Wish Givers by Shannon Knight

Author:Shannon Knight [Shannon Knight]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Winter Moon Press
Published: 2023-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

20

Reva

The second time was much slower, with Malu insisting on tasting as much of her as he could. It was better than the pricking of her needles, better than sunshine on skin. Reva had no idea surrender could feel this good. After that, they ate everything on the heaping tray, their eyes burning into each other. They laughed over the nasty fish juice Malu had been drinking for years. Then he went into ecstasies over the plainest banana, and Reva consumed every moment of it with her eyes. After they’d eaten, they laid back down.

“How did you come to be here?” Reva asked, her head on Malu’s chest, her hand trailing along his skin.

“Just like the others,” he said, his voice still rough. “I was poor. My ma took care of us, me and my baby brother, Nakoa. She was a silent woman, and I don’t remember ever seeing her smile, but she cared for us. Her name was Awhina.” He smiled gently. “During the monsoons, she got really sick. I began stealing food, but I wasn’t very good at it. So I was caught. I never saw my ma or baby brother again. They both likely died shortly after that. Maybe one of the neighbors was able to take care of them, but they were like us. It isn’t that the people in the lower city are heartless. There just wasn’t enough food. The bulk of it was being sent to feed armies.”

“It was Ali’i Ora then?” Reva asked, following up on her guess about his age.

“Yes, Ali’i Ora. Anyway, the sentence for theft was death.”

Reva startled, and Malu stroked her back.

“The rich create the laws. I was put in a pit with others like me waiting for death. It was outdoors, so things got ugly fast, with the rain coming down so that we sunk to our ankles in mud, and the water came up to our calves. There was no place to relieve ourselves, and when they fed us, they just tossed it down. We had to catch it before it was fouled by the water.”

He looked down at her. “Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s an ugly story.”

She nodded. He stared back up at the ceiling.

“Then they started separating us. They took out all the young boys. I had seven or eight summers to my name. They asked us to show them if we could write. If we knew how to write, they said they might be able to come up with a reason to keep us alive.” He paused. “I don’t know if that was true. I think . . . I think they killed those boys. But everyone tried really hard to write. I’d seen writing before, so I made scratches like writing in the mud. I wrote down a long line of scratches and then pretended to read them. One of the guards laughed and slapped me on the back so hard I fell in the muck. But another picked me back up and told me to stop that.

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