After Forever Falls Apart

Chapter 13 (who are you)

I teach the child how to make bone necklaces. Silent, shadowing, he numbly does what I tell him to do. Eat this loaf of bread. Drink water from a cup. We're going to leave the beach now, the sun is going down and we should return to our cabin before it gets dark.

The child shadows me from the beach, to the softly sloping hill, to the town of shoddy woodwork. My heels grind sand into ash-mixed-gravel, this ground has yet to become a road. Or, it once was a road, before the burners, before the people returned to knock down the stone frames of doorways still standing, returned to pour gravel over what might become streets again, returned to build shoddy cabins with wood while the brick buildings slowly climbed higher.

The child and I have doomed this place before the first tiled rooftop can begin.

We don't tell them that. Maybe, the child and I can go quietly enough that no burners will catch wind of our magic, however they might do that. The people rebuilding this town don't seem eager to tattle to the burners of some mages passing through their clattering construction, paying for room by mixing pots of mortar for the bricks.

The child and I sleep, in a drafty cabin crawling with insects. We sleep, on woven mats, the muggy heat making a cloak covering uncomfortable. We sleep, the child and I, covered by cloaks to protect from the insects.

Each morning, I wake with the sun and change, brush out my hair, tie it back with ribbons. The child follows me from our cabin; the morning silence crackles with our bootsteps over gravel roads.

We mix the brick mortar alongside a man wrinkled with age, who wakes even earlier than I and gathers the grounded rocks for the mortar. He taught me how to mix the concrete my first days here, now the child mimics my motions and I give him a smaller pot, more water so the brown-gray goop--scented like rain--is thinner to stir. We work in silence, some days, perched on creaky workbenches. We're not allowed to place the bricks ourselves, the man's hands shake too much, I am an outsider, the child is a child.

Sometimes the man tells stories. He raised his seven children in this town, he carried his wife free of the flames when the burners came, end of the winter. By winter, he means the oppressive and constant heat gave way to a season of steady rain and cool ocean winds for a few weeks. I nod along, mixing mortar until my arms burn and my hands dry beneath a film of gray.

I do not know how valuable mixing mortar is to these people. Maybe, only those lowest in society are burdened with such menial labor. But early mornings, midafternoons seated beside a round pot is an easy enough payment for a room to sleep, food to eat.

When the brick layers come to the construction zone, to the red brick walls stacked as high as knees, the man returns to his cabin in the sprawling bones of the town. The child and I stay, cross-legged beside the pots of mortar and gray stirring sticks in case they need more.

They rarely need more. To the sounds of their mutters and clacking bricks, I teach the child needlework, stringing beads together in patterns; square beads, circle beads, lumpy marbles, squares again. I teach him the back and forth of a needle with thread through two layers of cloth, how to tie a knot at the end and cut the thread free. We begin a patchwork blanket, there on the ashy ground beside pots of mortar, the scrapes of brick builders' tools like choppy waves.

I pretend not to see the way the brick builders glance at us. Girl with a child, is the child hers?

I take the glances that I pretend not to see as a compliment; they do not wonder about the girl being a girl, only about where the girl's child came from, and why there is only a girl and a child, and why the child never seems to speak.

In the afternoons, I take the child down to the beach, by the water, away from the heat. There the jet bird has a nest, by wordless agreement we decided she should stay away from the townspeople. The only birds native to this muggy heat have half-featherless bodies, good for running, or else are so brightly colored as to seem like flowers, covered in petals, bragging to the pollinators.