16 – 4
There's a pot-bellied stove in the far corner of the Bend at the Bend's dusty, empty taproom, coldly dark with disuse and stained ashy black by years of soot. A small stack of axe-split drywood waits neatly beside it, a waxy taper set atop. All that's missing is a spark. The first of our issues.
The second is a lack of soft, comfortable things on which to rest. The tavern's furniture is constructed solely of bare, sturdy wood, without a single cushion to be found. They're more comfortable than the frozen earth to sit on, but my weary body aches for better.
Thirdly, our illnesses have spitefully refused to clear up in the hour or so it's been since we arrived in Sockeye Bend. With no idea where to find medicine nor anyone to tell us what kind we need, it would seem our lot is to suffer in sickness until we recover on our own.
The last of our issues is that of food and water. With the well seemingly fouled our choice falls between either drawing from the river and risk its cleanliness or drinking the liqour found on the tavern's shelves and risk discovering the consequences of being ill and drunk. We haven't found any food, not yet.
“Ha!” Clarke cries, more a croak of joy than a triumphant shout. I turn from placing drywood in the stove's round belly to see her emerge from beneath the bar, dust in her hair and holding something aloft, “Found it!”
“Found what?” I ask, curious.
She coughs, which sounds awful; then sneezes, which goes everywhere, “Ugh,” she groans, wiping her nose on her sleeve, “Gross.” Once done, she says, “Here,” and tosses whatever it is across the taproom. It falls well short, landing with a clatter and sliding under one of the tables.
I grumble and go after it, sighing as my head swims and knees twinge. If this is what it means to be grown, they can keep it. I grab it and straighten up, leaning on the table until the room stops spinning. When my focus returns, I turn it to Clarke. Her dry lips part in a sheepish smile, “Sorry.”
A second grumble, as eloquent as the first, and I turn my attention to the flint-and-steel striker in my hand. It's old, scuff-scarred from use of long years; stone and metal kept together by a short cord of dry-aged leather. I bang my hip on a table's edge in my haste to rain sparks on the drywood stacked in the stove's pot belly, eagerly looking for the first glow of embers.
Five days of shivering light, six nights of freezing dark. I am so very tired of both.
Clarke comes up behind me, muffling a cough, as I kneel before the stove's open door. Her hand falls between my shoulders as I rasp the thin steel bar over the curl of flint. Kindling smokes, blackens, and curls. Come on. Come on!
Catch, damn you!
A glimpse of orange amidst soot-black and drywood-brown; first one, then three, then many. Neither of us dare breathe as we watch the light, the heat, catch and carry from splinter to timber. Then, gloriously, fire.
The far corner of the Bend's taproom fills with a sunset glow and dry, crackling heat. Relief knocks me back into Clarke's legs, joy leaving me in a gasping laugh. Clarke envelops me from behind, kissing her smile into my hair, my temple, and the corner of my eye. I reach up, hands on her nape and around her wrist. She closes her eyes to bask in the warmth; it's then that I place a kiss of my own, just there on the line of her jaw. She hums and leans her head against mine, happy and content.
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We sit there for a time, letting the fire's light play across our skin and its heat sink into our bones. In those moments we aren't lost or sick, hungry or hopeless. In those moments all we are is weary travelers, come in to a tavern to warm ourselves after walking a long, cold road.
Then I shiver, my aching head throbs, and a violent cough wracks Clarke's body. Hunger rumbles in her belly, its echo found in mine. There has been nothing to drink but a pinch of snow the day before. Merigold is still out there. Juliana is still dead. We are still alone.
The vacant silence of Sockeye Bend creeps in, kept at bay only by our presence and the crackle-snap of the fire. Out in the plaza's center, the well looms; its bucket rope down and taut to straining with weight.
“So,” Clarke asks, “what now?”
The well? I shudder, from the fever and nothing else.
No. Instead, “Food,” I say, “Help me up?”
- - -
I keep my eyes on the shops surrounding the plaza, my thoughts on which one is likeliest to have what we seek. At first glance, it's the butcher's, though that only lasts until we're close enough to smell it: the oily putrescence of rotting meat. It's thick enough to taste on the air, to coat the only window in a greasy sheen, and to churn sour nausea in my aching belly. The both of us stagger away, each coughing for different reasons.
The bakery's also out, what loaves of bread we find within either riddled with weevils or grown over with mold. In the back, the sacks of flour and meal have been chewed open and feasted on by what must be rats. Their droppings cover the floor, but there's no sight of the vermin themselves, more's the pity. Only the desperate and starving would sink so low as to eat rat, but what are we if not those things?
Back into the plaza and the setting sun. We find a pair of shops selling fishing supplies, each directly across the plaza from the other. There's a small schoolhouse and an empty, unfurnished building with its windows boarded, its door chained and locked.
“This is hopeless,” I grumble, aching and shaking and tired. Clarke huffs beside me, nods her agreement. I sigh and smell the wet air. It's not river-wet, but colder and crisper, like snow. My resolve crumbles, and I give up.
I stomp across the plaza, going nowhere in particular, and leaving behind Clarke and her goose-like sound of surprise. I hear her following, asking what's wrong as if she didn't well know, and the suddenly obnoxious burble of river-sound beneath it all. Fucking town. Fucking well.
Fucking everything.
She catches up on the stoop of a corner shop, the first flakes of snow in the air and frustrated, miserable tears in my eyes. She's struggling to catch her breath, which adds guilt to the torrent of feeling I'm awash in. “Sorry,” I'm almost as hoarse as she is, “I just, it's...”
She nods, because she knows: nothing's changed, not really. In fact, it might've gotten worse. We've stumbled from a slow death of freezing and starvation into whatever the moonlit hell is happening in this forsakenly empty town. “At least we can get warm now,” she offers. I snort, pushing away from the stoop.
“Let's go back,” I say, holding out my hand, “We'll try again in the morning.”
She laces our fingers together, “We should start here when we do,” pointing behind me with her chin. Amble's Sundry Dry Goods, the sign in the window proclaims. It doesn't stink of rot or rat shit, I can't hear any insects buzzing shrilly about inside, so that makes it our best find yet.
I keep my eyes on the Bend at the Bend, on the soft orange glow filling a few of its windows. I fill my ears with the sound of Clarke beside me, of her labored breathing and sniffing. We skirt well around the plaza's center and the structure that squats there, smelling of stone and mire with its bucket rope down and taut to straining under weight.
It's a foolish thing for me to fear when I've so much else to, but even this studious ignorance hasn't kept its scent from my nose or its dry, fibrous cracking from my ears. Am I going mad? Is it the fever? The hunger? I don't lack for choice. We enter the taproom, stepping in to its warm, dry welcome. Clarke hurries to add another piece of drywood to the stove, I drag over a chair to wedge against the door.
Maybe I am. Maybe I've found the limit of my sanity and have been teetering at its edge these last days. Maybe it's only now I've lost my balance and starting to fall.
Clarke doesn't ask why as I join her by the stove. Either she doesn't want to, or she does and is afraid; as if bringing it up will topple me into madness. She pulls me into her side, tucking my face into the curve of her neck. I feel her fingers in the ratty tangle of my hair, picking apart the careful knots.
It calms me and, eventually, soothes me to sleep.
Coda
In watery depths a mind stirs, sated and dormant from its last, gluttonous feast. It unfurls itself, uncoils in a langorous stretch of loathsome limbs. The waters ripple.
Soon, its ancient mind thinks, soon.