou trudge to the depot every morning to bring back parcels to support both their families, twenty-five children between them, and poke paper tubes filled with dried beans and canned vegetables and soft, supple bags of uncooked rice, one by one, through the only portal they allowed into their dim and darkened home.
There was nothing wrong with the outside, at least not as far as Manu could see. There was the rest of the village, of course, and the finger of Horse Head Lake that nearly cut the town in two, the cluster of little houses bending into a long, thin line as it traced the shore. The line was filling up, now, ever since the Wall had crept along the edge of the lake, and the town had reared itself upward, block upon block of houses piled on top of each other to reach dirty fingers up into the sky, the poorest residents hovering like birds five stories in the fetid air.
Manu’s family was poor, but they were also long-established, and had moved into their residence back when the village was young. The Wall hadn’t even reached them yet, all the way back when his great-great-great grandparents had worked at hauling water from the lake to fill the baths of the well-to-do for a penny a day, but Manu had lived behind it for all of his short life. He thought it was a beautiful thing, but his mother frowned at him when he said so. She didn’t think anything was beautiful. She just wanted the Wall to leave them alone.
He had only seen it at night, since he was scared to leave the house when his father was awake. They could hear it breathing all the time, of course, day and night and in their dreams, but seeing the unbelievably massive edifice, craning his neck upwards to hope to get a glimpse of the ridge of its back, was something else entirely. He had seen it sleeping, heaving ever so gently as it lost itself in thoughts so far beyond Manu’s mind that they may well have been the musings of a god. His mother had told him that. That he couldn’t understand it – that there was safety in not knowing the Wall. She had told him that there was no point in trying, but he wasn’t sure he could agree.
The Wall had been come a friend, of sorts. Not his only friend – he had his brothers and sisters and his Cousin Sou, who sometimes came into the house and tried to scrub the floors, her lips firmly pinched together under the kerchief she wrapped around her nose. There wasn’t much floor to see under his father’s piles of things, but he shouted at her when she tried to move them, and her brows lowered so far as to touch the edge of the flowery fabric that tried to keep out the worst of the smell.
The Wall wasn’t Manu’s only friend, but it was his most mysterious one. Someone had told him once that it wasn’t a wall at all: it was the tail of an enormous beast made of stone, and each new scale, each inch that it grew and grew and grew to thread across the whole of the kingdom, was an unanswered wish. The beast fed on disappointment, they said. Every kind of discontent was its food, and that is why it had gotten so huge. It was a good thing, they said. They needed the Wall just as the Wall needed them.
Manu didn’t know if that was true. He didn’t think so. He had touched it once, and it felt as cold and dead as any of the pebbles he kicked down the road in the shadow of the moonlight, breathing as much free air as he could before his father woke up and bellowed at him for his breakfast. It had been frightening to get so close. He had had to dodge the guards, walking stiffly in rigid pairs as they tried to keep the curious peasants away from whatever the Wall was. Sometimes someone would sneak past, and pin a piece of paper onto the stone, scrawled with a prayer or a hope or a bargain that the Wall never seemed to keep.
It would fly away some day, they said. The tinker claimed to have seen its wings, coiled in anticipation around the unfathomable bulk of its body, lying deep in the Darkwood Valley where the river crashed down into the hollow between the mountains. It would fly away and leave them defenseless – but what the Wall helped defend them against never seemed to be all that clear.
His father had said that he was keeping all his things for the day the Wall went away. There would be panic, he predicted, and fear, and no more food. Manu didn’t think he really had any food that would still be good when that happened, but he knew better than to argue. His father would eat anything. His mother would let him. They still wouldn’t ever go outside.
Manu would, though. He would stay outside forever if he didn’t fear a beating. Aunt Yeno would bring him back, his ear clamped between her bony fingers, and his father would pick up something hard from the pile and hit him with it for a while. Sometimes Manu didn’t mind so much. Maybe his anger helped the Wall grow bigger. If he kept going outside, and Aunt Yeno kept bringing him back, maybe he could help the Wall get big enough to soar away.
He would go outside to see it. Maybe his mother would turn around and peer through the hatch, disapproving and scared. Maybe his father would scramble over his walls, shouting in panic, and stand in front of the door so no one could see around him. Maybe Manu would slither out the second story window and sprint for the Wall, grabbing on as it stretched its wings to block out the sun and took to the air, the boy clinging tightly and tiny to a corner of its tail. Manu had dreams where it happened. Maybe that’s what the Wall dreamed of, too. Hoping so might make it bigger, and maybe one day none of them would need disappointment anymore.
FOR LOVE
I cannot shed a tear for Love,
I cannot spin her tales.
I cannot smile and bat my eyes,
Nor give her moans and wails.
I cannot smile and dance away
Through thicket, or enchanted glade.
For Love, she carries arrows barbed,
And flashes a wicked blade.
SUNSET
The lawnmower tractor’s engine coughed, thick and choking, for a few minutes before the whole contraption shuttered to a halt, steam hissing out from under the green painted hood and masking the lengthy cursing of the man who now had to push the stupid machine a quarter mile uphill, back to the shed where it lived but rarely earned its keep.
The cursing wasn’t particularly sincere. Herb didn’t mind that the tractor had died three times already this season. He enjoyed fixing the lawnmower, and he enjoyed cursing it out when it failed yet again. He even secretly enjoyed how his back would seize up after wrestling it back to the house, because the pain meant he had finished something hard to do.
He liked it when his wife would throw a tube of IcyHot at his head when he came in the door, call him a damn fool – say he was too old for this nonsense – demand that he get a new mower. Then, after dinner, she would work out all the knots in his aching back with her long fingers, laughing, teasing him, while answering all the questions on Jeopardy! over her shoulder, swearing that one day she’d get on that show and teach them how it’s done.
The Kolskis had been married for forty years and had loved each other for longer. After raising two kids and losing a third, they had settled down outside of Oneonta to thirty acres of rolling pastureland, three cows, a dozen chickens, and four temperamental alpacas who would follow June around like puppies but would pitilessly savage Herb if he came within ten feet of them.
He didn’t mind that the alpacas seemed to have it in for him – he had always felt much more comfortable around the cows, anyway: good, solid beasts, not overly intelligent. But then, what use did a cow have for brains?
