I was born in a drainpipe. I thought I would die there, trapped in its damp darkness, frightened and alone, listening to the pallid water mask the coughs and whispers of the others who shared my fate. Strangely, I was content. The sea comforted me. I think it was the first word I learned on my own. Sea. Those around me would raise boney, festered hands and point to the waters. Sea. 

I spent my life sitting by the sea. Sitting on the land–that’s all there was then, stoney land, shimmering sea, and the rough firmament of ledge between, no blue sky, no radiant sun, just me and murky sea. I’d dip my toes in the waters until my wrinkles shriveled into sores and swirled red. I didn't mind the pain when the waters were so safe and warm and clean. No matter how much red ran through them, the waters stayed clean. 

Something was wrong with me. Those around me were tall, lumbering, loud with broad shoulders and brutish brows. I was tiny, sick, fierce, and anxious because I saw myself grow smaller and softer as they grew larger and stronger. I looked in the sea for answers and change, but I found nothing but slim vulnerabilities where others had power. I could not hide from my reflection. I was merely a girl, and those around me were danger. I started to fear them.

But I had a knife. I must have been born with it. It couldn’t leave my side any more than my hip could. A silver crescent blade with serrated edges like a long smile. Red veins pulsing along its length humming me sweat musing in the dark. Its shimmering songs kept me awake when others pretended to sleep. 

The first time a man tried to touch me, he went for my heel and I went for his neck. I chopped and I chopped and I chopped and I took his bloodied sackcloth to clean my blade and I took his meat to relish and the sea washed away whatever I didn’t take, just ragged flesh, broken bone, and leaky marrow. We watched him float down past the water's end. I and those who were left watched him. Some kept watching me after he disappeared. I saw their hungry eyes reflected in the silver glint of my knife. Those few starving animals tried to touch me, so I watched them float away too. 

In the sea, I could inspect every screaming contour of a dead man's face, searching for the features that separated me from them. For why I was different. Instead, I learned the shape of their fear within their ashen, sunken, hopeless faces. I learned it as intimately as I knew my own. Men stopped scaring me. Nothing bigger or stronger ever scared me again. 

The men didn’t know I could speak. The smart ones stayed away, and there were no kind ones to teach me. My knife was there though, and if I listened during the quiet times the knife would sing. I learned language through its lyrics. 

As I grew, and fewer men tried me, my knife went silent and anemic for long stretches of time. I had nothing to listen to but the men’s gangly gossip echoing along the walls. There was a hierarchy to them. The biggest man cared for flowers. He had the only green in the tunnel. There were only a few other dull colors then. My skin, my clothes, splatters of brown. The stone land and sky were a muffled grey. Where the pipe sloped up and where it sloped down faded into a colorless blue breath. Death chilled us from both directions. The only brilliant red in that sanctuary was mine, latched to my silver-blooded knife. Potter had the only green, and I was fiercely jealous of it. 

Potter came from the area beyond the high mist, from a group of men like us but older. He arrived haggard and thin, a great burden lashed to his shoulders. Behind him rolled his wooden garden of green. He had traveled for days just to find men no better off than those he had left. He decided he would travel no more. Potter settled down on the distant shore and offered all of us a trade. Food for food. That changed everything. 

Food came by regularly enough from an inlet on the seaside wall. From it would come a great rattling that shook the walls and stone under our feet. Blood would trickle from its mouth as it hemorrhaged, and we would clutch our ears begging for it to stop. To keep my sanity I learned to count. One, two, three, after four handfuls of fingers clawing my ears it would happen. The inlet would explode. A great outpouring of fish would spill across the sea, covering it like a grey blanket, and we would all rush forward to take our fill. 

The first bite of one still squirming was my greatest joy. Bony and scaly but so rich in juicy flavor that the bloody chewing was worth it. I always carried one in my teeth, sucking on the flavors and fishing out small bones from the sides of my mouth, while I hunted for the best ones in the swarm. We were blessed with a multiplicity of fish in all sizes and shapes, but the prize fish had silver skin and pink meat instead of white. I caught most of those, spearing them easily despite the water's spatial illusions. I had stared within the sea so often that nothing could hide from me there.  

The fish escaped as quickly as they came, hastily swimming downstream. Some of the thinner men chased them beyond the death fog. If they were gone too long, I knew they would not come back. The few that came back early came back empty-handed. The waterways blessed those who embraced it not the clumsy fools who floundered through it, and those ignorant stragglers stayed mean-spirited upon return. They would eye me and my bounty too closely, and I would send them into the sea’s embrace to continue their chase. 

I never shared; I feasted. Eating made me stronger, and I needed all the strength I could steal. I devoured that pink flesh even when it turned slimy and discolored. When I had my fill, I would throw the great excess back into the sea so the men wouldn’t grow stronger on my rotten trash. 

I liked Potter at first. When he first arrived, I’d taken pity on the scrawny old man who seemed weaker than myself. I traded him a whole fish, unbitten, and he gave me a small green bell in return. I thought it was a bad trade until I bit into it and met such a sizzling burst of hot flavor I cried. Its juices flooded the surface of my tongue with pain, and I loved it. I ate every bit of it, down to the tangy core and the crunchy seeds within. Potter told me that if I saved the seeds for him, next time he would give me two peppers instead. I never did save the seeds. I just traded more fish. 

More and more fish for fewer and fewer peppers each time. There was fiercer competition than ever, and those who couldn’t hunt fish hunted their peers, mugging the weakest for food to fuel Potter and his evergreen garden. I didn’t mind. I still had my knife, and I still caught the most favored fish. Our tastes were similar. Our trades were cordial. When I went to him, he’d pat my head and remark on how much I was growing. I’d tell him the same. He changed from his haggard self, growing fat and tall from his bounties. I’d sit with him sometimes in the safety of his den. He would talk using words I didn’t know or couldn’t understand. I didn’t mind it when he rambled. He was comfortable to be around. I…liked him. 

Then he stopped wanting my fish. 

It happened on my birthday. Potter invented one for me. Some period of time after his own. He threw a strange celebration to congratulate me on becoming a year older, though I had no concept of birth or day or year. I didn’t mind. On feast days I ate my fill of fish and peppers, sitting by Potter while he stroked my hair. He traded peppers for locks of it often enough. On a day like that, I felt comfortable allowing access to more. 

“You’re becoming a fine woman.” He said–though I had no concept of the word woman. 

“You’ll make a good mother.”

 Nor mother. 

“As my wife, you would want for nothing.”

Nor wife.

Then he gripped my hand, and I understood that. So did everyone around him. A grand hush fell over us. We were so quiet only the sea could be heard and even she sounded timid in the presence of my anger. I wanted to throw Potter into it, let his corpulence and grease float away from me, but I couldn’t. I was changing. Potter was my friend…or at least some nascent definition of one. I ached at the thought of him disappearing beyond the fog, of being alone, of being without the peppers, but still. No one was allowed to touch me. 

I said, “No.” 

It was the first time I ever spoke. Whenever I needed food, or needed safety, or needed to get a man off of me, I used my knife. The screeching was always secondary. But for the first time in my life, I couldn’t get what I needed by stabbing. For the first time in my life, I needed words, so I stabbed the silence with them as hard as any thrust of the knife. 

“No. No. No. No. NO!” 

I screeched, and I tugged at his arm as I kicked, but I did not stab his fat gut because I didn't want to hurt him. I needed his hand off of me, but only had this fledgling method of speech to communicate that desire. So I yelled louder than I thought possible for so long blood strayed from my estranged vocal cords. I said as fiercely as I could. “No!”

Potter didn’t let go. One of his men grabbed my foot instead, and I realized that words didn’t mean shit. 

I stabbed the man in the neck and then slashed Potter across his arm because I still didn’t want to kill him, and while the wounds bubbled I scurried away. That little violence wasn’t enough though. We spoke past each other. Potter bellowing, hurling words I couldn’t understand, I running and stabbing and screeching towards those who reached for me. Potter was better, forming words that possessed his men with a crazed spirit. They trampled the little leather hovel I made my hovel, chasing after me. They chased me into the death fog and beyond. 

