We Leave Together, стр. 31
She coughed. She shook her head. “That’s what will happen if you keep this up. You’ll spend the rest of your life staring at the ceiling and drooling. You won’t remember a thing. You’ll do terrible things, and you won’t even remember, and you won’t be doing them for the right reasons.”
“I know.”
She clenched her fist, and pounded the wall. The tea trembled. “If you know…!” She hit the wall even harder. The plaster dented. She heaved her teacup out the open window.
“I don’t know why I do it, Rachel,” he said. Djoss’ bottom lip trembled. He closed his eyes.
“We have some money left, however you got it. We’ll sell everything. We’ll sign on with a merchant in need of haulers and pack handlers, if we can. We’ll walk through the woods if we have to. We have to get out of the city. We’ll find somewhere new, somewhere far away. We’ll start over, new.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I guess it’s all me this time. First time it’s ever been me, huh?”
She held the rest of her words inside of her. They burned like acid.
***
Rachel carried a small sack on her back full of the pots and cracked crockery they had been using. They would sell all of it at whatever fence would offer any money for stuff that was almost worthless. Djoss searched around for the teacup, but already the street had swallowed the cracked, white clay egg. Djoss carried nothing at all. He was still too weak and uncoordinated.
The landlord’s wife came out from the butcher shop and asked if they were leaving. Rachel told the landlord’s wife that she and Djoss were going to buy new furniture soon.
The butcher’s wife snorted. “Tell me when you’re done. You paid up and you can stay until the end of the week, but you get nothing back from us. Don’t even ask.”
Rachel didn’t repeat her lie about new furniture. She didn’t say anything at all. The two women looked at each other in the street, both of them gauging the other.
“Will you wait until we’re done moving out?” said Rachel. “We’ll be done today. We’ve already sold everything of value. Nothing is left worth stealing.”“We’ll wait until sunset,” said the butcher’s wife. “Once the Pens empty out, people come asking.”
Djoss coughed. He rubbed his hands together like they were cold. “We’ll be out by then,” he said, “Just give us a chance to finish and don’t show anybody the room until we’re done clearing it.”
“I’ll do what I want with my room,” said the butcher’s wife.
Djoss popped his fist into his palm. “I’ll do what I have to do about our stuff. We need the money more than some thief.”
The woman looked Djoss up and down with empty eyes. She smiled, wanly. She spoke to Rachel. “You picked a hard boy, but I can see the pink in his face. I’ve seen it from the start. I’ll give you to sunset, woman, and I hope you pick a better man when this one smokes his head to cheese. If you was a real Senta… Well, you ought to see his fate easy. Everyone else does.”
Rachel sneered and snapped a flame in and out of the air where she could feel the combustion in the koan of the spaces between. “Maybe I’m the only one who does see his fate,” she said. “You don’t know anything about us, or my brother.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said the butcher’s wife, but she clearly didn’t believe it. “I won’t put the sign out until sunset.”
Rachel and Djoss were done within the hour. After nothing was left. Rachel gazed at the empty room. She smelled the bittersweet manure and meat rot of the butcher shop and the salty smell of more sea rain to wash away more of the animal smells that seeped in from the porous wooden and brick walls.
Rachel leaned out the window. She turned around to look up at the swirling clouds overhead. She turned around again to see the narrow street and all the people there that didn’t know her name. She sighed. Djoss said nothing. He waited quietly in the hall for his sister to close the door behind her.
***
A sidewalk café cut into the warehouses for the porters. Djoss and Rachel sipped berry tea even though they hated berries in tea. The berry tea was the cheapest thing to drink, and they could get lots of it with all the rainy weather spoiling the berries that hadn’t ripened yet.
Djoss and Rachel ate wheat bread and stew because it was the heaviest thing on the menu. They couldn’t afford to eat twice that day.
They spent one more night in a trashy inn. She tied him down to the bed with ropes she borrowed from the innkeeper’s stable. He didn’t argue with her about the ropes. She showed Djoss what she had gotten, without consulting him about it. She told Djoss where to place his hands. He complied.
She slept sitting in a chair with all of the money under the cushion below her.
He didn’t fight her.
That night must have been so long. I can only imagine the howls that must have emerged from that room, like a beast was chained down and dying. Rachel never told Jona about that night.
I have heard the men deprived of the demon weed wailing like banshees caught between the real and the damned. I imagine she watched the contortions of her brother’s face, and saw her father there, writhing in a demon agony inside of the ear. She saw the dying poplars where she says he fell, how the trees puckered to ash like paintbrushes drying up, and all the bloody puke flowing from her brother’s mouth was like a river of death that washed him clean.
I imagine she pulled ice from the air,