He pushed the tractor past two of the cattle, who followed his slow, sweating progress, swinging their big heads around to stare at him as he inched up the hill. He waved to them, almost losing his grip on the mower, and then redoubled his efforts to get it the last few feet.
It was funny, he thought, as he finally crested the hill, took off his ball cap and wiped his face with a blue handkerchief, how as a boy he would use any excuse, from a paper cut to an alien invasion, to get out of doing farm chores. It was funny how satisfying the labor was to him now. It was funny how lucky he
was to have this good land, two grown sons, and a beautiful wife who loved him. It was even a little funny, he frowned as he locked the door to the shed – it was even a little funny how he already knew the secret that June had been preparing to tell him for the past three days.
It was all sort of funny, he thought, as he sat on the steps of his house and looked up at the sky, slipping into evening with pinks and purples layered on the horizon like soft cream, a crescent moon like a great shining pendulum hanging above the tree line. Funny how quickly it would all disappear.
The screen door creaked behind him, but he didn’t turn around.
“Herb?” June asked as she came outside, a shawl around her slim shoulders, and sat next to her husband on the step. “Did the tractor die again? I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon. I thought we were going to go to town. Do you want some casserole? I can heat it up for you if you’d like.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. Maybe later. Stay with me here for a while, if it’s not too cold.”
They sat together on the stairs. She leaned her head on his shoulder and they watched the stars come out.
“You’re a stubborn old fool with that tractor, Herb,” June said mildly after a while.
“I know.”
“You should get a new one.”
“Maybe next year.”
“You can’t hold on to it forever, you know.”
“I know,” he said quietly before the silence grew long between them.
All he wanted to do was sit there forever. There were knots twisting in his heart, not in his back, because he knew what she wanted to tell him. He knew she was choosing the right words in her head. He was all twisted up because he thought that maybe if she didn’t tell him – if she didn’t say those words, even though they both knew what they were – maybe it wouldn’t be true and they could sit on the steps together in that silent, comfortable peace under a sky blazing with glory just for them, for just a little while longer.
She would have to go inside soon, though. Six o’clock, on the dot, to uncap and unscrew the endless line of prescription bottles arranged in a neat row on the kitchen counter, like little soldiers sent to fight a hopeless war. No refills, the doctor had said. He didn’t expect June to need them, and that was the thought that kept Herb awake at night long after the powerful painkillers had put his wife to sleep. Six months, the doctor had said. Six months and it had been three already.
Herb looked down at his hands – big hands, calloused now from turning his good land into a home, and in the fading light of the swinging moon, they swam with the tears in his eyes, because he knew what she was going to say, he couldn’t stop it, and the only thing he wanted was to sit in fake ignorance on the steps with his wife, under that sky, before it all faded away.
HIGH O’ER THE MIST
High o’er the mist the crimson sun will rise,
And burn off shadows with its fiery staves;
Will kiss the sea that ever glistening sighs,
And bears the golden light upon its waves.
The sleepy land, still in the darkness drowned,
Cradled by the looming stars above,
Sleeps alone in peaceful dreams profound -
For I am waiting lonely for my love.
The rosy light will touch benighted fields,
And slip between the branches of the trees;
Transform the leaves ‘to tiny blazing shields
That bristle like an army in the breeze.
Dawn will flood the windows with its rays,
And on the huddled rooftops it will break;
The craftsmen and the farmers start their days -
But I will pace my penance by the lake.
And as the shadows lengthen ‘cross the lands,
And cool the grassy meadows through the day,
They mute the ocean’s crashing on the sands,
And draw the fishers home across the bay.
The moon, with gentle light, the valley fills,
And softly silver now the water gleams -
Still I walk unceasing through the hills,
Searching for my love inside my dreams.
SALT AND OIL
The maze appeared from nowhere one day, but it didn’t surprise me much. Morchellas sprouted everywhere, and there was always a pattern to be found if I looked hard enough. Most of the time they followed the same paths as the pigs, rooted in the dung they dropped as the hogs stopped to crunch up the spongy mushrooms, a cycle as timeless as the summer sun.
Mama called them fairy circles, but Pop just called it bollocks. I was somewhere in between, on the cusp of sprouting myself, fourteen and disinclined to agree with anyone. Mama shook her head when I got cross, arguing both sides but not really believing either. She would send me to the cupboard to take an herbal supplement she swore would fix me, the bottle marked with big red letters that said PMS, preferring to blame biology no matter what the calendar said, refusing to believe that there was something wrong with what had been crafted rather than what had been born.
So I spent a lot of time in the yard, looking through the broken fence at Mr. Calper’s pigs as they snuffled and rolled and pissed hard and steaming onto the ground. He had named them all, but I had named them better, and they snorted happily at me and rubbed up against the wooden slats when I sat with my back against the barrier, reading my homework out loud to keep us company.
Mr. Calper went to the graveyard once a week to visit his wife, and I would sneak through the gate while he was gone, to scratch the pigs behind the ears and pick some wildflowers from the fields to leave in the old vase on his porch for when he returned. I liked to see the look on his face. He was a sad old man, but he liked the flowers. He probably knew it was me who was leaving them, but he never let on.
The maze was in the back corner of his land, near the edge of the woods where the best pheasant’s eye grew. The pigs never bothered to go that far, so the morchellas grew by the hundreds, in thick, spongy clusters like prune fingers after a swim. I didn’t like how they tasted, and it was a good thing, too. The way they grew in spirals didn’t feel quite right. Mama had said to leave them alone, because sometimes there were poison ones mixed in. For once, I listened. And not for the first time, she was wrong.
I left them alone and walked right through, careful not to crush them. There was a path, of sorts: a double line like a runway that I tiptoed between for the fun of it, curving one way and another in a snaking knot like the dancer I knew I didn’t have the grace to be. If I had picked them, I wouldn’t have been caught in it. I wouldn’t have stopped, shivering, wide-eyed and gasping, clutching my head like a flooding stroke, blurring and burrowing into the heart of me.