It was too easy to get lost in the death fog. The tunnel looked the same no matter how deep I went. The thick barrier of fog seeming distant yet creeping ever closer imperceptibly. I didn't know I was in it until I stabbed a man and I couldn't see his blood on my hands. The air thinned, and my screeching turned to choking. I couldn’t stop fighting despite that. Footsteps echoed behind me, lost as I was, and if they encroached all at once, I would die. 

But I was just a girl, and I couldn’t outrun those long-legged men.

Hands reached out from the fog. I screamed and cut but rarely managed a fatality. Each cut drove rage and power into the hands. They fought back, kicking and punching me. I lost teeth, and many times lost my footing. I had to fight many of them off, stuck on my back with their heavy corpses crushing me, but my weakness was theirs. The closer they got, the less I needed to aim. 

I sent dozens of bodies floating. The work must have taken a year because it was my birthday when I came back.

So few men were left when I came back. Just Potter and the weakest of his cadre. I walked right up to him, trudging past my trampled home, ambling forward as he crawled away. I left him on his back, strolling past him towards the great pile of fish and peppers he had prepared for me. After that great work, I was hungrier than ever. I let Potter live because I was tired and I still considered him my hard-of-hearing friend. I took my bounty, I sat right back down next to the bloodstains I had left, and I ate. Halfway through, I attempted communication again. I took my knife and ran its curve gently along the nape of my neck right where that bulge of his was. I communicated in the only way that worked. I looked Potter in the eye and told him that if he touched me again, I would kill him. 

I think he would have killed me at that moment if it wasn’t for a miracle. How tired must I have looked after emerging from the death fog? The skin along my arms was red and peeling, dirty with the blood and detritus under men’s fingernails. The muscles along my leg were frozen in flight, tense to the point of aching, and I could see my tendons swim like great parasites along the length of my leg. If Potter had tried something, I might have lost. 

But I was hungry, so I kept eating when Potter stood up. If it was to be my last meal, I would finish it. It wouldn't be. Just before Potter took the decisive step forward, a song started echoing softly down the pipe. 

One of them floated down. A hollow. 

Few things came down from above. Men most often, replenishing the population I diminished. Fish were much more common, long dead, many little more than flayed heads with their stripped-down skeletons treading sideways along bloody pools. Bodies. Few like the ones I made. Mine were broken with missing chunks. The ones from above were intact, peaceful, and bearded, like a haggard man who decided to lay down. We’d strip them if they weren’t already bare. 

The rest were hollow. Those sang. 

The song that saved me was deep and tonal. Something lower than I thought any man could make. The hollows always had a booming voice that couldn’t be ignored. Mouths wide open in horrid positions bellowing single notes, tuning themselves for a chorus forever out of reach. I never understand where they got the strength for their screaming. Hollows were empty inside. 

No muscles, no fat, no bones, hollow, like a leather tunic floating downstream. The one Potter and I saw was different than usual. Long blonde hair, slim features like mine, but taller, stretched. It cried into the sea as it sang, still alive. Trapped in there for eternity. Forced to perform without end. I could never stop a hollow’s song. I tried slitting the throat once. It kept singing. 

Potter left me to tend to his garden. The tragic things were mood killers. I finished my meal, went to rebuild my trampled hovel, and slept.

The harassment started immediately. I woke to the smell of rotten fish. The men pelted me with heads and guts, the pieces Potter used to fertilize his garden, soil covered and fermenting, I had to bathe the stench and dirt off me, but while I was in the sea, his gang ransacked my home, stealing the many linens that formed my bed. They knew my weakness, reach.

They didn’t respect that weakness though. I lost sleep to the mens’ games. Brave ones would creep along the shore, lay the barest touch on me, and then run before I could retaliate. Sometimes I could slice a heel and make an example of the fallen, but most of the time they got away, with me tangled in my few blankets. I stayed awake to catch them, but they never came when I was ready. Somehow they knew when I was asleep and only struck then.

They starved me too. Harassing me even when fishing. I never ever put down my knife. Never. It was always a fixture of my right hand or left. When fishing, the other hand held a makeshift sack of what I caught. With neither hand free, they struck. In the roar of the fish swarm, my focus was on seeing through the sea’s illusions. I never noticed when men crept up to me. When I lifted a hand to strike my prey, they would kick me in the back, and I would go sprawling into the water, catch lost, the contents of my sack swimming away.

I grew weaker for the first time. Weak, tired, hungry, wet, and cold. I had my knife, but I felt like it would slough off my body along with my whole arm if I raised it in defense, but raise it I did because if I ever stopped being fierce…if ever Potter thought he had the numbers. I’d float. 

The boy saved me from them. 

He came with the inlet’s great rattling. I looked towards it instinctively waiting for the flood of fish but they never came. Ten sets of ten hands, and no blood drizzled out of the pipe, nothing but a calm clanging crescendo where I was used to the earth itself shaking. I grew excited. I found the strength to grip my knife strongly. Whatever great fish fell from that inlet would be mine to eat, and with my strength back, I would end the harassment permanently.

The clanging continued until I could no longer stand. I crouched low instead, ready to sprint forward, but the clanging continued. My eyes drooped, the excitement wearing off, and sometime later I was woken by a great howl. The inlet screamed and metal screeched and out from the mouth, a boy swung and crashed into the knee-high water. 

And it was a boy, I knew what they looked like. Small and lithe like I still was, but draped in colors. Blue pants, Red shirt. Green pack. I ran at him.

Potter’s men failed to give chase when the inlet birthed no fish. They had arrayed themselves against me, planning to beat me to whatever treasure came, but I had no respect for the long-legged mens’ hesitation. I kicked off the shore and pierced through the water with my knife held high. I stabbed down the moment the boy was in reach. He let out a tiny yelp and dodged.

My knife stabbed through his ghost and cut through the inlet, metal ringing in pain. The boy kicked one of my legs, and I felt the feeble bone crack. I went down, sinking under the water. 

The back of my head hit the seafloor. My vision went blurry then black. I lost sight of the boy, but I could still hear, so I swiped at his screams. Too slowly. The current fought me with every motion, each thrust more sluggish than the last. A fish could have dodged them. The pain of my leg flooded my enfeebled senses. I became too weak to attack, too vulnerable to defend. I was drowning. 

My leg wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get my body weight onto it without twangs of pain, so I focused my energy, my breath, on attacking the boy. With that threat gone, with his stolen strength, I could heal. I could survive. I still missed my every attack. I got in a dozen swipes before I couldn’t lift my knife anymore. It dropped beneath the waves, and I allowed death to finally come to me. A hand went around my neck. It lifted me up.

I breathed in life like it was my first time. The boy huffed as he struggled to lift my little body just a bit above the surface of the sea, still so submerged that water flooded down my throat with every breath. His little arms shivered under my weight, so weak and vulnerable. My naked palm scurried underwater for my knife with this new chance. With my breath and sight back, I knew I could end him. I could still feast. Just as I found my knife, he said something that made me forget everything. He asked me, “Are you ok?”

I think I fell in love with him then. It’s hard to remember when it happened. I know I love him now, and my emotions like to retroject themselves into my past. My coldness, my incomprehension of the world, my…lacking, and the otherness I feel compared to those around me. I see my past through the lens of the flailing creature I am now. I don’t know if the man I love was also a boy I loved, but I allow myself to believe he was because no matter how hard I try to remember the truth, in my memories of that dirtied and haggard boy he shines with the brilliance of the sun just like the man I love now. 

With great effort, he laid me down against the wall, and I felt an eclectic pain along every bit of my body. With my vision back I could see blood in the water. The side of my shin had a purple welt, and white peeked out from under my pale skin. I screamed when I saw the injury. I didn't want to die that way. I didn't want to die slowly while crippled. The boy shouted over me, telling me to take deep breaths. That he would heal me. He tore his brilliant red shirt and fashioned the remains into a long strip of cloth. Three times he wrapped that cloth around my leg. Then he pulled. I passed out. 

When I woke, we were still in the water. My feet and hands were shriveled but not yet bloody, and my knife had been placed on my lap. The boy was still over my leg, rubbing some green salve along bits of red cloth and redressing the wound. He didn’t notice I was awake, so I watched him work. He moved masterfully. The boy took a jar from the pack he carried and allocated just enough of the glowing balm to turn the cloth a shiny orange. Then he carefully, as if not to wake me, removed the bloodied cloth from my leg and placed it gently into the sea. As it washed, he would take the medicinal cloth and wrap my wound. Once the new bandage was firm, he returned to the sea-cleansed cloth to wrang it out and repeat the whole process. 

