Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “M—m—m—oh—bee—Grandma, what’s a ‘moby’ ?”

  “I don’t know, child.”

  She picks up a different one. “J—j—aye—n . . . Jane! That’s Miss Anderson’s name! Is this book about her?”

  “No. Another Jane, I think.” I open Moby Dick. Tiny, dense writing, pages and pages of it, whole burned forests of it.

  “Read the sin with the picture of trees!” She roots among the books until she finds Alice in Wonderland and opens it to that impossible vision of tens, maybe hundreds, of glorious trees. Hope studies the child blessed enough to walk that flower-bordered path.

  “What’s her name, Grandma?”

  “Alice.” I don’t really know.

  “Why is she wearing so many wraps? Isn’t she hot? And how many days did her poor mother have to work to weave so many?”

  I recognize Gloria’s scolding tone. The pages of the book are crisp, bright and clear, as if the white plastic bubble had some magic to keep sin fresh. Turning the page, I begin to read aloud. “ ‘Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank—’ ”

  “She has a sister,” Hope breathes. Nearly no one does now; so few children are carried to term and born whole.

  “ ‘—and tired of having nothing to do: once—’ ”

  “How could she have nothing to do? Why doesn’t she carry water or weed crops or hunt trunter roots or—”

  “Hope, are you going to let me read this to you or not?”

  “Yes, Grandma. I’m sorry.”

  I shouldn’t be reading to her at all. Trees were cut down to make this book; my father told me so. As a young man, not long after the Crash, he himself was in service as a book sacrificer, proudly. Unlike many of his generation, my father was a moral man.

  “ ‘—or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?” So she was considering—’ ”

  We read while the sun clears the horizon, a burning merciless ball, and our sweat drips onto the gold-edged page. Then Gloria and Bill stir in the next room and Hope is on the floor in a flash, shoving the books under my sagging cot, running out the door to feed the chickens and hunt for their rare, precious eggs.

  The rains are very late this year. Every day Gloria, scowling, scans the sky. Every day at sunset she and Bill drag themselves home, bone-weary and smeared with dust, after carrying water from the spring to the crops. The spring is in the dell, and water will not flow uphill. Gloria is also in service this year and must nurse one of the trees, wiping the poisonous dust from her share of the leaves, checking for dangerous insects. More work, more time. Some places on Earth, I was told once, have too much water, too many plants from the see-oh-too. I can’t imagine it. Island has heard from no other place since I was a young woman and the last radio failed. Now a radio would be sin.

  I sit at the loom, weaving. I’m even clumsier than usual, my fingers stiff and eyes stinging. From too much secret reading, or from a high see-oh-too day? Oh, let it be from the reading!

  “Grandma,” Hope says, coming in from tending the chickens. “My throat hurts.” Her voice is small; she knows.

  Dear God, not now, not when the rains are already so late . . . But I look out the window and yes, I can see it on the western horizon, thick and brown.

  “Bring in the chickens, Hope. Quick!”

  She runs back outside while I hobble to the heavy shutters and wrestle them closed. Hope brings in the first protesting chicken, dumps it in her sleeping alcove, and fastens the rope fence. She races back for the next chicken as Bill and Gloria run over the fields toward the house.

  Not now, when everything is so dry . . .

  They get the chickens in, the food covered, as much water inside as can be carried. At the last moment Bill swings closed the final shutter, and we’re plunged into darkness and even greater heat. We huddle against the west wall. The dust storm hits.

  Despite the shutters, the holy protection of wood, dust drifts through cracks, under the door, maybe even through chinks in the walls. The dust clogs our throats, noses, eyes. The wind rages: oooeeeeeeeooooeeeee. Shrinking beside me, Hope gasps, “It’s trying to get in!”

  Gloria snaps, “Don’t talk!” and slaps Hope. Gloria is right, of course; the soot carries poisons that Island can’t name and doesn’t remember. Only I remember my father saying, “Methane and bio-weapons . . .”

  Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that’s a—

  A what? What was that memory?