Insofar as I was having thoughts, they weren’t clear ones. I’d felt the same, once, when the flu came to school and Pop drove me to the hospital at three in the morning, still wearing his slippers, the edge of the steering wheel brushing my forehead as I lay on his lap. His hand on my forehead, warm and steady, as if he was trying to keep me from floating away. Everything had felt like watching TV, and I didn’t like the hospital. But Mama had let me drink Gatorade she bought from the gift shop, and even smiled when I showed her my tongue stained blue.
The doctor had been a funny man, but he wasn’t here now, and neither was Mama. I was scared, and there were tears on my face as I dropped to my knees, my hands over my ears, squeezing like a watermelon to make it go away. The mushrooms smelled like the pigs’ dung as I rolled onto my side, curled up and heedless of the rules I broke by bending and snapping the stems. I thought I heard them cry, or maybe it was me, and I shut my eyes to wish it away.
Fairy circles, Mama had said, and I believed every word when I felt a hand on the back of my neck, not warm and firm like Pop’s, but rough and scaled and broad, grinding something sandy into my nape, pushing aside my ponytail. I shrank away but the hand returned, wet and slimy, and rubbed something moist and soothing, slick and fragrant
as I whimpered.
“There, now,” a voice said, the first sound in a hundred years as the overpowering earthy scent faded and the tide receded from my brain. “Time to get up, girl. Stand on your feet and let’s move along.”
I didn’t know how I obeyed, but I didn’t have much of a choice not to. The voice was less compelling than the gritty wetness on the back of my neck. It smelled like breakfast, and I craned my head to try to see, my arm held helplessly in Mr. Calper’s rough hand as he guided me away.
“I’m all gross,” I said, not sure what else I was supposed to do. The liquid was squirming down my back, sticking my shirt to my shoulder blades, and it felt like someone had sneezed on me.
“Of course you are, girl,” he said, the sound of rocks grinding in a throat that had sucked down cigarette smoke for years and years. “A gift for the earth.”
“What does that mean?”
“Them creatures’ll feast on anything, and it was about to be you. Morchellas? More like monsters. I hate the damn things. The pigs like ‘em, though, and I know you like the pigs. Maybe there’s some good in you worth saving.”
“Thank you,” I said unsteadily, wiping as much of the oil out of my hair as I could.
“Run along,” he replied as we crested the corner and his house hove into view. “Keep away from there next time, you hear? I don’t much care for pheasant’s eye in any case. Stick with daisies and we’ll both be all right.”
He let go of my arm and shoved me towards the gate, a little smile on his face despite his gruffness as he turned up the path. Daisies grew on my side of the fence, safe and sunny. “Can I help you feed the pigs?” I asked, suddenly not caring that I was a mess.
“Tomorrow,” he called over his shoulder, brushing the old, empty vase with his gnarled hand as he disappeared. I waited a moment as the light went on in the parlor behind the glass, saw his shadow as he sat in his chair, and then spun around, sprinting for home, knowing I would never even bother to try to explain.
MEMORY LANE
Who knows how long I’ve wandered in that dark place where it seems
That my hopes are torn to tatters by the shards of broken dreams?
I look up and I wonder where the stars have gone tonight:
All I see are spots of brilliance that are furious, freezing bright.
No matter how I ache and scream and plead with mindless shades,
My cries don’t even echo as they wither and they fade.
The timeless, tuneless nothing whence is conjured up our fate
Is fairy lights and springtime to this shadow where I wait.
Haunted by the murmurs of “I wish I was” and “should,
I look up and I wonder if the stars are gone for good.
The buildings in my memory and the constructs of my mind
Are wrapped around with warnings, with their windows leering blind.
The air is thick with ravens and the dust of all my tears;
I haven’t seen the sunlight here for many, many years.
The cadence of my footsteps is a sad and sorry song,
A soft and wild melody that follows me along.
The monuments and headstones to my grand and feeble plans
Reach grasping from the landscape like so many twisted hands.
The howling of my conscience makes me shiver with despair;
I wrap my pride around me as I hurry here and there.
Who knows how long I’ve wandered in the darkness and the gloam?
The many paths of Memory Lane are treacherous to roam.
COLLECTING DUST
I don’t collect things. Sure, I buy things, and sometimes there is a sentimental reason why I keep them around, but collections imply that something you cared about is worth keeping around independent of whether you have lived or died. It’s a sad thought, really. Thank God she hoarded those silver thimbles, because they’ll pay for her funeral, some people might say. And then you’ve got nothing. A hole in the ground and no thimbles.
But a girl will go almost anywhere when it’s raining and she’s blown a tire on her bike. Even a secondhand shop with no cars in the unkempt gravel drive. It was one of those clustered old farmhouses that calls itself an antiques mall to attract the tourists driving through Connecticut on the way to a scenic byroad. Bleach-blond soccer moms naïve enough to believe that they could discover some secret Americana treasure worth millions in a town too small to boast its own Starbucks, and wow everyone at the Antiques Roadshow. To my knowledge, they never did. But then again, I don’t watch Antiques Roadshow.
The door was open, and I found myself draped in the musk of the dead and dying, teetering on all sides with half-formed china sets and mucky saucers, a tumble of children’s books, a spattered mirror that didn’t quite reflect, and something that might have once been a pile of quilts. It was dank, and close, and there was probably mildew, but at least I was out of the rain.
There didn’t seem to be anyone there. I expected at least a sagging old woman with a saddlebag face, appliqué on her sweater and a life behind her, waiting for something and watching other people trade their hours for the detritus of souls that couldn’t manage to keep their relics alive. I thought about how easy it would be to steal something from the unattended shop, before I realized what a futile thing it was to steal from a graveyard.
Wandering was difficult. There might have once been aisles, or at least threaded pathways through the grim and untouched mountains, but the territory was now uncharted through landslides of patched, stuffed toys and spring-like things, a box of buttons and a tangled nest of costume jewelry, bright and plastic and garish in the swinging light of a bakelite shade that had seen better days.
In a laminate curio there were vases, impostors of the great houses frozen in postures less than graceful. Mass produced elegance for the housewife who had run out of luck. For the aspiring; for the sad. For the ones who faded, they may have stood proudly in a spotless parlor, clear vinyl over orange brocade, where starched and brushed up cousins would sit stiffly at Christmas and wonder why doing so was the highlight of the year.