It was mystical, ritualistic. I saw the wound slowly disappear with each brief glimpse of my bare leg. I had hurt myself before, never this bad, but what bruises I had took eternities to heal in that damned place. I felt my bone slide back in place just in time for Potter to finally dip his toes in the water.

Potter told him to stop in that deep earthen voice the men seemed to fear. The boy did, and I shed a tear with the realization that he was like all the rest, spineless and cruel. I picked up my knife. I would end him before he ended me. I'd end all of them. 

What he said made me drop my knife. "Could you help me get her out of the water? It’ll be much easier to treat her on land.”

My mind wanted to villanize those words. He wanted Potter's help to drag my corpse onto land and defile it. I knew what men wanted. 

But his voice was so soft, so tinged with guilt. He was pleading on my behalf. Me, a girl. A monster. He wanted to help me. I didn't know how to process that. 

“Don’t let him touch me,” ended up being my reply. I focused on my state of being not my state of mind. The pain was lessened but still irritating, and I was very much too weak or hungry to stand properly. I wouldn’t be able to fight Potter if he came closer. I needed the boy’s support, but I was so ill practiced on how to ask for it. 

“If he touches me, I’ll die.” The boy’s head swiveled towards me, searching my eyes for exaggeration. His smile faded with the lack of any. His gaze returned to Potter, starting to cross the sea towards me. He put a hand protectively over my chest. I hope he mistook the unsteady rhythm of my heart as fear, my blushing as a mark of lassitude. I didn't want him to know how much I loved him. I didn't know how differently he would react to affection. 

He beckoned Potter to come no closer in his sternest voice, though meek and squeaky however he puffed his chest. He was a boy and Potter was a man. He would need help.  

Potter sloshed towards us ignoring every of the boy's polite pleas. Potter said that I was his and he would take me no matter who else laid claim.  

I hated those words. The boy grimaced at them, but he was no fighter and Potter knew it

Faux bravery would not help us. All he could do was push us further into the wall. 

He couldn’t protect me, but I could protect him. 

I stood up. My lip bled so I could have pain other than my leg to focus on. I bit down hard until the top canine met the bottom. It was just enough to keep me from passing out. Were the wall not bracing me, I would have fallen back into the water. 

Potter stopped so did not return, so I raised my knife at him. 

“If you come any closer. I’ll kill you.” More words. So many words to shore up my futile actions, but the bluff worked. Potter backed up, and each subsequent step would be easier after that. He scowled at me, fat jowls flapping angrily. He was scared. Not of the boy. Not of me. But both? He looked us over. He looked to the shore for his men so far away. When he looked back, he saw me several steps closer. Almost in range. A tentative step forward and I could plunge my knife deep into that distended belly.

He fell backward, cursing at us, but running away. I planned to fight the pain of standing until he had reached his sanctuary garden, but he merely had a single foot on the shore before  I fell forward into the sea. The boy caught me before I sank under.

I slept well for the first time, dreaming of the words the boy had spoken to me. “Are you okay?” “Are you okay?” “Are you okay?” Over and over in my mind, the words played, and I felt giddy with foreign warmth. Someone actually cared about me.  Where was that feeling my whole life? Where was the love? I wanted to dream forever, but I couldn’t. I spilled out of that happiness onto stone and water. I wished there was more to life than that. 

My leg was better when I woke. Stung like nothing I had experienced before, but I could stretch my toes and flex my heel well enough. If I put weight on it, it would hold. 

I was in my hovel, covered in blankets. The boy sat in front of me, and I watched him for a bit. He looked like he was sucking blood watching the men on the other side of us. They were sleeping but he seemed incapable of that when cold and wet. I rose quietly and wrapped myself around him. 

He jumped, yelping at my touch. The boy liked to ramble when anxious, but I learned quickly enough to ignore him. I nuzzled my head into his neck, sharing my warmth. He blushed, and let me, having the courage to say anything but "stop". I remember a few of those words. 

“You scared the daylight out of me you know?" What was daylight?

You could really hurt someone really badly with that knife. 

Which was why I kept it on me at all times. 

The mothers told us cannibals lived down here. You’re not a cannibal are you?”

Mother. That was the second time I had heard the word, and I let it float on by like all the other things he told me. If I had asked back then, studied the concept more closely, and memorized his stories, maybe I would have been a better one. 

He decided I wasn't a cannibal, the poor niece child. He assumed I was human, and that I ate as other humans did. He offered a fish from his pack. 

God, I loved that boy. I snatched away that silver dinner and devoured it greedily, lint and all. I shared none of it. When he reached for a bit, I pulled it back. He laughed at my fear. He didn't want to take his gift, just cook it. Though I didn't know what it was, and when he looked around he noticed the lack of wood or flint or anything that made life easy. Instead of cooking, he leaned into me and talked. 

About the mothers and home. About his siblings and the lost boys. About the angels and his escape. About songs. 

The boy yawned and rested against me, evermore weight collapsing onto my side. I propped him up to the best I could. He was so small and slight compared to me. He wouldn’t survive that prison long, though I wanted him to. 

“I’m looking for songs, you know.” I didn’t. But he told me about them. Songs of gyration, songs of flight, songs of mercy, songs of death. The world was full of songs and there were songs in everything, about everything. I started humming. A tune my knife had taught me. High and nasally. Not the full song. That made me bleed, so I transposed it low enough to not hurt, and he could feel the music through me. He laughed. Like that. Almost exactly like that.

Before he drifted off to sleep, he asked me if I would come with him to look for songs. I told him yes then laid him gently onto my blankets, wrapping the edges around him. 

It was only me awake for the longest time. I had no interest in songs. The songs the knife taught me burned, and I wanted no more of them. But the boy. I wanted him, and he needed me. He was so weak that I knew he would lose his life if left on his own. I could keep him, tie him down so he couldn't escape, but that's how Potter operated, and I was nothing like him. I thought of convincing him to stay instead, but that look in his eyes. He needed songs more than he needed me.

There were no songs here. He would leave. He would go beyond the death fog and die. He would die blind and scared. Collapse from hunger within a thousand steps. It was inevitable. It was inevitable that I would go with him. 

Meeting him had changed me. I couldn't live without kindness any longer.

So what to do? How did we leave? I wasn’t great at problem-solving. Every problem I ever solved I solved with my knife, but I couldn’t cut a hole through the death fog. My leg was better, but I don’t think I could walk the great distance I had run on my birthday either. Which way would we even go? Uphill? No. Corpses came from uphill and so would what made them. Downhill was the direction everyone went. No one came back from downhill, but maybe that was because they escaped. Potter certainly thought that downhill was the way to go, and he had seeded food enough for that journey.

How would we carry enough food? If it was only a few thousand steps, maybe we could stuff ourselves full of fish and marathon our way down, but if it was a thousand thousand steps. We’d die. I couldn't see anything in the death fog. I wouldn’t be able to fish, wouldn't even know if they were close. We'd starve.  

There were no answers for me. I sprawled onto the floor in an unfamiliar mental exhaustion. If only my knife had the answers. I looked to it for that. Felt its pulse through my hand. Saw my haggard self reflected through its silver. Saw Potter and his garden reflected in its silver. Oh. 

When the boy woke up. He screamed. Everybody besides us was dead. 

“What did you do?” He screamed at me, and I prepared to stab him in reflex, but I stopped myself early in the motion. He caught the intent despite my attempt to hide my acts and feared the worst of me. He scurried away. All the way back to the death fog as I ran towards him. It would consume him forever if he enticed it any further, so I stopped. I put my knife down in goodwill and crouched a distance away from him. I pointed over my shoulder at Potter’s eviscerated corpse and his blood-tinged garden. Then I yelled my plan over the sound of the sea. 

We waited until the fish came again. I was much less picky this time, wantonly grabbing whatever I could and throwing it towards a pile on the shore. The boy ran crazily after them, fearing that the stone floor would contaminate the meat. I started throwing far and wide to mess with him but the poor thing dutifully put them in place ignorant of my teasing. It was the birth of a new habit, a new life. When the last fish escaped downstream, I went to help him with his task, storing the fish on a blanketed patch of Potter’s garden. Rations were set, and I hoped that they would be enough. 