  Then Gloria, despite her slap, begins to talk. She has no choice; it’s her service year and she must pray aloud. “ ‘Wail, oh pine tree, for the cedar has fallen, the stately trees are ruined! Wail, oaks of Bashan, the dense forest has been cut down!’ ”

  I want Gloria to recite a different scripture. I want, God forgive me, Gloria to shut up. Her anger burns worse than the dust, worse than the heat.

  “ ‘The vine is dried up and the fig is withered; the pomegranate—’ ”

  I stop listening.

  Listen, that’s a—

  Hope trembles beside me, a sweaty mass of fear.

  The dust storm proves mercifully brief, but the see-oh-too cloud pulled behind it lasts for days. Everyone’s breathing grows harsh. Gloria and Bill, carrying water, get fierce headaches. Gloria makes Hope stay inside, telling her to sit still. I see in Gloria’s eyes the concern for her only living child, a concern that Hope is too young to see. Hope sees only her mother’s anger.

  Left alone, Hope and I sin.

  All the long day, while her parents work frantically to keep us alive, we sit by the light of a cracked shutter and follow Alice down the rabbit hole, through the pool of tears, inside the White Rabbit’s house, to the Duchess’s peppery kitchen. Hope stops asking questions, since I know none of the answers. What is pepper, a crocodile, a caucus race, marmalade? We just read steadily on, wishing there were more pictures, until the book is done and Alice has woken. We begin Jane Eyre: “ ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day . . .’ ”

  Birds of India and Asia has gorgeous pictures, but the writing is so small and difficult that I can’t read most of it. Nonetheless, this is the book I turn to when Hope is asleep. So many birds! And so many colors on wings and backs and breasts and rising from the tops of heads like fantastic feathered trees. I wish I knew if these birds were ever real, or if they are as imaginary as Alice, as the white Rabbit, as marmalade. I wish—

  “Grandma!” Hope cries, suddenly awake. “It’s raining outside!”

  Joy, laughter, dancing. The whole village gathers at the altar under the trees. Bill carries me there, half running, and I smell his strong male sweat mingled with the sweet rain. Hope dances in her drenched wrap like some wild thing and chases after the other children.

  Then Gloria strides into the Grove, grabs Hope, and throws her onto the altar. “You’ve sinned! My own daughter!”

  Immediately everyone falls silent. The village, shocked, looks from Gloria to Hope, back to Gloria. Gloria’s face is twisted with fury. From a fold of her wrap she pulls out Alice in Wonderland.

  “This was in the chicken coop! This! A sin, trees destroyed . . . you had this in our very house!” Gloria’s voice rises to a shriek.

  Hope shrinks against the wide flat stone and she puts her hands over her face. Rain streams down on her, flattening her hair against her small skull. The book in Gloria’s hand sheds droplets off its skin cover. Gloria tears out pages and throws them to the ground, where they go sodden and pulpy as maggots.

  “Because of you, God might not have sent any rains at all this year! We’re just lucky that in His infinite mercy—you risked—you—”

  Gloria drops the mutilated book, pulls back her arm, and with all her force strikes Hope on the shoulder. Hope screams and draws into a ball, covering her head and neck. Gloria lashes out again, a sickening thud of hand on
tender flesh. I cry, “Stop! No, Gloria, stop—Bill—let me go!”

  He doesn’t. No one else moves to help Hope, either. I can feel Bill’s anguish, but he chokes out, “It’s right, Mama.” And then, invoking the most sacred scripture of all, he whispers, “We will never forget.”

  I cry out again, but nothing can keep Hope from justice, not even when I scream that it is my fault, my book, my sin. They know I couldn’t have found this pre-Crash sin alone. They know that, but no one except me knows when Gloria passes beyond beating Hope for justice, for Godly retribution, into beating her from Gloria’s own fury, her withered fig tree, her sin. No one sees but me. And I, an old woman, can do nothing.

  Hope lies on her cot, moaning. I crouch beside her in her alcove, its small window unshuttered to the rain. Bill bound her broken arm with the unfinished cloth off my loom, then went into the storm in search of his wife.

  “Hope . . . dear heart . . .”

  She moans again.

  If I could, I would kill Gloria with my own hands.

