We Leave Together, стр. 37

Djoss snatched at the ropes from the laundry. He didn’t bother pulling the laundry loose. He untied them all from the stones. He left them lashed in on the side near an alley. He looked over the edge. He looked at his ropes. He figured it was still going to be a good drop to the ground. He tugged off all the laundry. He put them in a big pile near the edge, where he planned to jump. He dropped them in one big lump over the edge. He grabbed the rope. He spun it around in his hand, so the many threads wrapped all over each other and then around his waist.

He took a running start. He jumped. The ropes caught at the second story. He slammed into the wall. The wind rushed out of his lungs like his body was on fire. He crumpled to the ground, into the pile of laundry.

I’m sure he knew that Rachel would come looking for him. When that happened, he wanted to have it all back—all the money he had spent, and all the futures he had lost. He swore to himself he wouldn’t touch the weed again. He was going to be strong, like he had always been. This was his chance to earn it all back.

***

Jona had turned around for a moment. He was scrubbing a dish clean. He pumped the water out from the line to the canal. He scraped the steel pots clean of rice with a pumice stone. He talked to her, she was sitting behind him at the table, and she wasn’t saying a word. “My mother never told me what to do if I ever met anyone like me,” he said. “She never really believed I would meet anyone like me. I think she thought I was the only one in the world. Whenever I asked her what to do if I found another like me, she just said nothing to it. She’d just act like she didn’t hear me ask her that, or something. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what to make of any of this. We make people sick, but they don’t make us sick. They don’t make demons sick, either, I think. If they do, how would we know? Where are we supposed to go to find out how we are the way we are? Maybe Lord Sabachthani knows about us, but if we tell him it’s our death, right? Maybe we stick together and we find more people like us. We find out what they know. Maybe we can make our own way underground and see Elishta’s Nameless for ourselves, or we find people who know about it and find out what they know. Maybe someday we get enough people like us, we split off and make our own place, our own district, our own city. Bloody Elishta, a whole city. Maybe someday we can be together, you and me, and have a family, and nobody cares if the kid has wings or scales or big, sharp teeth like a lizard, because it’s still just a kid, right?” He stopped scrubbing with his stone. He pumped some fresh water into the pot. He rested his arms on the side of the sink. “Rachel, I wish we could be a family…” he turned around to look her in the face.

She was gone.

A candle burned on the table. The flame flickered in slight winds from invisible places in the stale room. The clay white wax curved gracefully over the puckered, melting lips.

***

I do not know her path through the Joni house. I do not know whether she found the basement where her brother had broken through the old chains. I do not know if she found the roof where the laundry lines fluttered down the side of the building like banners.

Ragpickers had snatched the cloth on the lines close to ground. Industrious boys piled crates along the side of the house and climbed up the ropes, jamming feet between bricks, and pulling at the bits of uniform and bedsheets and women’s working dresses. Jona’s appearance scared them all overboard, like sailors jumping ship.

Jona looked over the edge of the roof. He pulled the laundry lines back to the roof, shaking off the boys that clung too long to the lines.

He threw the clothes on the roof, and went back inside. He sat alone in a dark room until his mother came home.

He thought and thought, and nothing made sense, and none of it was going to make sense, but he kept thinking. Pretty soon, he stopped thinking and just felt that feeling that comes to young men, when nothing turned out like they planned, and she’s gone.

There is a wailing that came next, a gnashing of teeth, and waiting for daylight on the roof of the house, where the stars and the moon occasionally showed themselves past the clouds and lamplight.