I tried to waste no time on ceremony. The boy couldn't convince me to say goodbye. The corpses had long been washed away, and the people they once were were not a congratulatory race. No audience was there to wave us away. No babies would be kissed. No bottles would be broken on our vessel. I just wanted to go. We took our positions on one side of Potter’s garden and pushed it into the sea.

The garden floated. We sighed with relief because that's all we had the time for. We never built an anchor. I jumped on before it could get away from me and held the boy’s hand while he skipped aboard clumsily. He waved goodbye at my blood-stained home, and for whatever reason, so did I. 

The garden was slow, little better than foot travel, and tottered when either of us crept too close to an edge, but it was effortless. We would go wherever the sea took us, and the boy was sure that meant out. He talked when anxious, and nothing raised that feeling more than disappearing into the death fog. As our eyes grew dim, he told me everything of his past. I wish I understood more of what he said, wish I knew how to ask questions. I might have remembered more. Not long after the beginning of our voyage, I could no longer see his slim outline. Only his scared voice carried through. Still, I knew roughly where he was, and I drifted asleep next to him, resting my head on a pile of fish, learning about songs. 

Eighteen days. That’s how long he told me we traveled. I trusted his sense of time more than mine. He slept twice as often as I did, and my sleep patterns were irregular at best. We had food and water. If only we had safety too. It would have been an easier time. 

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

We met more men. The death fog wasn’t endless. It would thin at places, and our visages would slowly appear from that thick blanket until the fog disappeared entirely. Men congregated in those places of clarity. No better off than us. Same squalor, same ragged clothing, and ramshackle hovels. No peppers though. We traded. They had fresher fish than we did, and one pepper could become many meals if I flashed my knife at the right people. The boy said what I was doing was extortion. I liked extortion. It kept us fed.

There were bodies. Hollows. They floated alongside us for days on end. I feared nothing, but listening to those eerie songs layered with the miasma of the dead as my blinded soul dissociated from the body kept me awake. I couldn’t hear the boy over them with them so intimately close. Nothing trumped their songs. Not him. Not the hum of my knife. Not my thoughts. It was like death. I asked the boy if that was what death was. Loneliness and songs. He had no answer. 

Despite that, traveling went well, which unnerved me. I had grown so accustomed to daily life or death fights that after a few days I stopped sleeping. Something had to be coming. Something big and mean and invincible. The shadow of death hung over us and sooner or later its caster would reveal himself. Instead of sleeping, I sat cross-legged at the bow of our garden, head stretched out just beyond the edge. If something was out there, I would see it before it saw us or our vessel. The boy kept telling me that things would be fine, that heroes always made it through their adventures. I didn’t believe it. This wasn’t an adventure, and I wasn't a hero. I was caged. If it was easy to leave that prison, it would have been easy to enter. Someone would have taken me from there, and no one ever did. 

My pessimism was always right. On the eighteenth day, I grabbed the boy and fled. 

Into the water, we fell. The boy fought against me, but I held him down beneath the waves. Something was out there and I didn’t want it to see us. We were on the edge of drowning when we heard the roar. A horrid sound, threatening to collapse our bones were it not for the shield of water. A low guttural shriek like a thousand ringing inlets. The boy stopped squirming. 

I swam us upstream until I could peek at the thick blanket of death fog overhead. We emerged, surfacing under the horrible sounds of our garden's destruction. But I did not mourn my peppers until we were safe. Though I wished I had the awareness to snatch just one. The boy gasped when we fully surfaced, and I glared while covering his mouth. It took a while for the fear to leave his eyes but I didn’t let go until he well and truly acknowledged the danger we were in. I motioned over to the shore, and we waddled towards it. 

Breath. Glorious breath. I indulged my basic need for air for a moment while we dried ourselves. The sound of the garden’s death faded away against our recovery. I hoped whatever monstrosity we had angered had left sated, but nothing could be that easy. The destruction was replaced by coarse gnashing similar to what I made eating fish but more slurry-like as if munching gravel. The monster was still beyond the fog, guarding the exit. 

I needed to get a closer look. The boy grabbed my shoulder to pull me back. I grabbed his arm and pulled him forward. He needed to see it too. 

We crawled on the ground like worms, making the slowest progress I could manage. I wanted as much fog to cover us as possible. I feared accidentally emerging into its gaze. When the fog grew thin, I prematurely covered the boy’s mouth. I even covered my own, worried about my breath and the beat of my heart. My feelings crept close to fear and I loathed the feeling. 

The monster was sickening. “Cerberus at hell’s gates.” That’s what the boy called it, a gross misshapen man with three heads. 

Such a disgusting thing. Two long necks grew from its ears, coiling in the air like snakes. No face at the end of either just gangrene maws drooling ichor. The heads ate hollows, ripping into their leathery flesh, tearing and pulling until the skin gave way. Its back was turned, so we could only see part of the desecration, but I felt its wicked pleasure from the act. It derived nothing of substance from those empty hollows. The monster just tore away their flesh and spat the remains into the sea. 

The hollows kept singing. Dismaly quiet but they harmonized in their suffering. A used pile of hollows sang sorrowfully in the corner. I released my grasping hold on the boy’s mouth. The creature wouldn’t hear us. Not over that. Nothing could truly be heard over that. 

I was going to kill it. Escape would be meaningless if that monster got to live. The boy must have seen the resolve on my face because he tugged me back into the fog. I tottered back unsteady but kept quiet. The boy ignored my annoyance and motioned for me to follow back into the fog. We strayed up the path until the sounds of the crying hollows and their torturer were just memory.

He asked me if I wanted to go back. That stunned me out of my anger and pity. I didn’t know what to say. This was his adventure. I was his support, a bodyguard to protect him until the last days. Determining where we went and what we did was not my role, agency and ambition were not my birthrights. I was a reactionary creature. I survived. Everything I did was to that end. Turning back, embedding myself in another colony, it would be…easy. The boy would follow for a time, unwilling to risk his life futily today though his ambition would lead him elsewhere in time. He would leave me alone if I went back, so I didn’t.

The boy nodded, relieved with my answer. He thought long and hard about what to do and came up with a…creative plan to get us past. His plans were always more…elaborate than mine. 

He ran, and the creature followed. It was a stupid plan. The boy burst out of the death fog, eyes closed, screaming. For a moment I thought that he would actually run passed the monster as the dumbfounded thing just stopped chewing to watch the pale human flailed around. But things never worked like that. Once he was within reach of the bright exit, the monster screeched. 

The roar shook my bones, but we were ready for it. Our ears were triple stuffed with shards of linen which just barely kept us sane. The intensity was tolerable, but not something we would wait to end. The boy kept running, and the monster snared in insult. I struck in the moment where the monster’s three heads were firmly set on the boy. I sang. 

The song worked on men and monsters, bringing the thing to its knees. it tripped forward onto its stomach, and I lunged for its back, cutting its right head off in an instant. The left head turned to face me and I punched in its teeth. The head reeled backward, buying me time to transfer my knife clumsily to my left hand. That trade had shredded my arm down to the elbow, and my pinky refused to bend. I would lose the whole hand next time if I wasn’t faster. I wrapped my good arm around the monster’s thick neck, and with newfound leverage, I plunged my knife into its jugular. 

It was like carving stone. Again and again, I cut as if carving my name on the fowl beast but no blood feed my knife. I kept trying, kept singing, keeping the beast on its knees at the very least. My throat wouldn’t last forever. Sores grew in my mouth, and each glob of clotted blood I choked out interrupted the song. The monster steadily rose in the intermissions. 

I wasn’t going to win. I hoped the boy got away. I hoped that he would find a song and name it after me. 

The creature got a leg underneath it. I tied my legs around its torso as the lumbering thing teetered to balance. It threw its back into the wall and slammed its weight against me. My vision went blank, but I held on. What else could I do but hold on and limply scratch at its armor? Every second it had its attention on me, the boy had an extra second to flee. If I stayed on, he would make it.

Why was I dying for him? A boy I barely knew. Was it the fish? That was really all it took for me to throw away my life, huh. A fish and a bit of kindness. My life must not have amounted to much. 

