No Lasting Burial by Stant Litore

Author:Stant Litore [Litore, Stant]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2013-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

THE SILENT WOMAN

With the woman from the boats leaning hard on him, Koach approached the small fire Bar Cheleph had kindled in the sand near the tideline. He had dragged driftwood and weeds and grasses to toss into it, and now sat solitary on a log and dug out a few hot coals with a stick to make a smaller firepit, one for cooking. A basket of fish waited in the sand by his hip.

When Koach seated the silent woman across the firepit from him, Bar Cheleph said without looking up: “I made this fire, Hebel. Find another.”

“You can’t hit me, Bar Cheleph.” There was no quiver in his voice. “Not here, where my brother and kin can see.”

Bar Cheleph bared his teeth at Koach, but said nothing. He began laying the fish across the coals.

At the scent of the fish roasting, oils bubbling out from the slit in their gullets, Koach’s mouth watered. The silent woman, too, stared at the fish.

“You hide behind Shimon bar Yonah as though you are his woman,” Bar Cheleph said in a low voice.

Koach bit back his anger and took up a small stick, stabbing one of the fish. Letting out his breath slowly, he turned and lifted the fish to the woman’s lips. Her eyes, still reddened from weeping, glanced at him gratefully as she bit in. Koach found the sight sensual, and disquieting: her head leaning forward, her small teeth cutting into the fish, her gaze lifted to his. He was suddenly aware of the woman’s body beneath his father’s coat, her curves. He swallowed.

She stared back at him a long moment before lowering her eyes. He took a breath. Shaken, he understood. Bereft of her last companion, hungry and alone, she was offering herself for the assurance of food. In the next moment she must have glimpsed his awareness of this, for her eyes dilated briefly—with fear, not with desire.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said, his throat dry. “The fish is a gift.”

The fear in her eyes grew. Perhaps she had never been offered a gift before. Not being able to offer something herself, not knowing what he might want in return, or whether it would be something she had to give—this had to be terrifying to her.

Koach saw all that in her eyes, in one of those flashes of insight that very young men sometimes have.

“No,” he said again. “I just want to see you eat.”

Bar Cheleph grunted. “Take her up the shore and rut with her, Hebel. Might be the only woman you ever get. That is”—he smiled, his eyes cold—“if you can rut.”

On any other day, Koach would have fallen silent and hung his head. But not this day. He rose to his feet, his good fist clenched at his side. All the fury and helplessness of the past year—of his whole life—rushed up at once, like a wave of the sea driving a boat before it. “My hand makes fittings,” he shouted. “Fittings for the boats! So that they can get out on the water.

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