Stone Seeds (16 page)

RATIONS

EGG MEN ARE TURNING over the house. Zorry notices Zettie hiding out behind the chair in the corner. The child is sucking her thumb and her eyes are closed tight. She's buried her ears under her hat, with her hair stuffed around it. Zorry throws the black flower into the sink, covers it with the dish cloth just in time. Ezray eyes the sink, small nod at Zorry, and then turns quickly away.

The Egg Men find it all. All the family's food stores, including the fresh eggs from under Mamma Ezray's hat, and the new hatched chicks in the box behind the oven, peppered with breathing holes, the red peppers under the sink, the root vegetables sunk down with stones at the bottom of the rain barrel. The perfectly formed mushrooms in the hidden pouch of Father's jacket.

Zorry's father seems to take it worse than Mamma Ezray.

Zorry's father was left with nothing this evening but a handful of dried beans because no one thought to check in the palm of his hand. Too obvious. He curls his hand around the beans until the Egg Mens' search is over.

Antek's father, the chief Egg Man for this sector, tucked a food ration card in the top left pocket of Father's jacket as he left. “Gaddys will replace it all. Don't look so sour, Sinta. Present your ration card at the shop. You are lucky we left you anything at all.” Zorry rolls silence around on her tongue, the
way Mamma Zeina taught her. Zorry's father looks down at the ration card.

A few dots on a ticket and his children to spend their lives begging back the half rotten leftovers of all that he raised or grew. He bangs his hand against the side of his head, once, twice. As though he's trying to remember something that won't come back.

Zorry tries to protect her father as much as she can, understanding without ever being told that he's not as strong as her mother, Mamma Ezray. And that several years of taking the government medicine has ruined what was once a fine mind. Now she tells him it's alright. What else? She tells him that Gaddys is nice and not to forget to take his medication. Pats his shoulder, sensing that what he's lost is too great for him to contemplate. If there was a time for him to confront all that he was and is now, then that time was long ago. He slowly pulls on his overalls, ready for his work in the sewers. But once they're on, he looks down at them. As though he sees them for the first time in his life. He doesn't make a move toward the door. He doesn't move at all, for one long moment.

“It will be alright, won't it?” Father gazes at Zorry opaquely.

“Yes.” She lies.

Mamma Ezray grows herbs and strong spices to cover the taste of soft rot in the rationed shop food.

Their father regularly complains that Mamma Ezray's chilli burns his tongue.

“You, Woman. You woman with your bitter cooking. Trying to kill me, you are.” He said last night, the way he does every night. Medicated as he is, Zorry thinks that deep down he knows.

There have been small signs. That day when he threw the cooking pot at the kitchen counter. The day he slid down the wall and then sat there. Three straight hours. His eyes blank, unreadable. He didn't get up until the bell rang, once, twice, to call the Sinta men for their work.

Zorry's father will clear the drains that run underneath and alongside the OneFolks' village. Then he'll come home and sleep through the day. Return at nightfall for his next shift.

He was a teacher in The Before. A professor of botany before the last Reckoning Era, before the mountain deaths and the Diggers' revolution. Zorry doesn't know anything about that time. It was before she was born. All she knows is that her father has been getting more distant every year since she was born. Since she was a small girl she has believed that some day he would just get up and vanish like smoke. Even his voice sounds farther away every year. As though he's leaving his family in slow pieces and parts.

“Reckon we need another Reckoning of you all. Another purge of the Sinta.” Gaddys stands at the cottage door, eyes her manicure. Pats her coil of hair. And then, unfathomably, she smiles at Zorry. Just as though she's pleased to see her. Bright corporate smile, the way the shopkeepers were trained to in the long ago. As if her face betrays her, Zorry finds she smiles nervously too.

Zettie slides out from behind her chair, slipping up to her sister Zorry. Holding on to Zorry's leg and then slips in front of her. Leans. And then without taking her eyes off Gaddys, slowly lifting her small hand in the air, tiny thumb pointed upward. Puts the thumb in her mouth. Zettie gazes solemnly
at Gaddys. Fails entirely to read the situation, as far as Zorry's concerned.

Gaddys takes a package from the Egg Man standing beside her, unrolls it. The rotting fish slaps on to the kitchen table. “Present,” she says. “For my best slaves.” Zettie looks up sharply when she hears the word. Now Gaddys is eyeing Zettie. Soft, knowing smile spreading out over her features. Zettie repeats the word, “Slaves.” A gentle uptilt at the end of the word like she asks it as a question.