The monster slammed me into the wall again, and I fell from its back. My head cracked against the floor, but I refused to pass out. I would face that death. When the monster turned, I vomited. 

It had no neck, just one long fleshy jaw stretching from it’s navel to it’s nose. I was cutting into the teeth of its upper mouth. Those iron daggers weren’t made to give way to my knife's simple metal. I should have aimed for the head. A creature of habit, I tried to slit a monster’s throat. Live and learn. 

It came for me, and I blew out my vocal cords. One last solo. The pain raging through my body distracted me from my throat exploding. It was self-destructive, but I was a vindictive bitch. When the monster fell to its knees, I threw my knife at its other head's long neck and severed it. Blood and metal spun into the water. The monster screamed, but I was already deaf to its lamentation. I smiled at it. It went to punch me, and I closed my eyes waiting for the end. 

When I opened them, the end still hadn’t come, and I was no longer alone.

The monster’s fist fell lamely at its side. There was no life in it anymore. My knife was buried deep into the top of its head. The monster tumbled to the side and into the water. Behind it a scrawny little man stepped out of its path, pulling my knife from the top of its head as it disappeared into the sea. He came back for me. 

The boy picked me up or tried to. I like to imagine he managed it. He gave me my knife and carried me towards the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought I was dying, too much light, more than I thought possible. My vision was blurry and my ears were stuffed. It felt like an end. I wouldn’t mind it. But it wasn’t my time. I greeted the world for the first time.   

There was no more fog outside. No more cold. No more water. Just sun. A brilliant sun like the glint of a smile greeted me on the outside. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t light and warmth. The closest experience to that was a hard fever, but this wasn’t misery. It was just pleasant. I can’t describe it. An entirely new feeling. 

The boy sat me down against the stony exit just like he did when we first met. He was out of breath and didn’t talk for a long while. It didn’t matter. We were beyond words then.  

A pepper sat buried in the sand at my side I picked it up and washed it in the outpouring of water from the drain pipe. When I bit into it, it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. I stayed like that for a long while. Just eating the remains of Potter’s garden and the mountain of fish that floated steadily from the drain pipe. Once I had some strength back. We went looking for songs. 

It took us a year to find our first one, and my voice didn’t come back until the last day. For the first few weeks, the boy fed me spoonfuls of his magic salve, but eventually, he was scraping dregs and I still wasn’t healed. I would be mute for the onset of our adventure. I didn’t mind. He talked enough for both of us. 

We exited at the base of Nevada’s divine tower. It’s sad to say that my origins were so plain, nothing but a stone wall that stretched from horizon to horizon and earth to sky. The boy told me that the wall curved. It was round like a cylinder– some sort of inverted tunnel-shaped thing. I couldn’t believe that the tower's vastness could ever terminate. No matter how far away we went from it, it looked to me like the demarcation of the end of the world. 

The end of a world. A pitiful drainpipe was the only imperfection on that dense structure. Out from it came water and fish and bodies in a stream that fed into a nearby river. We walked along the water's edge, scavenging whatever floated downstream, pushing beached hollows out of the dry sun and into the water. Creatures of habit we were, we let the sea take us where it would. The world was too vast, too directionless for two children born to rigid structures. 

The boy knew that if we escaped the rivers pull and went west we would find ourselves on the California shore. There my definition of the sea would be humbled, and I could sunbathe on the ground that wouldn’t pepper my back with sores. Far enough north would take us to the Oregon forests. We’d meet survivors there who tended Babylonian gardens with spicier peppers than I could imagine. We had no compass or map, so we ended up going east towards more arid desert because that’s where the river took us. In the far distance was a stony spire, and the boy was certain that a song would be hidden in the lands between. 

The dessert once housed an entire civilization, scattered and terse, but gaudy. Collapsing ruins sat far from the riverside made by a people who spurned water favoring the crazed high of heatstroke. Insanity was built into every structure. Tall wind-run Ferris wheels shimmered impossibly in the desert air. Neon ladies danced in the sky, and massive casinos mazed along every street stuffed with games the boy always won even when he explained the rules. Madness. It was all empty madness. 

My definition of ‘up’ changed as we rode a needle’s elevator. I saw the city at night with its automated music and enduring lights. An orchestra played as we escaped onto the roof. The wind threatened to blow me off the high point, and I could barely hear my thoughts between the music and sand buffeting my every direction. The boy kept me grounded, kept my raging hair out of my vision so I could see. We huddled together for warmth in that cool desert air. He talked. I listened. We kissed too. 

I wish we could have stayed longer, but The ruins laid empty for a reason. Still, until those reasons came for us, we shopped. I found a half intact mirror buried deep within a department store. I was treated to the first unmurky view of myself. Something was definitely different about me. Much more different than the boy. Taller than him back then, and curvy despite my sunken face. My mangy blond hair tumbled down behind my waist and over my shoulders like a curtain. I resolved to cut it like the women I saw postered along the walls. 

I bathed for the first time. With soap. Many many bars of soap. The grime never stopped peeling off and I enjoyed the hot water too much to just leave the bath. The soap smelled incredible, I took a bite of it when the boy first showed it to me, and my starved tastebuds managed to find that delicious though the boy found it gross. As I bathed he threw bars of them at me, underhanded and with his back turned. His red-faced refusal to look at me bare made me laugh. We wouldn’t bathe together for a while longer.

There were clothes too. So many clothes: dresses, socks, skirts, flowy tops, and crazy half-stripped things that wrapped around the body. All in an incredible pallet of colors. It was like a dream. Better than a dream. My dreams were dull and grey reeking of fish and flesh, but the waking world was beautiful, and I could be too. I huffed suitcases of clothes across the desert, refusing to give them up before my strength did. I would have cried at my losses, but we lacked the water for me to be so wasteful. 

Life was feast or famine even after the drainpipe. The boy searching cities for songs. I protecting him and getting lost in old American wonders. searching was always risky. Once we heard wild howling in the winds, we packed up and cameled across the desert in search of the next oasis. So many of them dotted the landscape. Small homestead with mutated wild crops of corn and wheat. Parks with free-range bison that I begged to feed on forever. Military bases ladened with weapons even the boy could use. Snow on occasion. I loved those early adventures. I loved when it was just us and the music and magic we made in empty places. People complicated our endless life together. But extracting songs from people was so much simpler than finding them on their own. 

We destroyed the first community we came across. An old woman buried within a church held a song she could no longer sing, and I wanted it for the boy. It was the congregation's fault. They left me alone with her, thinking that I was harmless, thinking that I would pray to her, but I always had my knife with me. 

Learning the melody was easy enough. The woman attacked me with it and my very bones shook to the rhythm. The song of moving, a common enough song, but powerful enough to send me flying through a wall, cracking ribs. She only managed to sing it once. I never meant to kill her, just extort her. She expired on her own after the bloody opera. It cost a little bit of soul to truly sing a song. Sometimes the greedy things took everything.

People fled with my encore. I expected the boy to be pleased that my voice was back, but he just covered my mouth and begged me to shut up. The people around us didn’t stop to retaliate, they just kept fleeing. All across the desert, they ran, and I was lost to the purpose, but the boy wasn’t. He dragged the old woman’s corpse out onto the porch of the church, and sat her down gently along the stairs, placing a green bouquet around her neck. He cursed as we heard howling laughter along with the backfire of an engine. He didn’t explain. He grabbed me and we ran inside the farthest building visible from the church and its peaceful owner. 

Monsters rode up in a pickup. Giant misshapen things with grey elongated limbs and bulbous heads. They made sounds like drunken hyenas and drifted wildly around the town square. The boy covered my mouth as if I was one to make noise, maybe a bit of payback, but his gaze mostly said that nothing was on his mind but our survival. 

The monsters fell off the pickup hollering and trampling each other. The first one carried a gun like a comical yellow funnel. He blasted it wildly around him as the others jumped on his back. Golden lightning shot from the silly muzzle but left no injury on any of the structures. The weapon looked as weak as the creatures, and I readied my knife. I could end it quickly if I got close. The boy forced my head below the window despite my confidence. That beam terrified him and he wouldn’t let us look through the window until no more stray shots were fired. A bit of lightning pierced our window and left a smoldering mark on the ceiling fan above us. I never questioned the boy’s caution again.

