Parched by Lou Cadle

Author:Lou Cadle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: coming of age, clifi, climate change fiction, adventure, post-oil fiction
Publisher: Cadle-Sparks Books
Published: 2018-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Sierra had shot a pigeon out of the air while working on her blowgun training with Zoe, after Dev had come and gone. She and Zoe had plucked the bird’s breast, and she slit it open and started teaching Zoe about the various organs. The girl already knew a lot from cooking alongside Kelly. “Heart, liver, gizzard,” she said, pointing them all out. “People don’t have gizzards though.”

“No, they don’t. You know what the heart does?”

“It’s a pump?”

“That’s right. Do you like to eat them?”

“It’s tough.”

“Its function—its job—is why it’s harder to eat. It has muscles and they push the blood all around, and they work all day, every day, every night. Chickens’ hearts beat faster than ours, so their hearts work harder.”

“Rabbits’ do too. I can feel their hearts in their chests.”

“Yes. Usually, the smaller the animal, the faster it beats.”

“Does mine beat faster than yours?”

“I don’t know!” Sierra said. “Let’s check it out. I’ll say go, and we’ll both count to ourselves, and I’ll say stop, and we’ll report the numbers, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “But how do I count it? I can’t hear it in my head.”

“Oh, at your wrist, here.” And she showed her. “Or in your neck somewhere. I’m not sure where exactly is best.” She began feeling her own neck.

Zoe did too. “Oh, I found it!” she said.

“Let me feel. Sit still so I can really feel it.” She felt the tacky, sweaty neck of her daughter and the heartbeat under the soft skin. It really was a miracle, wasn’t it? That once, there had been no Zoe. And then she had grown inside Sierra from the tiniest start, and now here she was, her own little person, with a perfect heart, doing its job, beat after beat, for almost ten years now. All this brightness and energy and curiosity made of nothing but food redesigned into a fully formed person by genetic codes. She pushed down the emotion rising in her throat. “It was faster when you were a baby. And when you were inside me.”

“You could feel it then?”

“Hear it. Kelly let me listen with her stethoscope.”

“Would she let me listen to the lady’s baby?”

“I don’t know. We’re trying to keep you safe, so that’s why you’re not around the pregnant lady. And she would have to say okay.”

“Dad said she has a visitor.”

“Her wife. The woman she’s married to.”

She frowned. “Two ladies can’t have babies, can they? Two hens can’t make a chick.”

“No. I mean, yes, they were able to, ten years ago, with a lot of medical help and equipment. It was a brand new thing then, done under special microscopes, and only a few hundred people got to do it. But not naturally, no.” She wondered if somewhere on the Earth, maybe in China, everything was still normal enough that medical tech was still at that level. If it were, it hardly mattered to them, did it? She drew her hand back. “You have a good, strong heartbeat.”

“Let me feel yours.

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