And then the infant turning to gaze at Mamma Ezray, quick checking gesture.

Mamma Ezray seems to slip inside herself.

Zettie eyes her mother.

Something seems to get into the child.

Zettie reaches out her small hand, prods the fish with her right index finger. It oozes a clear liquid tinged with yellow. Now she steps back. The liquid pools on the floor, around her feet. Now she gazes up at Gaddys.

“Take it. You, Child. Take it. You're a slave, ain't you?”

Zettie pulls her left thumb out of her mouth for long enough to say it. “No.” She says. One word.

“I am a Sinta.” She says. As politely as she's been taught to speak to adults. The child doesn't look away from Gaddys once. The most revolutionary words ever spoken to Gaddys, and they came from a child. Gaddys' face blossoms red.

Now Mamma Ezray and Zorry stand in front of Zettie. She looks through Mamma's legs.

“She's just a Chil …” Zorry says

“She'll learn …” Mamma Ezray says, sinking.

After Gaddys has gone, Zettie cannot be persuaded to
touch or even look at the fish. And what's more, she appears to be not speaking to either Zorry or Mamma Ezray. Maintains a dignified quiet. Neither Zorry nor Mamma Ezray object or try to break the small girl's silence. “Let her keep something.” Mamma Ezray's last word on the subject.

After Gaddys' home visit, Zettie holds her tongue as much as she can.

LEECHES

“GADDYS HAS LEFT A bag of protein pearls.” Zorry's fathers voice, from the cottage doorway. He glances behind him briefly to watch Gaddys moving slowly away, down their rockoned garden path. Skirt the gate and vanish behind the tumbledown stone wall. The hedge. This time she has an Egg Boy assistant, he's soft on her heels. Father turns back to his family. “So that's good news eh? Protein pearls.” Holds the bag up.

“What was she doing here?” Zorry asks Mamma Ezray. “Put it outside. Why's she singling us out?”

“She's deciding whether to re-certify us or not. Did something happen in the shop? That day. When I sent you for our rations.”

“What? You think this is my fault?”

“I didn't say that.” Mamma Ezray gazes at her eldest daughter. “She's trying to figure out whether we're tame. There'll be a test for us somewhere now. We must be … Cautious.”

Zorry's father, disliking this kind of talk, simply acts like he doesn't hear it.

Something makes Zorry look up. She notices the small dark shadow on the back of her father's neck. Closer examination, it's curved like a half-moon. Thumbnail mark, and the purple print from an adult-sized thumb, just above it. She knows he
won't remember how he got the strangulation marks. The scratch. She doesn't ask. Whatever happened to him during his last work rota, it was apparently bad enough that he was rebooted afterward. She examines his face closely. She had heard there was an escapee from last night's work rota. A runner. Is it possible that Father helped the man, or else saw something? Now she sees the small electrical burns on the sides of Father's temple. He has certainly seemed to be … Different. Lately.

Mamma Ezray catches Zorry's eye and now they are both staring at the back of Father's head. They forget about the bag of protein pearls. The bag is on the floor by the front door and Zettie steps outside, toward it, quietly. She opens the bag. The packaging is striped pink and white and she examines it with pleasure. Two illustrated candy bars criss and cross on the front. Sweets, she thinks. She doesn't check the bag before she plunges her small right hand in. Then she feels something moving under her fingertips. Yanks out her hand. It's covered in sulphurous, sliding creatures, snails with half formed soft shells, tree slugs too, of the sucking kind. Mucous sliding out from their poison sacs underneath. She feels the first sting right away and she screams for her mother.

It takes Zorry and Mamma Ezray fully fifteen seconds to prise the leaching things off the child. They look at the tiny holes and bite marks in her hand in silence. Swelling and reddening already. One small mark streams with blood and Mamma Ezray wraps it. Both Zorry and Mamma Ezray are also covered in small stings and bites. They bathe Zettie's wounds in silence. Zettie holds out her hand patiently, quietly. Her eyes are half closed. Gritting her baby teeth against the pain. Small
winces as Mamma Ezray dabs the ointment.

“Protein balls was it?” Zorry says in disgust.

“What are they?” Zorry's fathers voice sounds shrill, urgent.

“Bavarnican snails and the leaching, stinging tree slugs from the killing forest.”

“What Gaddys give you that for?” Zorry's father, fish still in his hands, looks genuinely shocked.