The monsters enjoyed their jest, so we sat quietly for a long time. The boy peeked first only motioning me to join him when it was safe. Outside the monsters left the truck at the base of the hill. Three of them, two brutes and a skinny thing with a gun climbed towards the church. They approached the old woman’s corpse still jesting. Laughing and contorting their heads and arms as if death was a huge joke. Their harassment went on for a while before the skinny one held a fist up to silence the other two. Silence didn’t last long. The brutes broke into snickered madness, poking and prodding the feigned authority figure bloody. The skinny monster didn’t mind. It leaned in and whispered something in the old woman’s ear. Then it shot her. 

The old woman’s eyes flew open, and she began to sing. Her thin, empty, hollowed body started to sing. My heart sunk and I forced down vomit. The dead woman was singing. I think she was crying too. 

The monsters leaned in to laugh, and I clutched my knife. Before my rage overtook me, the boy pressed a glowing red button, and the monsters, the church, the woman, and her bouquet went up in flames. The song didn’t stop. There was no stopping a hollow’s song. 

We took their truck, after giving it a thorough cleaning. I was used to wading through dampness but the boy treated the read slime pooling on the floorboards like poison. We ramshackled the homes for cleaning supplies: gloves, towels, water pails, a working vacuum if you could believe it. I worked quickly, expecting the townsfolk to return, but they never did. That village would never be a real village again, and that tinged my heart. The place wasn’t a drainpipe. It was a home, and I had destroyed it. 

The truck sparkled when we were done. We wouldn’t enter otherwise. We loaded the bed with enough food, water, and clothing to last weeks. There was as a surprising amount of anachronistic fashion in that apocalyptic hovel. I found sunglasses, the ones shaped like a heart. 

The boy didn’t know how to drive. Where would he have learned? But controlling the rig was simple enough to learn with nothing but dessert around. He inched us around town for a while to get his bearings, only crashing into soft things like walls and crates. Nothing too damaging to the engine. Somehow he made it to the edge of the town towards the open road. We ran into a truck of reinforcements heading our way. 

Neither the boy nor the monsters in front of us acted quickly enough to stop what I decided to do. I put all my strength into the new song, and I moved their car out of the way. With my older and stronger voice, I moved their car all the way out of the way. It spun into the sky, shooting towards a mountain in the distance. The boy looked stunned. I made a wish. 

“I didn’t know you could sing like that,” he said. I shrugged, but that wasn’t good enough for him. He wouldn’t leave until I told him the truth. The ways in which I occasionally practiced singing in my childhood. How I survived. How I managed to kill Potter and the rest. He made the face he made the day I sliced up Potter. The one I never wanted to see again. When I turned away he knew that he had hurt me, and never asked those sorts of questions again. I nestled into my seat to rest my throat, and watch the skyline. The boy pulled out onto the boundless Nevada dessert. We were forever changed.

I wish we could have stayed in the desert. Living and adventuring alone. It wasn’t meant to be. It wasn’t enough. Not for eternity. The years passed with every song we acquired. The boy became my husband, and I became his wife. We had a child. 

I should say we found a child. That happened first. 

Arizona was hot. An understatement, but even with a working AC we sweated in that pickup. It didn’t help that my conversation skills were still so lacking. I loved to hear my husband speak, but he had long run out of his childhood tales, and I was a participant in the rest of his stories. Sometimes he would realize that halfway through a retelling and blush. I’d always beckon him to continue, but his momentum would be lost. His story would end unclimactically, and silence would reign in our mobile castle.

He was unhappy. I knew that because he kept tuning the radio. There were few humans capable of operating a radio tower. Fewer still with the courage to leak out their location on the airways. There was no telling what else attracted the monsters besides songs. Knowing all that, he messed with it anyway, randomly tuning the radio in the hopes of some news or an invitation or a song. It became a nervous tick of his when things got awkward between us. He’d rather listen to radio static than express his needs. 

My husband needed people; their words, their laughter, their thoughts. I was incapable of that. When I spoke, my words sounded so disingenuine. I could express so much more in a look or a gesture, even a soft hum, but that wasn’t enough for him. His methods of communication were simpler, and he needed to keep his eyes on the road beside. I worried for our relationship, but the voice that came up from the radio saved it for a time. 

A man’s. Distressed and sobbing. His voice looped and my husband refused to tune away from his cry. His wife had died in childbirth. He had raised their son to the best of his ability, but the boy needed a mother. The toddler rarely stopped crying. The boy was a danger to himself and those around him, so he would leave his son in a fireworks shop just a bit off the highway. He hoped that someone braver would look after him. 

The will could have been playing for years, but my husband turned onto that off-road the moment it appeared. I put my hand on the wheel and turned the other way. We spun out, our little adventure almost ending right there. He yelled at me for the first time, but I had my knife, and I was not afraid to use it, just wary of it. Potter had taught me the permanence of violence and I was much too in love to risk our strained relationship on simple solutions. 

We could not raise a child. I firmly believed that. I told him over and over again over the wailing of the father on the radio. It was hard enough keeping him alive, and a crying child was too much of a risk. Luck was too big a part of our strategy. Hoards of monsters sometimes patrolled the roadways at night. We had survived so far by cutting our engine, disconnecting our battery, and sleeping on the floorboards in a little cavern we had dug out under the seats. A crying child would dismantle that strategy. It would kill us. 

But it was the right thing to do, and I was loathed to admit it–I despised that my words were so limited–but I was only around because my husband always did the right thing. 

When we got to the promised location, it was the dead of night. I had my knife out, creeping along the desert sand at the ready. I knew a convoy would appear when we least expected it and I was prepared to grab my husband and run barefoot across the desert if it came down to it. 

The store was eerie. The front door squeaked as I slowly opened it. The shop was empty except for a scattered mess on the floor. We found the jerry-rigged distress signal easily enough. It was so shoddily made that we eliminated the possibility of a trap, or the message being old. That signal wasn’t built to last long. Still, the place was so quiet that the boy must have left. I proposed the idea, but my husband just glared at me and kept looking. He started to whisper as if calling a pet or an army. He would get us killed if I didn’t find the boy quick enough. 

I searched myself for an answer. Where would I hide if I was scared and alone and hungry and without my knife? Near where I felt safest. Near the sea. I went into the restroom. I slammed open the stalls and growled with irritation when no one was inside. A tiny whimper crept up on me after the final door. I stopped, and it grew louder. I stepped carefully towards the sink, and it grew louder. I opened the cabinet doors, and the boy was there.

I wish my husband had found him instead. How terrifying must I have been to him, an angry growling woman? Half-human at the best of times with specs of blood dotting her clothes? He screamed but not quick enough for me to yank him out of there and cover his mouth. I must have been a monster to him, even when instinctively protecting him. I don’t think he ever saw me as anything but a mother bear. Fierce, powerful, and protective yes, but not a real human mother. Never that. 

He didn’t want to go with us, and though I couldn’t fault his lack of trust, I couldn’t assign his shivering to mere common sense either. My husband tried to drag him into the truck, promising that the boy would ride on his lap, not mine. But even with a greater comprehension of language than I had at that age, the boy said nothing but “no” and dug his heels into the dry dirt. I got annoyed, but couldn’t shake my feeling of wrongness at the situation. The wrongness crisscrossing the boy, the scars along his face and right side. The terror in which he refused us. The way he squeezed his free fist hard enough to bleed. Signs of trauma. I motioned my husband to stop pulling him and yelled for him to whimper back into the truck.

My husband kept one foot out the door, but the big strong man was hidden enough away for the boy to calm down. I hopped in the truck bed and rummaged through our supplies. Candy was easy enough to find. I always packed the best stuff even when we were close to starvation. Food would come in time. I waved the chocolate bar at the boy, but that wasn’t enough for him to come close to me. I wouldn’t trust food from the hands of most others either.

I needed to show him it was safe. I bit off the barest edge I could manage– though my self-control wasn’t at a level where even that wasn’t a significant chunk–and I chewed with exaggeration to show him that it wasn’t poison or rotten but good, and stretched the rest out to him. When he tentatively stepped into my range, I lunged and put him in the truck bed. 