  A sudden lone crack of lightning brightens the alcove. Already the skin on Hope’s wet arms and swollen face has started to darken. One eye swells.

  Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that’s a—

  “Grandma . . .”

  “Don’t talk, Hope.”

  “Water,” Hope gasps and I hold the glass for her. Another flash of lightning and for a moment Gloria stands framed in the window. We stare at each other. With a kind of horror I feel my lips slide back, baring my teeth. Gloria sees, and cold slides down my spine.

  Then the lightning is gone, and I lay my hand on Hope’s battered body.

  The rain lasts no more than a few hours. It’s replaced by day after day of black clouds that thunder and roil but shed no water. Day after day. Gloria and Bill let half the field die in their attempt to save the other half. The rest of the village does much the same.

  Hope heals quickly; the young are resilient. I sit beside her, weaving, until she can work again. Her bruises turn all the colors of the angry earth: black and dun and dead-algae green. Gloria never looks at or speaks to her daughter. My son smiles weakly at us all, and brings Hope her meal, and follows Gloria out the door to the fields.

  “Grandma, we sinned.”

  Did we? I don’t know anymore. To cut down trees in order to make a book. . . my gorge rises at just the thought. Yes, that’s wrong, as wrong as anything could ever be. Trees are the life of the Earth, are God’s gift to us. Even my father’s generation, still so selfish and sinful, said so. Trees absorb the see-oh-too, clean the air, hold the soil, cool the world. Yes.

  But, against that, the look of rapture on Hope’s face as Alice chased the White Rabbit, the pictures of Birds of India and Asia, Jane Eyre battling Mrs. Reed . . . Hope and I destroyed nothing ourselves. Is it so wrong, then, to enjoy another’s sin?

  “We sinned,” Hope repeats, mourning, and it is her tone that hardens my heart. “No, child. We didn’t.”

  “We didn’t?” Her eyes, one still swollen, grow wide.

  “We didn’t make the books. They already were. We just read them. Reading isn’t sinful.”

  “Nooooo,” she says reluctantly. “Not reading the altar scriptures. But Alice is—”

  Gloria enters the house. She says to me, “Services tonight.”

  I say, “I’m not going.”

  Gloria stops dead halfway to the wash bucket, her field hat suspended in her hand. For the briefest moment I see something like panic on her face, before it vanishes into her usual anger. “Not going? To services?”

  “No.”

  Hope, frightened, looks from her mother to me. Bill comes in.

  Gloria snaps, with distinct emphasis, “Your mother says she’s not going to services tonight.”

  Bill says, “Mama?”

  “No,” I say, and watch his face go from puzzlement to the dread of a weak man who will do anything to avoid argument. I hobble to my alcove and close the door. Later, from my window, I watch them leave for the Grove, Hope holding her father’s hand.

  Gloria must have given him silent permission to do that.

  My son.

  Painfully I lower myself to the floor, reach under my cot, and pull out the white plastic bubble. For a while I gaze at the pictures of the gorgeous birds of India and Asia. Then I read Jane Eyre. When my family returns at dusk, I keep reading as long as the light holds, not bothering to hide any of the books, knowing that no one will come in.

  One heavy afternoon, when the clouds steadily darken and I can no longer see enough to make out words, a huge bolt of lightning shrieks through the sky—crack! For a long moment my head vibrates. Then silence, followed by a shout: “Fire!”

  I haul myself to my knees and grasp the bottom of the window. The lightning hit one of the trees in the Grove. As I watch, numb, the fire leaps on the ceaseless wind to a second tree.

  People scream and run, throwing buckets of muddy water from the spring. I can see that it will do no good—too much dry timber, too much wind. A third tree catches, a fourth, and then the grass too is on fire. Smoke and ash rise into the sky.

  I sink back onto my cot. I planted one of those trees, nursed it as I’d once nursed Bill. But there is nothing I can do. Nothing.

  By the light of the terrible flames I pick up Jane Eyre and, desperately, I read.

  And then Hope bursts in, smeared with ash, sweat and tears on her face.

  “Hope—no! Don’t!”

  “Give it to me!”

  “No!”