I touched one. The little lid rattled, and I had to catch it as it fell. It was plain, and white, and ribbed a little, bulbous protrusions curving upward between the incised bones, and from the top there was a bit of yellowed something: a sheet – paper? No, more plastic. From the age of the invented, the fabricated, the fake.
I picked it up and peered inside, curious, for once, about the dim innards of something that took effort to see. It was a bag, twist-tied closed, and filled with ashes. How I knew they were ashes is irrelevant. There is something about the human form, even when reduced to dust, that is instantly recognizable.
The lack of heft was frightening; the lack of meaning more. There were no words. There was no label, no explanation, except for the obvious one. Someone had forgotten. Someone hadn’t cared. Someone had passed off a person to the second-hand store, disconnected, disembodied, disused, and disgust.
I could have philosophized. I could have been outraged. I could have taken it home. I could have asked the woman who materialized from behind a half-hearted counter where the vase had come from, but I knew she wouldn’t know. It wasn’t a special object, and neither was the person inside. There was something comforting about it. Whoever it was, they were gone. They were not trapped by tombstone or duty, tied to a place by habit and a passing remembrance, diminishing through the years to a pinprick of nothing, but never allowed to die.
I could have taken it home. I could have put it on my shelf and stared at it every now and again until the startling rawness of reality wore down to a comfortable familiar fondness, like an old friend from camp that you’d rather keep a memory. But it had a shelf. And it had no memory. And I wiped my fingerprints away before placing it exactly inside the clean circle underneath its footprint, not wishing to leave a trace.
I nodded to the woman, who stared blankly back, hopin
g to convey that she had a very nice selection, but I wasn’t in the market for tarnished belt buckles at this time. She didn’t acknowledge, and neither did I, that the warped doorstep was a liability. It was unlikely anyone would make the trip. She knew, and I knew, that the disconnection of wood from wood was as temporary as the ashes, in a futile sort of way, and she wasn’t the type to collect complaints.
The rain was worse when I left, because it washed away the clinging cloying of expired perfumery and silver polish. I was the same as when I entered, dripping and frazzled and silent, the cool ceramic fading from my fingertips as the oddness faded from my mind. There was a mile to walk before towels and tea and wrinkled skin above the radiator. There were ashes at home, if I could face them, and second-hand words, bright and bakelite. And as I crunched down the path to the garage in the back, I thought about plastic, twist-tied closed, and I wondered if I would ever be so lucky.
ON ANGST
Here I am, hoping
That this time, the glow of good fortune
Does not abandon me
As quickly as each day we lose the warmth of the sun;
That this night, sleep awaits me with opium dreams
Visions of this future I chose, painted
In the soft strokes of a broken morning
THE BOOK OF YEW
Martin sat quietly on the sofa in the good company parlor, trying not to squirm around. His mother had removed the thick, slightly yellowing plastic that usually covered the white brocade, which was an exceedingly rare event. He wasn’t sure he really understood the point of white upholstery that had to be protected like a dragon’s horde of gold.
Even on such a special day, his mother had told him to take off his shoes before treading on the gleaming carpet so he wouldn’t make tracks, and he swung his sock-clad feet back and forth a few times, nervousness overcoming his best manners, before his father glared at him and he instantly straightened his spine and stopped every movement.
In the white parlor lived the Victrola, too. His parents would play records when they had company round for dinner, long after Martin was supposed to be in bed, and he would sneak down the stairs and peer through the banister, risking a thorough scolding. It was his special birthday treat to dress up in his Sunday clothes and sit on the sofa while his father selected the perfect song to delight his young son. Sometimes his father would suddenly stand up and grab his mother’s hand, swinging her out of her seat and pulling her close to dance the two-step while Martin clapped his hands and laughed before his mother would take his hand, too, and they would dance all together until the needle scratched along the record’s edge.
It was his birthday today, too, but it was unlikely that he would hear the Victrola sing until very late that evening, if at all. Pastor Risling didn’t like records, and he didn’t like that Martin’s father owned his Victrola. Martin wasn’t sure what Pastor would say if he knew that his parents sometimes danced.
Today, Martin was turning seven, and that was a very special birthday for any young lad or lady. It was the day Pastor Risling read from his big green book, made of pressed yew leaves and sheepskin, and told the waiting child if he was going to heaven or going to hell.
The starched collar of his best dress shirt felt a little too tight on Martin that day, and he would have sat on his hands to prevent him from tugging at the neat knot of his tie if he wasn’t so afraid of marking the couch with some bit of grime that had escaped his mother’s furious scrubbing that morning. Pastor Risling was watching him, now. He had finished talking to his father, and soon both parents would be sent out of the room.
It was a private affair, as well it should be. Martin could choose to tell his parents the outcome of his reading, if he wished, but most people advised against it. The truth always came out, of course, one way or another, but if he didn’t tell, he might have a few more months of favor. A generous family might simply cast out a wicked child, to fend for himself in the far-away, hidden Valley with the other sinners who scraped the rocky earth for nasty, woody roots and huddled in rags against the cold, guarded by Pastor’s obedient followers with better souls.
But most of the time the children were taken away in the middle of a moonless night and simply never heard from again. Martin had been hearing tales of the purgatory of naughty children since before he had left his mother’s womb, and had always made sure his door and windows were locked up tight before he would ever fall asleep.
He was more than a little bit terrified. He had a vague notion that he had never been quite up to par, reinforced by the lengthy, thunderous sermons Pastor Risling subjected his flock to every morning before the sun was fully risen. Perhaps it was because he had never been able to focus on his lessons properly after two hours of worship at the dark beginning of every day. His teacher had hit his open palm with a ruler a week ago for being inattentive during mathematics. He had hidden in the trees and cried for an hour during lunch, afraid that such a punishment so close to his judgment day would count as a deep black mark against him.
Pastor Risling was saying something, and Martin swallowed hard to get rid of the queasy lump of fear in his throat before he dared reply. He was a frightening man, tall and broad and gray haired, though he seemed much smaller than usual without his billowing robes and the added bulk of the pulpit. He didn’t look quite real, sitting on the matching chair halfway across the room, as if he was just a poor, shrunken echo of the spirit that howled and rang through the church pews every day. Martin had never seen him looking so ordinary before. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“Yes, sir,” he said, assuming that was the right answer to whatever it was. He could hardly ever go wrong with saying “yes, sir,” but he nearly melted in his seat when he realized he was still making mistakes even at the moment of his ultimate fate.