He cried immediately, but I took my hands off him as soon as I could. I wouldn’t want to be touched by someone who betrayed my trust like that. I placed the candy bar in front of him, then scooted as far back as possible. I knocked on the glass, indicating it was safe to drive away, and nodded when my husband asked if we’d be okay back there. He threw both blankets at me before closing the door. When I turned away from him, the boy was devouring the entire bar. I shed a tear, but it disappeared quickly in the dry Arizona air. 

The truck lurched forward, and I lunged after the boy to make sure he didn’t hit his head against the hard floor, breaking his trust again. He shivered, but I stopped touching him the moment he was safe, and again scooted as far away from him as possible. I wanted him to be sure that though I could lunge for him at any time, I wouldn’t defile his boundaries except to protect him. Once I was sure he understood, I tossed a blanket at him and laid mine down so I could rest upon it and look at the stars. I said nothing to him, but before long the little gremlin crawled up beside me. We spent the night under his blanket. It was a lucky night. Nothing much bothered us.

Raising a child wasn’t easy. Food was much more scarce in the desert than it was in the drainpipe where I could gorge myself on the best meals and toss away the scraps. We got on well enough when it was just the two of us looting dangerous places for weeks worth of supplies, but with the boy’s mouth to feed, we needed to stop and scavenge more often. I wouldn’t allow him his hunger pains. 

Stopping more often was dangerous no matter how safe a location looked. Monsters gravitated to the quiet places. My senses were usually sharp enough to get both of my men to safety, but when I faltered, they got hurt. My husband lost a finger and the boy broke his leg during an ambush even despite my sacrificed ribs and concussed head. We made it out alive but the quality of that life was ever in decline. My husband started to sojourn out with the boy the days I recovered, fearful of losing me in a fight. I yelled at him when he came back, but he wouldn’t allow me harm as if he was the one who guarded me. The boy was my only option. I taught the boy songs the nights we spent in the truck bed despite the risk in the hope he could get them out of a tough spot if it ever came down to it. In the back of my head, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. We couldn’t live like that. That wasn’t the life I wanted for my son. It was too similar to mine.  

We debated it for a long time, which meant that my husband had good talking points while I crossed my arms and maneuvered my face into different scowls. I couldn’t give up on the boy and my husband couldn’t handle seeing me harmed even if I always healed. The only compromise was an option I hated. Joining a settlement. 

There were other survivors in the desert. We got many of our basic supplies trading with traveling convoys–though we were always on the bad end of a trade since my extortion trick didn’t work against armor and guns. The people we met were nice enough when they got what they wanted, and that made me itch. Potter was nice enough when he got what he wanted too. 

Supposedly up North, there was a green patch, straddling the border between Colorado and New Mexico. The settlement there was welcoming, a bit “culty” but good people who didn’t have to scavenge. They grew their own food and hunted their own game. There was no danger of monsters. Monsters were cowards and only preyed on the weak with enough courage to lift their heads in song. They shied away from larger more permanent settlements. You were safe if you could protect yourself. 

I didn’t want to go. I had met very few people in my life that were worth being around and both of them were already by my side. I needed them, and they needed me. If they were safe and cozy and well-fed in a settlement like that, what would be my purpose? I was a finely tuned weapon, would my husband still love me sheathed and ornamental? Would the boy love a hibernating mother bear? 

But wasn’t that the case already? They got more hurt more often. I couldn’t protect them like I once could. I was a broken tool. The best thing I could do would be to put them in the hands of others. We went to Colorado despite my husband's protest. He may have yearned for adventure and songs, but I wanted his safety more.  

It was what he needed. My husband came from a community with mothers and siblings who he trusted intimately until the last days. He was born to fellowship and became a new man in Colorado, becoming the town doctor within the week. When we curled up together in the cabin they built for us, he no longer talked about songs. We avoided talking about songs around anyone. It was all setting bones, midwifing, and gossip. So much gossip. It was a new world for me. People cheated on their wives, had babies, stole, lied, and they all still liked each other despite that. The community stood firm despite the drama. The people bounded together even after such betrayals. I wasn’t sure I would fit in. 

My son certainly did. There was a school for all the little children borne into this world. My son had friends and became talkative and unfamiliar. Both of my men did. The community met their needs better than I ever did. I couldn’t bare to be around them. I found a job as a hunter, and spend my time out in the woods. 

It was better that way. I found a small creek far away from the chimney smokestacks and made it into a sanctuary. I set up tanning racks and hid hunting supplies. The guns were too rudimentary for me, constantly getting jammed and freezing up in snowstorms, so I hunted deer and geese with my knife, and the community praised me for my successes. At the very least I kept my men fed. 

But I was lonely, and it was such a foreign feeling. In the drainpipe, there was no real person but me. I was alone, yes, but I couldn’t yearn for relationships I didn’t know were possible. But after spending years side by side with the man I loved, it hurt to be without him. Even if it was only for a few days at a time. I’d eat the livers of my catch alone, and even reviving the experience of having first pickings to the best meat didn’t stop the pain. 

They invited me to my son’s school, which was a mistake. All the knowledgeable adults rotated in and out of teaching positions, giving the children context about the hard life ahead. As the town’s foremost hunter, they had the privilege of learning from me. It was an embarrassment. 

I didn’t know enough words. It was as if years of my husband’s droning slipped through my fingers. How did I explain the quiet peace of waiting for prey, where to stab a deer to take it down silently, how to skin it, how to turn it into furs, all with just a few sad vowels and harsh consonants. I stumbled over my words, stuttering, stressing the wrong syllables. The children laughed at me. 

Were it not for the teacher I would have stormed out of that room and out of the community. I felt like a bear on display, stuck in an uncomfortable chair in a room more constrained than my origins. It just wasn’t meant to be. But the teacher silenced the children with a raised fist and a hush. She beckoned me to continue. She became my first friend. 

Telling a story is hard. Their structure is deceptively simple: beginning, middle, end? When does a story ever really begin? How do you place an ending before your death? My true beginnings as a mother may have started in that classroom, but I wouldn’t know it, so I told the children the entirety of my memories. The teacher guided me along, making me jump over where things got too violent or constant for children, making me linger on my survival skills, encounters with monsters, and songs. My son asked questions along the way. 

He was there too. Likely embarrassed by this creature he shared a home with, but he was more curious than any of the wide-eyed students. He asked me if I had killed anyone before, and made me tell him how.

The settlement wasn’t perfectly safe. Monsters circled it, hunting for those straying too far but never besieging the city itself. Raiders snuck past their barricade, and I would track them as much as deer. Some would cry and tell me that they were merely survivors looking for a new home, but I stopped believing that the first time I was betrayed. My knife made quick work of most. The settlement hadn’t faced outside attackers for a while, the teacher solved that mystery in a day. 

My stories may have been too graphic for children, but I could see nothing but pride in my son’s eyes whenever I looked into them. He understood the dangers out there more than anyone. I told him that I would do anything to keep him safe, and he understood that too. 

The teacher defended me to the parents. All were appalled by the things their children repeated at home that night. She was a believer in the real world and how everyone needed the tools to defend themselves. After all, the community may not be around forever. The savagery of hunting deer and more could return to them any day. 

I liked her, and she liked me too. I spent less time in my sanctuary and more time in her home with her family. Our husbands would spend the night chatting away, while I would stay in her study learning words, learning how to read. They had books, such boundless works of fiction: castles, magic, religion, family, empathy it was all so much more real than any jumble of spoken word. I started keeping my husband awake, unable to shut up about the things I read. I read my son to sleep every night practicing the voices and reenacting the characters. We were never closer. 

I was never closer to the rest of the world. I started to say hello, and the first few times shocked everyone I met. They didn’t expect such a wild thing to have a light voice refined by song. I told jokes. I made small talk. I had dinner with friends. I went out with friends. I showed my friend my sanctuary in the woods when she asked me to. Handed her my knife and taught her how to hunt a goose. She cried with her first-ever bite of liver, never having tasted anything so raw and fatty and good in her life. I resolved to share some with everybody in time. 

We got pregnant around the same time. Such a strange experience. My husband was happy as could be, but I fell into a deep depression. I couldn’t move as swiftly distended as I was. I was bedridden and hungry and useless. I felt like such a drain on society. The community had less meet. If it wasn’t for my friend I would have gone insane. She told me to treat the thing in me like I treated my son. It worked. I cared for it. I started to sing to it. Doing that calmed us both. 

