Scorched

By the time the caravan of visitors entered through the gate that enclosed our small village, most of us had gathered at the Square. I’d filled the water bucket for the pigs and waited for the newcomers with the handle slung over my shoulder. It was heavy but did not faze me; life here strengthened us inside and out.

The man leading the group offered a hand to me in greeting. I shook it, his hand like worn leather in my own. Here was a man who worked and he immediately commanded my respect.

“Hello,” I said warmly. “You are welcome here. There is food and water for you in the Square.”

“Thank you, young lady. You’re most hospitable,” he said. He had an Old World charm to his words, slightly foreign but pleasant to hear.

He moved past me and I glanced at the passing faces of the ones who had come to our village. A few I knew, recurring visitors from neighboring villages, and many I didn’t. With each passing year, it was impossible to predict who the wind would bring us. People came and died and were born or simply left; it was the way of things, the way of life.

One boy in particular near the back of the group caught my eye. Like many of the others, he wore a heavy jacket to protect him from the sand and wind during the trip, and he also wore a dusty blue bandana around his mouth and nose. His raven black hair fell past his pale eyes and, unlike the others, he carried only a small knapsack over his shoulder rather than a backpack or duffel bag of belongings.

Several dragged small wagons behind them, no doubt food for the celebration. I was excited to see what they had brought; every year it was something different and foreign, either meat that didn’t graze where we lived or packages scavenged from distant skeletons of Old World cities.

I could hear the low murmurs at the Square increase in volume as the newcomers came in. Exclamations over old friends and new acquaintances peppered the air like honeybees in a heavily flower-perfumed meadow in Spring.

I waited for all of them—roughly twenty or so—to pass through the gate before breaking away to empty the water bucket into the pig trough. As soon as it was empty, the pigs swarmed around, lapping up the fresh water. I rubbed a few on the back before heading to the Square.

“Evalyn! One of my old friends who had arrived with the travelers screamed my name, running to me and engulfing me in a hug.

“Deidre! It’s been so long since I last saw you! What’s it been, like a year?”

She laughed at the age-old joke. Deidre was one of the few people I knew my age who I saw consistently each year, for the past six years. She, like me, never truly believed in the mating system and mostly came to the Dance of Fire for a reprieve from her home village. She had short blonde hair with white streaks, bleached from the sun, and bright green eyes. Her hair had a ragged edge to it where she cut it herself.

“I can’t wait to show you what my grandpapa brought for me last time he visited,” she said excitedly and I followed her to the building that would serve as the visitor’s sleeping quarters.

We wound our way through groups of people visiting old friends or chatting to one another, stepping over bags and legs. We all slept in bunk beds and the trailer-house was filled with them, arranged in a staggered pattern. Our carpenter, Bert, had even made a few modified versions that had three bunks instead of two. Deidre, of course, had the very top of one of the three-level bunks.

We raced, with her scrambling up the small ladder that led to the top, and me using the bottom mattress to jump up, swinging my legs for momentum. I very narrowly won, Deidre sliding across the sheets only a half second after I managed to drag myself up. She tackled me and a thirty-second battle took place, precariously perched atop a bunk bed. Eventually, she managed to wedge my left arm behind my back and I was mindful of the edge of the bed so, rather than prolonging the battle and risk falling off, I yielded.

Deidre and I had connected the first time we’d met. I was drawn to her company for the same reason she was drawn to me: we were each other’s equals. Every year, we were the fastest, the strongest, and untouchable. While others wilted in this broken world, we flourished beneath the scorching hot sun.

“So,” I said, smoothing my hair, tangled from the melee, “What did you want to show me?”

She rummaged through her faded black backpack. “This,” she said, unwrapping and reverently holding out a strangely shaped rock. I’d never seen one like it; it was pale grey, speckled with dark spots, and it was smooth and shiny where sunshine from the skylights glinted off of it. It was a little longer than my palm and had a curious spiral that began at the pointed tip and ended in a wide opening at the top. The inside was a beautiful, vivid pink, like opening a green flower bud to see a surprisingly bright hue staring back up at you.

“Listen to it, it sings,” she whispered, her eyes twinkling with excitement for her special rock.

I kind of laughed, thinking she was only joking, but when I put the rock to my ear, I heard a hollow whoosh I was not expecting. I was startled but curiosity made me listen again. It was like the rock had captured its own inner wind, combined with the muffled echoes of peoples’ voices in the room; it was as though I held the voices of everyone around us cupped to my ear.

“Wow,” I said in awe. “I didn’t know rocks could sing like that.”

“It’s not a rock,” she said. “My Grandpapa called it a ‘seashell’, I think. Yeah, a shell.”

I was perplexed. “A shell? Like an eggshell?”