“Are you ready?” Pastor Risling asked, his bony finger slipping in between the pages to lever open the tome that took up most of his lap. A pen appeared in his other hand as Martin craned forward to see what was written on the brownish, mottled pages as the heavy cover swung open with a puff of dust. “What would you like it to say?”
“I – I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Will you be a good boy, or will you be wicked?” Pastor asked, looking at him sharply with his bright, beady eyes. “You must decide.”
“But isn’t it written there, sir?”
“It will be.”
Martin felt like he was going to cry again. He didn’t understand. “You mean I get to pick?”
“Of course you do. It’s your choice whether you’ll be an upright man or a bad one. Haven’t you ever been listening?”
A tear squeezed out from the corner of Martin’s eye when he realized he must not have been. It was so hard to stay awake before sunrise. He may have missed a word or two. The thunderous tone may have made it hard to listen to anything but the rumbling of brimstone from beyond the Pastor’s ken.
From the first time he could start to puzzle together the meanings of strings of words, he had heard a lot about the yew book, and a lot about hell. Perhaps he had connected the two in a way that was not entirely intended. His teacher was right to punish him for his wandering thoughts. He must be the worst kind of sinner.
“I’m sorry, Pastor,” he sobbed once he had stuttered out his confession in broken syllables. His nose was dripping onto his clean shirt. He wiped the dribble with his hand, and then immediately stuck it under his leg to stop him from making such a crude gesture again. The realization that he had now ground his snot into the snowy brocade made him cry even harder.
“There, now,” Pastor Risling said soothingly, holding out a handkerchief. Martin wasn’t sure if he should take it. He didn’t want to get it dirty, too. “You’ve always been a fine fellow, if a bit of a flighty, timid one. I’ll put you down as a good boy. But you’ll have to stick to it, do you understand? This page will be filled with all the deeds you do in your life,” he
added, flipping quickly to another page covered in letters, but turning back to the blank sheet too quickly for Martin to read any of it. “You must commit to making sure that you help the world more than you hurt it.”
“Yes, sir,” he whispered. “I will try.” Martin watched with wide eyes as Pastor wrote his name in a big, round hand at the top of the page. “You’re not going to ask my teacher about mathematics, are you?” he could help but ask.
Martin had never heard Pastor Risling laugh before. It was a nice laugh, like his father’s laugh, and it made him feel a little bit better. “I most certainly will,” the Pastor said, shaking his finger at Martin with false solemnity as he closed the book. “You must learn all your lessons if you are to go anywhere in this world or the next.” Martin nodded quickly and earnestly, which made the Pastor smile again. “That’s a good lad. Now, I know your parents are very formal and upright about this sort of thing, and rightly so, but do you think that before I go, I might have a bit of a listen to the Victrola?”
MELTED CHEESE
Avery reflected on the wispy string of mozzarella emanating from the edge of the darkly crisped panini while her mother continued to talk. It had been a good sandwich, for the first few bites, before her mother had asked her how she could eat at such a moment. She had been eating because it was good, she had wanted to say, and because it had cost her eight dollars and fifty cents, plus tax. She had been looking forward to the sandwich a lot more than she had been looking forward to talking to her mother, but Avery hadn’t really expected to get what she wanted.
She never did, where her mother was involved. Even now, as she idly toyed with the strangely hardened, cooled spur of cheese, half-listening to Shelly detailing the reasons why she had separated from Mark – was it Mark? No, this time it was Jeffrey, probably – all she wanted to do was shove her mother’s untouched pesto flatbread into her mouth and tell her to shut up so she could have lunch in peace.
But of course, the sandwich was ruined now. Mozzarella never melted the same way twice. She could take it home, she guessed, nodding and making a sympathetic noise where required, and put it on the George Foreman grill she had gotten at a yard sale last year. That was as close to owning a panini press as she had ever gotten. Asking her mother for kitchen appliances had always upset her, even if it was for a birthday. Who are you going to cook for? It’s just you, she would say, accusatory and disappointed. You’ll never use it.
It was probably true, Avery had to admit, abandoning the mozzarella thread and turning her attention to rolling the edge of her napkin between her fingernails. After gorging for the first week on grilled cheese, pressed wraps, and burritos she didn’t need to be eating, the stupid thing would go into a cabinet and never emerge again. They were hard to clean.
Mark had bought her a blender, in an attempt to secure the good will of his on-again, off-again paramour by getting her daughter on his side. Avery had accepted the appliance with enthusiasm, but it hadn’t paid off the way Mark expected. She cared about him just as much as she cared about her mother dabbing the thick foundation away from her cheeks as she pretended to cry over Jeffrey, peeking over the tissue to see if Avery was showing the proper level of concern.
She wasn’t. She was hungry, and she wanted more than watered down Diet Coke and watered down sentiment from her mother, who thought being alone was worse than crying over flakey dates and lackluster romances. Her mother had a bright blue Kitchen Aid stand mixer from her first marriage. Avery had coveted it since the day her father filed the divorce papers and the house went up for sale, but Shelly had stubbornly held onto it, like she held on to everything else from her long-spent youth.
Avery took a bite from her cold sandwich anyway, grimacing at the tough prosciutto and the soggy bread where the tomatoes had lingered for too long, ignoring Shelly’s frown. She was on a budget, and she would be damned if she let good food go to waste. She had paid for the pesto flatbread, too, as a special mark of generosity in her mother’s time of distress, but it lay limply on its plate, untouched, as her mother scolded her for disregarding her feelings. Six seventy-five, and the sodas had cost extra. Shelly had gotten potato salad, too.
The George Foreman would have to be good enough for the leftovers. It had been good enough so far. She would be able to leave in a few minutes, when her mother got around to realizing that she wasn’t going to get much more sympathy out of Avery that day. Maybe she would have time to run home and put it in the fridge before she had to be back at the store. Maybe she would give Jeffrey a call the next day, and he would take her out to lunch to hear what Shelly had said about him. Jeffrey liked seafood. Jeffrey didn’t mind if she stuffed her face.