“Gaddys put the snails and leeches in sweet packaging. It was clearly aimed at the child.”

“What?” Father says, stupidly.

Zorry feels something rising in her. A sudden need to have her father pay attention to what's under his nose, to make him face what Mamma Ezray has to. She explains, as quietly as she can bear to, so as not to alert the neighbours, with the result that her words hiss, her eyes narrow, “Killing forest snails can move fast … Father. They leave a glutinous trail behind them as thick as a finger. Look at it.
I said look at it
. If Mamma Ezray hadn't seen the trace of the last one on the back of Zettie's shirt, heading in a neat loop toward her neck, then our Zettie would have been killed.” Zettie gazes softly from Zorry to Father.

“What?”

Mamma Ezray looks down. She shakes her head at Zorry. “Don't. Zorry.”

But Zorry, now that she's started, cannot stop herself, “Mamma Ezray whipped Zettie round and caught it before it reached Zettie's jugular vein. One moment too late,” she said, “and Zettie would have …” Father looks shocked. He stares at Zorry.

Zorry holds the creature by its shell now, upside down. To
show Father. It curls around and tries to reach the tips of her fingers.

She drops the snail and Mamma Ezray crushes it underfoot.

Zettie looks down at the small squashed body with interest. There are thick meaty edges to its underside and yellow suckers running down it. Now Mamma Ezray sees something, screams. She spins Zettie. She finds two more snails on the back of Zettie's head, one is one of the worst kind of leaches. Now Zorry spots a stinging tree slug, on the child's wrist and slipping out from the edge of her sleeve. Zorry pulls it off. All three are pale now. Panting for breath. Now they strip the child and plunge her into the rain barrel beside the kitchen window. They turn her clothes inside out, examine the hems and the seams.

“That was the last.”

Mamma Ezray pulls the child out of the rain barrel, checks her over once more. Rainwater streams from her onto the floor and they dress her quickly. Pat her head. “It's over. Zettie it's over.” The child has slipped inside herself. She looks pale. Detached.

Zorry looks up now. Notices that her father seems to have tuned out even further. Shambles toward the sloping wall beside the kitchen. Takes a seat on a leaning, busted kitchen chair. And now he's staring hard at a chip on the wall. Right in the very place where he'd thrown a plate of Mamma Ezray's cooking, just last year. Zorry can't see what Father sees there. But he seems to wilt. Fade in front of her eyes.

Rallies just a little to say, “You must've done something bad, Zorry. In the shop.” And then he falls silent.

“Don't blame her. It's not the child's fault. Don't talk any more. Just don't …” Mamma Ezray snaps at him. It's the first time Zorry has seen Mamma Ezray lose her patience with their father.

Zorry takes a hold of Mamma Ezray's hands and turns them softly, palms up. She looks down at the trail marks and snail bites on her mamma Ezray's fingers. Gazes into her face. Waits for her mother to speak again. Her father, behind them, goes on shaking his head. “It doesn't … I don't …” He says. Bangs the side of his head twice, hard. Now Zorry listens to the sound of him opening his medicine cupboard, squeak of the hinge, the long pause. As though he is considering the thing. Then the soft popping sound as the medicine lid is opened. Mamma Ezray's shoulders rise and fall. She gazes gently at Zettie. Zorry has never seen her mother look defeated. Until this moment now, she's not truly known what fear is. She says to her mother quietly. “Look. I got to go.”

“Yes.” Mamma Ezray looks up. As though she sees her daughter for the first time. Soft appraisal. She puts a hand on Zorry's shoulder. “Yes. I know.”

She turns back to the sink.

Zettie is sitting on the cottage back step, looking into the middle distance. Mamma Ezray can't see what Zettie sees. The child seems to her to be exhausted in a way that's too old for her years.

“How did my children get so old? So old, on my watch.” And then, heavily, “Go talk to Jengi, Zorry. There is no going back now.” Shoulders rise and fall, clutches the sink. “There is only going on.”

Soft sound as the door closes behind Zorry. Mamma Ezray
stares into the sink for a long time after she's gone. And when she tries to, Mamma Ezray finds that she can't move her hands. That last leech she pulled off her youngest had wrapped itself around her thumb, delivered all of its poison. She examines the large hole in her thumb. The paralysis lasts a moment. Mamma Ezray stuffs the dish cloth into her mouth when the pain rises. She bites down.