She laughed. “No, a seashell. It came from the ocean, which is the same thing as a sea. I guess it’s like a lake, but enormous, as far as the eye can see. There would be animals that lived in these shells and when they grew, they shed them. My grandpapa lived there a long time ago, in the Old World. He gave it to me before he died.”

“How strange,” I said. The most experience I had ever had was with our own pond but I knew for a fact there weren’t any shelled creatures in there. Maybe it was because we made it ourselves. What if every pond or lake that was created by Nature was filled with them?

“I want to go to one,” I said suddenly.

Deidre wrapped the shell carefully with a strip of cloth and returned it to her bag. “Go where?”

“To an ocean. Or a lake, a real one. I want to see what these shell-animals are,” I said.

Her face brightened. “Yeah! We should go, Ev. It’d be such an adventure.”

I nodded. “That’s it, then. One day, we’re going to an ocean,” I said decisively.

I wonder if it sings?

☀☀☀

Dinner was a feast, at least compared to our usual fare of dried meat with vegetables or stew. The guests had brought dehydrated venison—from some animal I did not know—which Sandra simmered in water and vegetables for several hours, cans of fruit and beans, bags of rice and flour, honey, and a lot of clothes and fabrics, which the matriarchs of our village fawned about for hours.

I myself had never mastered the needle; in fact, I was quite comfortable in saying I downright hated the thing. I was just fine with finding clothes or wearing my rags until they’d fully served their purpose.

Sandra and several of the elders busied themselves in cooking the meal in late afternoon, making the most of the natural light before dusk fell, while the rest of us became acquainted. Besides Deidre, I knew Isaac and Brianna, who mated last year, Soriah, Deidre’s little sister, and Darryl.

Deidre and Soriah never traveled alone; after their parents died two years ago, they were inseparable. Soriah was 13 but her green eyes had clouded over from when she’d gotten the sun fever. She’d wandered the desert for three days before Dee found her and after her body had healed, it was evident her mind would not. She knew names and faces but she preferred not to speak unless she had to, instead, watching everything with her pale eyes.

At the moment, she was knotting flower stems together for the Fire Dance with several of the younger girls. Even when we were too young to be mated, we attended the Dances, to be familiar with them. It was also an opportunity to gauge future mates while they were young, to plan ahead. As though one could truly anticipate who would survive and who would not during the course of a year.

I sat on the cracked and blistered seat of an old, rusted bike to watch Isaac and a few others try to hit a target on a small bale of hay with a bow that was nearly as tall as they were. They’d found it on the way here and were trying to test it out. Brianna sat on the ground next to me, legs stretched out, leaning back on her palms.

“Hey,” she said and I returned the greeting. Though she was only a year older than me, she looked much older than she had the last time I’d seen her. Lines were engraved at the corners of her eyes and forehead, her skin tanned and leathery from the harsh sun.

“So how are you and Isaac?” I asked. I admit, I was surprised that they had not yet conceived a child, though I had no idea if they did and it had died or any of the numerous possibilities. I definitely was not about to ask that question.

She lowered her eyes and I feared the worst. “We’re fine, we both very much love each other,” she said, surprising me; it was definitely not what I had expected her to say. “But…I have not become pregnant after a full year and my mother has brought me back to the Dance of Fire to mate me to someone else.”

I was shocked. Being mated twice in a year was so rare, I didn’t know of anyone else who had gone through it.

“Why doesn’t she let you wait another year? Perhaps you still have a bit of maturing to do, body-wise. And you and Isaac are so happy together, I…” I drifted off, kicking a stone that protruded from the ground. “Making babies shouldn’t be the controlling aspect of your life,” I finished.

Brianna looked up at me and I wanted to cry from the sadness I saw her wide, brown eyes. “I know you’ve always been a bit of a rebel, Evalyn, but…it’s our duty to bring more people into this world, for both our village and our entire species. When you’re mated, you’ll understand.”

I understand enough, Bri, I thought. But that doesn’t mean I have to abide by it.

I watched Brianna and Isaac differently after what she had told me. Even before their mating last year, we all knew they would be together. Every time they were near each other, it was like an electric rush between them; their love was strong enough to see. And now we all were condemned to silently watch as her mother physically forced them apart at dinner, putting space between them to extinguish that spark that ignited them both.

I saw the wretchedness in both of them when they glanced at each other and quickly looked away, ashamed of their failure to provide what was expected of us all.

That night, I looked around at every person’s face, illuminated by the bonfire, and saw only hollowness of long, wasted years of existence, of the strain that struggling to survive had etched into their skin and soul. We were merely embers of a once glorious vitality and I mourned our death.

I stared into the fire, watching tiny blue tongues crumble away wood at the base, and I decided in that moment that I would make my own spark so that I may never need another.

I will refuse to mate.