Xenocultivars by Isabela Oliveira

Author:Isabela Oliveira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Speculatively Queer, LLC

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ILIAR

When I saw the stray guinea pig running to hide under a rotting pile of wood, I knew all was lost. Teacher Mirta had always kept the guinea pigs in a large shed, carefully under lock and key.

To find my way back to Teacher Mirta’s house, to my beloved Sulyom, I had wandered through a landscape of lack and deprivation; what the war had not destroyed, the marauding armies had taken for food. Most of the guinea pigs had probably warmed errant soldiers’ stomachs.

The closest household was Aunt Karisa’s. When she heard me approach, she came to the fence and leaned against it, her body trembling. “I saw the soldiers,” she muttered. “They came for the mage and took her. Poor Mirta,” she said in such a tone as to brook no confusion about the fate of my teacher.

My body was beginning to take on Aunt Karisa’s trembling in sympathetic resonance. “What happened to her student?” I asked.

“Oh, that youngster? About your age? A boy or a girl? I could never figure it out.”

“A girl,” I told her as firmly as I could manage. Sulyom was somewhere in between, but her body was her own business, not a village auntie’s — and she’d always considered herself a girl, grew up as a girl, lived as a girl.

“All right then,” she grumbled, “no need to take offense. My eyes are not what they used to be.”

I wanted to shake her; some of Sulyom’s vehemence that had rubbed off on me. “Yes, but — where is she?”

She shook her head, her blue-printed headscarf slipping. “I don’t know. I hadn’t seen her in weeks when the soldiers came. I was wondering where she’d gone... Some of the youngsters from the village ran away to join the army, so I figured...” She shook her head again, then brushed a thin brown strand of hair that’d escaped from under the scarf behind her ear with unsteady fingers. “That’s all I know, my dear.”

I’d held myself together through all the battles, through the assault on the ramparts of Samur, but now I struggled not to drop to my knees. I’d come all this way for Sulyom, my boots turning to rags, walked across endless lands for Sulyom — all for nothing?

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