Every River Runs to Salt by Rachael K. Jones

Author:Rachael K. Jones [Jones, Rachael K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fireside

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I'd worked up quite an appetite by the time we got to the Foundry, on account of having forgot to pack anything edible for my adventure. We docked the raft beside a thousand other cardboard rafts on a parking lot clear of litter.

Something about all of it made me sick down to the pit of my stomach: endless thirsty asphalt fingers stretching toward the Oconee, the floodlights sapping all the color from your face and arms like an inverse sun. The building squatted between the shell-shocked ghosts of failed coffee shops. Into that building all the foragers streamed, carrying their finds in shrink-wrapped bundles high on their backs like rice-paper sushi rolls. Like sandwiches at a picnic. Like leftover chocolate cake, because damn I was getting hungry, and even garbage looked good if I turned my head sideways and squinted a little.

"Y'all said something about a lunch break?" I asked Dill and Opal. We stowed all the cans into shrink-wrap cocoons on the dock while their poor harnessed Has-Been whimpered and whined and nosed the empty raft.

"After you talk with Stephens. We don't just hand out company lunch to anybody who asks," said Opal.

Together we turtled across asphalt that was somehow summer-hot even beneath that slate-gray sky. There was an old Foundry in the Over-Ath, an ancient factory-turned-restaurant, but nothing like this place. This Foundry demanded all your attention. It practically had its own gravity.

My stomach whined and needled at my gut. Opal looped behind the building to the employee entrance. "Remember: mind your manners. Stephens ain't a man to cross, not in the Under-Ath." She pointed me toward the Manager's Office.

Stephens was so small and skinny you could probably butter biscuits with him if you were short a knife. His suit swallowed him up to the neck, stopped by a slantwise bowtie just below his upturned white collar. He kept twitching and shuddering all over like his skin itched him, and when he moved, his joints squealed like a rusty icebox door. Damp tea bags hung dripping on a tiny clothesline behind his chair. He sipped iced tea from an empty tennis ball tube and read from a newspaper so old that Nixon headlined it.

I sucked on my dry teeth. That tea was the first liquid of any kind I'd seen in the Under-Ath. He glanced at me over cracked spectacles, and a smile poured across his lips like warm honey. Almost pleasant, except that smile squeaked so loud I clenched my jaw.

I thought of Imani—all brine-covered and alone, self-banished to the Under-Ath with no hope of redemption or return. I licked my cracked lips and extended a hand. "Sincere apologies for disturbing your meal," I said. "I've been told you're the man to see about an ocean."

His handshake clung wet and sticky like bubblegum on a hot sidewalk. I wiped my hands against my jeans. "Alexander H. Stephens, Foundry manager. And you are?"

"Quietly Jensen. I'm from the Over-Ath."

He waved me to an extra chair. I unslung my backpack.

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