Avery made her escape when Shelly slunk off to the ladies’ room to replenish her mask of makeup, a kiss on the cheek and an extra squeeze to her obligatory hug making up for her desultory attention as far as Shelly was concerned. As the waitress came round with a Styrofoam container, Avery glanced quickly at the bathroom door before reaching across the table. She plunked her mother’s uneaten sandwich on top of her own, dumped in the potato salad, and took a final swig of soda before she bolted gratefully from the bare table.
THE MYTH
In myth, Atlas holds up the heavens,
But it seems this world is mostly sky.
I wonder at the airy places in my heart,
Where cool numbness rises to form clouds
That drift through the caverns in the breeze
As the walls close in, and dissipate:
Tempestuous packets of electric fluid
Traveling with the currents of my mind,
Breeding into thunderstorms behind my eyes.
MY MOTHER NAMED ME HARTHACANUTE
On Thursday, March 18th, 1999, at 7:54 AM, I was born Harthacanute James Kevin Augustus Taylor. I like to think my mother wasn’t being wantonly cruel or clinically insane, but it’s hard to tell. She would always tell me that I should be proud to be so unique, and beamed like the sun when the local news station did a sixty-second bit on me before I even left the hospital, filling out a slow day with some snarky quips about the kind of parents who would name their children Ima Stone or Armin Hammer. They showed my picture, all seven and a half squirming, screaming pounds of me, and a blurry, pixelated camera shot of the video recording on the TV has been framed on the wall of the living room ever since.
I don’t think she did it for the glory. I think she meant well. Her name was Janine, and she worked as a receptionist in a dentist’s office. Women named Janine always ended up as receptionists, she would tell me. Names make their own destinies, and she didn’t want me to be roped into any one of them without a choice. A Harthacanute could be anything he wanted to be. A Harthacanute didn’t have a choice except to make his own way.
I was trying to do just that at my high school orientation. There’s nothing like spending a late August afternoon packed into the bleachers of a sweltering gymnasium, cheek by jowl with four hundred and eleven other nervous, sweating new freshmen to really welcome you into the cruel world of miserable disappointment that will fill the next four years for a shy, scrawny boy with a really weird name.
I had, of course, endured more than my share of bullying in the public school system so far. Every year I tried to get my teachers to call me James. At my insistence, my mother met with each one of them before school began, asking them to use my middle name. Either she wasn’t putting much effort into being persuasive or my teachers were more absent minded than even they appeared, because invariably every year during that first badly-pronounced roll call on the first day, “Harthacanute” made its mangled appearance and the room erupted in laughter. It was too late by the fourth grade. I would be Harthacanute forever more.
Suffice to say I didn’t have my hopes up for high school. Three different middle schools fed into Walton High, which for me merely meant there were two schools’ worth of people for whom I could be an entirely novel sou
rce of ridicule and distain. There would be new football players, who would learn that their kind called me Martha, and new pretty girls to ignore the fact that I might have a name at all. There was a new pack of nerdy nobodies who would think it mattered to me that I was named for the last Danish king of England, and a new group of thuggish bullies who bore no allegiance to anyone, and who would shove me into the lockers just because I was small.
It was while I was brooding on these and other topics, trying to tune out the principal’s pointless speech, that I heard him for the first time. Well, “heard him” is a bit of an understatement. It was while I was brooding on these and other topics that a thunderous roar of rage, battle lust, and compounded, wine-fueled fury coursed through me, shaking the very bones in my skull and making me jump two feet in the air with a comparatively tame little yelp.
“What the hell was that?” I shouted, standing up and looking around wildly, trying to figure out if somehow a rabid lion had gotten loose in the room. The entire freshman class, the faculty of the school, the student council, and special guest Molly McIntyre, School Board President, turned as one to stare in my direction.
“I…uhh…” was all I could say, the skin melting off my cheeks with the heat of embarrassment. “Um, sorry. There was…umm…a bug. Sorry.” I sat down. Normally, I might have been pleased with myself for covering my ass so successfully. Lies always come back to bite you when you put in too much detail, after all. But I was still unsettled by the tremendous noise that had absolutely no business interrupting my day.
The rest of the assembly passed in a blur of politically acceptable and blandly welcoming speeches by various members of the district administration I would never even see again. Shame still burned and bubbled within me, but I was beginning to convince myself that maybe it really was a bug that had briefly buzzed into my ear canal, and that there was nothing to worry about. It wasn’t until we were allowed to leave the auditorium and practice walking the halls according to our new schedules that I heard it again.
“YOU!” the voice screamed at me outside Room 262. I spun around, nearly flattening a teacher.
“Whoa, there, sport, take it easy,” he said, steadying me as I wobbled on my heel. “You don’t have to rush until the school year actually begins.”
“Sorry, I thought…nothing. Sorry.”
“Hey, you’re that kid from the assembly. Are you okay? Need any help? You seem a bit jumpy.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Well, maybe not, but if I’m not, it’s probably outside your field of expertise.”
The teacher laughed. “Try me,” he said. “I’m Mr. Wozicky, European History.” He stuck out his hand.
I always hated this part. “Harthacanute Taylor. Nice to meet you.”
“Ah, the famous Harthacanute. A pleasure to meet you at last. I hope you won’t take it amiss if I refrain from making any observation about your name whatsoever.”
“No, I could probably live with that,” I said. “I’m taking European History third period.”
“And I’m teaching European History third period. What a coincidence. I suppose that means I’ll see you in class on Monday.”
“Yeah, see you. Sorry for bumping into you like that.”
“No problem. Take it easy.”
I snuck into an empty classroom and sat at a desk in the back, clutching my head. It didn’t hurt. It was supposed to hurt if you were having a stroke, wasn’t it? What is going on? What’s happening to me? Am I going crazy? Perfect timing for it, I guess. Maybe if I get committed, I won’t have to go to school anymore.
“Who are you?” I whispered, feeling silly.
“WHO ARE YOU?” the voice replied, incredulity thick in its earth-shaking tone.
“I’m Harthacanute,” I said, looking around.
