Out of Water by Sarah Read

Author:Sarah Read [Read, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 978-1-950305-06-3
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2019-08-05T05:00:00+00:00

THROUGH GRAVEL

We twisted our bent backs and held our flowers up through the fine-grit gravel and soggy cigarette filters—up through the gaps and the spaces where things didn’t fit together anymore, and we waited.

Beth came to us that spring in her red cardigan, reaching down for the buttercup sprouting from the crack in the sidewalk. She pinched the stem, as delicate as her own little fingers, and she was gone before her guardian could turn to see why she had stopped. She slipped through the cracks of the busy world above, and was ours. The first child of the new spring. The first child in more than eight years.

In the dark of the understreets, by the light of the grates and drains overhead, she smiled nervously as we marveled at her small digits, at how the dimples in her knuckles were fading into lily-slim fingers, at how straight her spine had grown without the weight of the city pressing down from above. At the gap in her smile.

Many of us had gaps in our smiles that year, but none so fresh as hers. Our arthritic fingers grasped at her shining hair. Youth was a balm to eyes even as weak as ours.

We huddled in excited half-formed factions for the meeting where one of us would be blessed with her guardianship. When the hour came and the name was drawn—and it was mine, Aemon—I confess, I wept.

I had never dreamed that when I stooped to my own small flower in the pavement years ago, I would be given a new life, one far from the paths of those I’d lost aboveground.

A new child. My heart filled with love for her—filled the holes in the spaces where things didn’t fit together.

I stumbled through the custom of her adoption. It had been so long since I’d seen it done. I wrapped her in my parka and handed her a tarp, freshly patched, washed and folded. It would become her room, and annex to my home—our home. I gave her a trowel—my better one, with the smooth handle and less rust. I sprinkled her brow with water from the Last Drain.

Though it was Chev that had drawn my name, he was the one to protest. As soon as the ritual was complete, he stood, his reverence for the old customs the only thing that had kept him in his seat till then.

“Are you sure you’re up to this, Aemon? You are old in years but young to our kind. Perhaps the child should be placed with someone younger and with more experience in our ways.” He meant himself, of course. He’d been here since he was a tiny thing, born to the understreets to a Kindred mother long since washed away. But he still had youth in him. His hair still grew the color of shadows.

“I am no stranger to raising children, Chev.”

“Yes. I recall. I believe it is relevant for us to inquire as to the nature of your daughter’s death?”

Gasps echoed off the high stone walls of the meeting chamber.

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