There were reasons why I so rarely trusted people, and I forgot them. Most everyone I met wanted something from me, and they weren’t satisfied  until they got it. 

The community had no singers before me. They had no songs. Finding songs took years of hard work and risky scavenging. They were once adventurous but with the barricade of monsters surrounding us, no one wished to risk forging out to find one. I thought my personal collection gave me prestige in the community. It just created envy. 

One day I woke up, and I couldn’t see anymore. Groggy, I assumed that it was just another symptom of the pregnancy, but it wasn’t. My wrists were bound. My mouth was gagged. I called out for my husband and choked. 

My captors didn’t keep me waiting long. The sack was torn from my face, and I lunged at the hand that did it. Muzzled, all I could do was limply lurch forward and hedbutt man that retaliated by kicking me in the leg. It hurt. I wasn’t in a state for that sort of pain, and I vomited to the side. My husband's side. He was bound as well, crying at me. Confusion turned to rage when I saw his face. No one did that to him. No one. 

A throat cleared and I reverted into a basal state, snarling at whoever was in front of me. It was my friend, her husband, and the leader of the town. The leader pointed a gun at my son and clicked the hammer. 

They wanted our songs. That’s what I thought, but it was so much more than that. They wanted a war dog, someone to break the barricade around them and capture other settlements around. The leader had ambitions of empire, and I would be the one to do it. I would receive plunder and reward, and so would my family, held hostage away from me for the rest of my days. 

The idiots. I would have accepted such a duty in a heartbeat if they approached me in any other way. I had no love for anybody but those of that community. If they wanted the monsters massacred, I would have sung praises while doing it. If they had just treated me like a human being instead of a beaten dog then maybe, maybe, my friend would still be alive. 

She was right there, unwilling to make eye contact. Her husband did, the smug little man. Things were the same everywhere weren’t they? It was him that slapped me when I shook my head no. My husband lunged meekly then, and I would have laughed if it wasn’t so serious. That pain was nothing compared to what I would do to the man who inflicted it. 

My son looked at me with hard eyes, and I shed a tear for what I would turn him into. I nodded and he blinked. Then he sang. The song of movement, a common enough song, but powerful even in the hands of the feeble boy. A dome of motion expanded around him. The gun, me, the men, my husband, my friend, and the desks hit the walls of the classroom. While in the air, I summoned my knife. 

When would people learn that I always had my knife? Cutting myself free with a twist I landed safely on the ground a distance away from my attackers. I threw my knife and killed the leader. Threw it again when it came back to me and killed my friend's husband. She screamed, picking up the gun and aiming it at me, but my son sang again. She flew into the next room, hitting her head on the doorway. 

I didn’t let my son follow me into the wreckage of that. He didn’t need to see what happened. I followed the blood trail to a mangled pile of metal and wounds. My friend's neck hung wrongly at an angle. Her gun stuck firmly in her hand. I took it. I sent my husband away when he tried to peek through the door. I needed to be alone for what I was about to do. 

The coldness returned to me, so unfamiliar and estranged, but I embraced it with ease. I thought I was a different person, but I was still that same girl in the drain pipe. And that girl, when confronted with an abandoned child, cold and starving, didn’t adopt it. I put two bullets in my friend, and then walked away. We left the community without a word in the same pickup truck that brought us there. 

I never wanted to see people again. I felt sick, more than I should have been, and I began to have nightmares of the things I had done from the opposite angle. I stopped talking again, stoped reading to my son each night. All I could do to lessen the pain was to forget everything. Forget empathy, forget fellowship, I needed to return to the drainpipe where I had no doubts about the things I had done when everything was right. 

The thing inside of me disgusted me. Feeding off of my food. Rendering me weak and helpless. It was like a Potter I couldn’t get rid of, and I wished for nothing but to shoot myself and end it all. My husband kept taking my knife, lurching for it even if it meant driving us off the road. I don’t know how he handled seeing me like that. 

When it was time, I was so so sick. They had to carry me into the settlement ward on a stretcher. I hated settlements, hated people, but I couldn’t fight back and my husband wanted help with all that was happening. The lights were so bright. I was sure that that day would be it for me. I wanted my son to hold my hand, but I couldn’t say the words. He stayed outside the room, and my hand hung limply at the side grasping nothing. 

The pain made me pass out. When I woke up, everything was chaos. Alarms overlapped all around me and screaming flooded the places left. My husband was behind me, running my bed down the hospital hallways towards a door. My son sat at the foot of my bed, carrying bloody wrappings close to his chest. Those wrappings were singing a song I didn’t know. 

The door in front of us exploded, and we all tottered to the ground. I instinctively protected my child, leaving no hands to protect my head from the hard linoleum. I recognized the effects of concussion immediately, I couldn’t move the right things, couldn’t ask the pressing questions. My husband picked me up and turned away from the fire encroaching us. He ran, injured and woozy, my son with his stubby legs barely keeping up with the signing thing in his grasp. 

We found a cellar. A crowded one. My husband kicked off people who didn’t want us in there, yelling at me that I was cursed. I didn’t understand what was happening. The song had stopped, replaced by a limp whimpering, and my husband set me down against a wall, then went to the cellar ladder and looked up through the tiny spotlight illuminating us from on high. 

Everything confused me. Everything hurt, and my son placing the bundle in my arms changed all of that. She was beautiful, with my blond hair and my husband's brown eyes. She was hungry and I did what I needed to do instinctively, silencing her just in time. 

My husband shushed the man beckoning us to leave and everyone went silent. Nothing could be heard above us but the crackling fire, and footsteps. Sometimes laughing. The monsters were here, looking for songs.

My coldness returned as my daughter finished. She didn’t seem satisfied after all that, and I bobbed her to get her to calm down, but I had seen enough of my husband's struggles with newborns to know she wouldn’t stay silent for long. That scrunched-up face of hers was the prelude to my family getting killed. 

I did what I had to do. I wrapped four fingers around her mouth, and then placed a thumb on her nose. My husband saw exactly what I was doing, but was frozen in space. He couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, barely dared to shake his head meekly. This would solely be my decision to keep him safe. 

Or so I thought. A little hand fell on my forearm. My son stopped at me.

He looked at me in the way I had taught him, communicated in a way so much more expressive than words, and I shed a tear at what he saw.  

What was I after all this time? How had I not grown at all? I was prepared to kill family to save family, or so I thought. I just wanted to save myself. I was still operating on survival instincts after all this time. The little girl in the drainpipe was ready to sacrifice herself to save her friend. What happened to her? I put my daughter in better hands. My son held her close, going through the motions of what his father had taught him. He burped my daughter. That was all it took. I was a horrible mother. 

I summoned my knife. I didn’t look at my husband when I climbed out of the cellar. I couldn’t. On top I saw a horde of misshapen things, waiting, knowing, and as they laughed at me, I sang every song I had learned in my lifetime. They splattered against the walls, and when more came, I sang to them too. 

Such a horrible night. I burned in that building as I sang my heart out. They shot at me with lasers but their aim was predictable, and the song of movement flung me out of their range. My knife made quick work of the brutes that came too close, and the skinny ones with weapons that could end me kept fleeing for reinforcements, buying me a breath or two. An ashy coughing breath or two. 

My mistake hid in that breath. I had failed to kill one, and the coward hid in wait of the small instance when I stopped singing. I heard the lighting before I saw it. A mark hit my hand, and I cut it off before the hollowing spread. 

My scream would have alerted any monster left alive after the slaughter, but little was left alive after the slaughter. My scream blew away the monsters, the fire, and the walls and ceiling of the hospital itself. I fell back into the cellar, into my husband’s waiting arms, and he closed the door just as the building fell down upon us. 

I couldn’t hold my daughter properly after that night. I let that serve as a reminder that she was still worth it. I never regretted the sacrifice because it allowed me a life with her and my family. We don’t stay in settlements too long anymore now though we both know an occasional stay is good for the children. It’s just too dangerous and irresponsible when we have a child who invents new songs. We fix radio towers instead. Monsters settle around the things like sediment, but they’re not hard for two singers to deal with. The girl is like me though more talkative, she has private chats with her friends in distant places. I gave her my knife, to the best extent I could. It’s still bound to me, the strange thing, but maybe if she listens to its songs she’ll gain her own.