“YOU ARE NOT HARTHACANUTE,” the voice said, “I AM HARTHACANUTE!”
The air around me shimmered and thickened. A gust of unearthly wind rattled the drawn blinds and rustled the posters tacked to the bulletin boards. The ghostly image of the ancient Danish king appeared before me, wrapped in wool and furs, sword in hand. He was not wearing a helmet with horns on it. I had had enough research on the Danes nudged my way to know the horns weren’t real. This very small point of pedantic accuracy, however, didn’t make up for the fact that a six-foot tall apparition was standing inches in front of me, looking testy and heavily armed.
“Oh,” I said, for lack of anything better. “Yes, you appear to be Harthacanute.
“And don’t you forget it, boy,” the ghost said in an angry growl that at least approximated the decibel levels of normal human speech.
“So. Uh. How can I help you?”
“Help me? Help me? You have stolen my name, and have condemned me to an eternity of restless torment and despair! It is my fate to haunt you until I find my rest.”
“Wait a sec. Hang on. First of all, I didn’t steal anything from you. It’s my mom you want to go after for that one. I’d gladly give it up if I could, but I’m stuck with it. Second of all, why are you telling me this now? You’ve had fifteen years to haunt me and I haven’t heard a peep. Third of all, I’m pretty sure you’re just a product of heatstroke or a brain tumor or something because you’re speaking frickin’ English! So just go away! I have enough to worry about without being haunted. Shoo!”
“HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME THUS, WRETCHED CHILD!”
He moved to hit me, quick as a snake. I ducked, then shivered as his hand passed chillingly right through me. I looked up to see him staring at his fist, a look of mingled horror and anger on his face.
“Ha!” I said, and he glowered at me. “Now you need to go away. Go away right now. I’m leaving the classroom, so you need to go away.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily, boy,” he replied.
“Okay, so how can I get rid of you? Change my name? My mom won’t let me until I’m eighteen, and I can’t have you bothering me until then. Is there a quest of some sort? A chalice or amulet or secret gateway to discover? Mad monks and code breaking? I could do that, right? Sounds like fun. Of course, you’ll have to fit it in to my Christmas break. I only get a week and a half this year.”
“Shut up,” he hissed. “If I knew what to do, I would tell you to do it.”
“Oh, yeah? Well if we’re going to be stuck together like some bad buddy cop movie, I’m the one who’s going to be in charge. I’m the one who’s real, after all.”
“Real? I am as real as you are. Maybe more. What is this place?”
“Don’t the dead recognize hell when they see it?” Harthacanute tightened his grip on his sword, and I smiled. “It’s a high school. For kids. Everyone has to go to school these days, you know. It’s the law.”
Harthacanute looked puzzled. “What the devil for?”
“Beats me.”
“Is there anything to drink?”
“I think there’s a water fountain on the first floor.”
“Don’t toy with me, boy,” he growled again. “Something real to drink.”
“Um. No. I’m under aged. I can’t buy you alcohol. I don’t think ghosts can drink, anyway.”
“By all that is holy,” the warrior muttered. “This really is hell.”
“Yeah. Come on,” I said. “It’s almost time to go home. I don’t think either of us want to stay here any longer than we have to.”
I turned towards the door, and instantly froze. Mr. Wozicky was standing there, watching me, the concern on his face masked by his surprise – and more than a little delight – as he stared right through me. Right through me, but not right through Harthacanute. He looked like he had seen a ghost, and apparently he had.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered.
“Wait, you can see him?” I asked, turning to see what the ancient king would do. If Mr. Wozicky could see him, then maybe he was in danger from the warrior’s wrath. “Don’t you do anything,” I
warned my namesake. “He’s my history teacher.”
“He is history,” Mr. Wozicky said quietly, stepping a little closer with a shaking hand outstretched, nearly touching the fox fur trim on the king’s woolen cloak. “He’s the real Harthacanute.”
“I’m the real Harthacanute,” I said, but no one was listening.
“Don’t you lay your hands on me,” the king snapped, trying to slap away the teacher’s fingers. He could do no more harm to Mr. Wozicky than he had done to me, but Mr. Wozicky was no idiot, and immediately dropped his arm and took a step back.
“I’m the real Harthacanute,” I told him again when he looked at me with a glassy grin on his face, rubbing the cold out of his fingers. “He’s just a figment of my imagination. And you probably are, too.”
“That’s quite an imagination,” Mr. Wozicky said.
“I’m quite a guy,” I replied, keeping one eye on Harthacanute and his sword. He didn’t look very pleased at the interloper. I wondered how he would feel about the football players and the bullies. I didn’t want to know what he would think about the pretty girls. “Look, you can’t do this, you know. I have to go to school here. I can’t have a giant smelly killer ghost following me to chemistry class. I’m sorry we have the same name, but you don’t see every stupid idiot named Richard being followed around by the guy from Star Trek, right?”
“What?”
“He means Richard the Lionheart,” Mr. Wozicky explained, but it didn’t help. “A little after your time,” he added. “But let’s just say that ruling England doesn’t really work out for you guys.”
“Lies,” Harthacanute said, spitting on the ground.
“Ew,” I said, looking at the transparent little puddle. “But you know what I mean. You can’t do this to me.”
“Then maybe you should wake up,” my mother said.
I blinked. “Where did you come from?”
“Wake up,” she said, shaking my shoulder. “You’re going to be late for orientation.”
“But I’m already here,” I said, blinking again, and then I wasn’t. I was in bed. Of course I’m in bed, I thought, groaning as my mom poked me with her sharp finger. Of course it was a dream.
“I don’t know where you think you are, mister, but you’re going to miss the assembly if you don’t get up right this instant.” She pulled the blanket off me and I rolled over as I tried to grab it back. “Right now. I even made you some breakfast. Come downstairs before it gets cold.”
She left me alone and I took the blanket back, staring up at the crackled paint on the ceiling as the fading voices of the dream flowed through me. The Danish king with fire in his eyes and thunder in his voice stood tall before my memory, the naked blade of his sword echoing the newfound gleam in my eyes. Maybe he was real. Maybe just a little bit of him was. Maybe a little bit had survived in me.