  We struggle, but she is stronger. Hope yanks Jane Eyre out of my hands and hurls it to the floor. She drops on top of it and crawls under my cot. Frantically I try to press down the sagging ropes so that she can’t get past them, but I don’t weigh enough. Hope backs out with the other books in their plastic bubble. She scrambles to her feet.

  “We did this! You and me! Our sin made God burn the trees!”

  “No! Hope—”

  “Yes! We did this, just like the people before the Crash!”

  We will never forget.

  I reach for her, for the books, for everything I’ve lost or am about to lose. But Hope is already gone. From my window I see her silhouetted against the flames, running toward the grass. The village beats the grass with water-soaked cloths. I let go of the sill and fall back onto the cot before I can see Hope throw the books onto the fire.

  Gloria beats Hope again, harder and longer this time. She and Bill might have put me out of the house, except that I have no place to go. So they settle for keeping me away from Hope, so that I cannot lead her further into sin.

  Bill speaks to me only once about what happened. Bringing me my meal—meager, so meager—he averts his eyes from my face and says haltingly, “Mama . . . I . . .”

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “I have to . . . you . . . Gloria . . .” All at once he finds words. “A little bit of sin is just as bad a big sin. That’s what you taught me. What all those people thought before the Crash—that their cars and machines and books each only destroyed a little air so it didn’t matter. And look what happened! The Crash was—”

  “Do you really think you’re telling me something I don’t know? Telling me?”

  Bill turns away. But as he closes the door behind him, he mumbles over his shoulder, “A little bit of sin is as bad as a big sin.”

  I sit in my room, alone.

  Bill is not right. Nor is Gloria, who told him what to say. Nor is Hope, who is after all a child, with a child’s uncompromising, black-and-white faith. They are all wrong, but I can’t find the arguments to tell them so. I’m too ignorant. The arguments must exist, they must—but I can’t find them. And my family wouldn’t listen anyway.

  Listen, Anna, that’s a—

  A nightingale.

  The whole memory flashes like lightning in my head: my father, bending over me in a walled garden, laughing, trying to distract me from some childish fall. Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Li
sten, that’s a nightingale! A cube of frozen water pulled with strong fingers from his amber drink. Flowers everywhere, flowers of scarcely believable colors, crimson and gold and blue and emerald. And a burst of glorious unseen music, high and sweet. A bird, maybe one from Birds of India and Asia.

  But I don’t know, can’t remember, what a nightingale looks like. And now I never will.

  LAWS OF SURVIVAL

  My name is Jill. I am somewhere you can’t imagine, going somewhere even more unimaginable. If you think I like what I did to get here, you’re crazy.

  Actually, I’m the one who’s crazy. You—any “you”—will never read this. But I have paper now, and a sort of pencil, and time. Lots and lots of time. So I will write what happened, all of it, as carefully as I can.

  After all—why the hell not?

  I went out very early one morning to look for food. Before dawn was safest for a woman alone. The boy-gangs had gone to bed, tired of attacking each other. The trucks from the city hadn’t arrived yet. That meant the garbage was pretty picked over, but it also meant most of the refugee camp wasn’t out scavenging. Most days I could find enough: a carrot stolen from somebody’s garden patch, my arm bloody from reaching through the barbed wire. Overlooked potato peelings under a pile of rags and glass. A can of stew thrown away by one of the soldiers on the base, but still half full. Soldiers on duty by the Dome were often careless. They got bored, with nothing to do.

  That morning was cool but fair, with a pearly haze that the sun would burn off later. I wore all my clothing, for warmth, and my boots. Yesterday’s garbage load, I’d heard somebody say, was huge, so I had hopes. I hiked to my favorite spot, where garbage spills almost to the Dome wall. Maybe I’d find bread, or even fruit that wasn’t too rotten.

  Instead I found the puppy.

  Its eyes weren’t open yet and it squirmed along the bare ground, a scrawny brown-and-white mass with a tiny fluffy tail. Nearby was a fluid-soaked towel. Some sentimental fool had left the puppy there, hoping . . . what? It didn’t matter. Scrawny or not, there was some meat on the thing. I scooped it up.