“I am Harthacanute,” I whispered, my hand tightening around a fistful of blanket, a breath of cold Danish wind tracing the echo of my words. “And I really am quite a guy.”
AUTUMN WORDS
The woods have gone so quiet,
The geese all south have flown;
I’m walking through the frozen forest,
Silent and alone.
I can’t help but think, this time of year,
Of all the faded dreams,
Of memories trapped beneath the ice,
And of their silent screams.
I try to capture all the colors,
Brown and blue and gray -
The tepid, neutral, glassy shades,
But they all have gone away.
It’s sort of as if there never was
A hue that’s bold and bright;
And even in the gelid air,
The moon glows painfully white.
But colors are like feelings, and
You know my feelings well;
Though when you were flying colors true,
I never quite could tell.
It’s in this frigid time of year,
When I listen to dreams of trees,
I hear your voice in the shivering air,
Your whisper in the icy leaves.
GIVE AND TAKE
Maala wiped the warm perspiration from her brow as she carefully scooped the cooking rice away from the hole in the bottom of the old iron pot, desperate not to waste a single grain while the water bubbled out and transformed the dried grit into soft, spoonable gruel. She had burned it yesterday, just a little, while trying to change the baby’s soiled clothes at the same time, and Yawo had scolded her. She would not make the same mistake again.
At the bottom of the salt cellar was nothing more than a fine, powdery coating, but she pressed her finger into the dust and imagined she was tracing a picture on a frosted window, cool and crackling with miniature spears of sharp elven ice, before rubbing the remnants of the seasoning into the bowl. It wasn’t enough, but if she didn’t stir it in all the way, perhaps the echoing tang of the expensive spice would still shine through.
Yawo wasn’t pleased. He had gotten accustomed to finer things during his time away from home, and no longer savored his sister’s cooking as much as he had before getting sick. The infirmary had been as elegant as a palace, and cost nearly as much to live in, but Maala hadn’t had a choice. She had hoped the physician would keep him there, and put the child to work when he was cured, to take him off her hands no matter how much she loved him, but the physician hadn’t been able to.
He hadn’t done much, in fact, except shake his head a lot and take the coins she had earned through a labor she didn’t wish her younger brother to know about. The little boy was still sick, and rice gruel with a dusting of salt wasn’t going to make him better.
Nothing would, the physician had told her, and she had spent long nights, wide open, gauging the truth in his words. He told her it would only be weeks before the tightness in her heart burst its banks and spilled into aching grief to flood an unmarked hole in the earth. He had said the same thing about her parents, when the dark bile cough came to the village, and he had been wrong. It had been less than a day.
More than a year had passed since she had begged him to save them. He had tried, after she had finally given him much more than begging, but her resistance had rendered it too late. More than a year, she sighed, brushing her fingers over the sleeping baby’s feathery hair as she brought Yawo’s bowl to his bedside. He ate it all, which pleased her, and rendered his quiet complaints less bitter as she ladled the boiled rice into his open mouth.
There was none left for her, but that didn’t matter. She was not hungry for bland and watery gruel. She would sup on something far brighter that night unless the physician listened to her, she thought grimly as she tucked the sharp boning knife into her skirt. There was no truth in his words. There couldn’t be. She had given him too much.
Yawo was lost in slumber by the time she slipped from the hut. She had been practicing for days, and she knew she would return before her brother or her baby woke. There was medicine. She had seen it on the shelf behind the glass. There were no more coins to use for salt, maybe, but the physician would be the one to pay dearly if he did not help her. She would give him nothing. She would not make the same mistake again.
THE EARTHSTEPPER’S BARGAIN
The soft green scent of the warm, loamy shore in the distance made Cal think of his childhood home, the one he had raided and burnt to the ground last year. There had been no survivors, but he hadn’t intended for there to be. Geilya was dead, and so the place was dead to him. He had had no other choice. But he was returning to the mainland out of duty only; the sea had long ago swept the last of his sentiment away. Roland Ironhand had called him, and his chief was not to be disobeyed, no matter how reluctant he had been to answer the summons.
“You need to stop that, Cal,” Hewryn said, leaning on the rail beside him. “Thinking has never done you any good before, and it certainly won’t sta
rt now.”
“I’m not thinking. I’m remembering.”
“Even worse.”
“I know. You could just turn around with the ship if you wanted. I’m not asking you to be here.”
Hewryn laughed, a deep, hearty sound of mirth that matched his massive frame. “You never ask. I’m here because you need me, and I’d prefer if you stayed alive until you’ve had a chance you pay off your debts.”
“I’ll never be able to do that, Hew.”
“Then you should never die,” the man said simply.
Cal nearly smiled. “I don’t intend to. Roland might have other ideas, however.”
“He likes you.”
“Liked,” Cal corrected. “There was that little misunderstanding that came between us, if you recall.”
Hew shrugged. “You did him a favor when you married Geilya. No one was going to take her off his hands after the Sepami came. She was damaged goods, in his eyes. He should be thanking you.”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” Cal said sharply, fighting down the stinging ache that shot through him every time someone mentioned her name. Every damn time. “You want to swim home? Without any arms?”
“Sorry,” Hew said, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry. Put it away, Cal,” he warned when his friend seemed to have no intention of backing down. He placed his hand on his own sword’s hilt. “Do you hear me? I said to put it away, soldier,” he repeated, snapping like their old sergeant in the Guards in a voice his hindbrain instantly obeyed.
Cal blinked and looked down. “Bloody hell,” he swore. He had the Rhaveren in his hand, but he had no memory of drawing the enchanted blade. It glittered with malice in the sharp ocean light, an eagerness that both disturbed and excited him. Anger, he thought ruefully, shaking his head as he sheathed the sword, extinguishing its radiance for the moment. Anger would get him every time. “I didn’t mean it,” he mumbled, slumping back against the ship’s side.
“Yes you did,” Hewryn replied. “I probably deserved it. I’m an ass.”
“Stupidity and rage,” Cal sighed, rubbing his temples, echoes ringing in his ears. “What a pair we are.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Hew said, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re not always that stupid.” Cal glared at him. “Come on, Your Holy Humorless Highness,” he laughed. “I’ll buy you a drink.”