“That’s true, ma’am. But for now, it is what it is. Just do your part and pick up what you see laying around.” He tipped the contents of the can into his cart and then grabbed the handles of the cart again, exerting great force to get the cart rolling again through the thick mud.
She watched him work his way downhill. Behind her, a crash startled her out of her thoughts. Wax puddled behind her on the floor, the candle extinguished by the force of the landing. Its holder was broken into dozens of pieces. She surveyed the scene. Her children were out of sight, but certainly not out of hearing range. Clearly, they were the culprits. Now to find them. There were nine rooms in her cave, shared between herself and a long list of extended family, the back three rooms devoted mostly to the small children of the family. She passed her sister’s room and gave a wave through the open curtain. Her sister was also pregnant but having a much worse time of it. The noise of the children was doing little to alleviate her illness.
“Garricke and Ursule! Get out here right now!” Eirene waddled quickly into the back room. “Both of you! When I call you, you come to me imm…” She stopped suddenly, mouth agape.
“He won’t take it off, Mother.” Ursule looked at her brother and continued. “I told him to take it off and he told me no. I tried to change his clothes and he wouldn’t listen to me!”
Eirene continued to stare at her children. “Garricke…”
“Mynerva. My name is Mynerva. Don’t call me Garricke. That’s a boy’s name,” the small child said.
“You’re a boy.”
“No. I’m a girl. My name’s Mynerva.” There wasn’t disobedience in his voice, but an absolute, yet quiet, assurance that this was the right way, the only way.
Eirene didn’t know what to say. “I don’t care what you say you are, I know for a fact that you are a boy. You have boy parts. Take off that dress immediately.” She reached for him, but he pulled out of her grasp.
“NO!”
“Garricke Davys!”
He opened his mouth and let out a scream that could wake the dead. “I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU SAY, I AM GOING TO WEAR THIS AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME!!!!”
“What the hell is going on back here?!” Gaylen bellowed, entering the back of the cave. He brushed past his daughter, tousling her hair as he did and joining his wife at her side. He didn’t need an answer, just followed her gaze to the back of the room, to his four year old son, who cowered behind the bedroll in the dress his cousin had just outgrown. “What’s the meaning of this, son?”
“I’m not your son. I’m a girl and my name is Mynerva.” Now the child crossed his arms and pouted. “I’m a girl. I want to be a girl. You can’t make me not be a girl.”
“I most very well can make you not be a girl. You are a boy. Boys have penises and pee standing up. Don’t you do that?” He didn’t know what else to say to him.
“Nope. Never ‘gain. From now on, I’m going to pee sitting down like Ursule does.”
It was hard to argue with a young child’s determination, no matter how wrong the child was. Still, Gaylen knew better than to let this continue. “You will not, do you understand me?!” Now it was his turn to reach for his son. The child bit him and forced himself under the bed, having to completely flatten against the ground to fit under the slats of the furniture.
“Mother-“
“Stop, Ursule. Go clean up the mess you left in the living room. You broke the candle plate,” Eirene replied.
“Sorry, Mother.” She put her head down and worked her way to the front of the cave, taking care not to step in the wax that dripped from the wall sconces.
Gaylen and Eirene went into an adjoining room, taking time to light the lantern as they entered. The light sputtered as it filled the dark space, casting a shadowy glow on everything.
Gaylen took a bundle of textiles off the nearby chair and offered his wife a seat. She accepted without argument or discussion, more than happy to rest her weary body. The silence was interrupted only by the crackle of the candle wick and the sound of their breathing. Gaylen sank to the floor and massaged his wife’s legs. “Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know. One minute I was talking to the trash man, the next I heard a crash behind me.” She went on to recount the scene and the following argument. “You heard and saw what I did, honey. Garricke shouted that he was a girl and we must call him Mynerva. Imagine!” Her anguish showed on her face.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“The inspector comes through soon!” she wailed and hung her head on her husband’s shoulder. “What if he’s still determined by then?”
“It’s okay, sweetheart, everything will be okay.”
***
“I’m glad your child is well, Prisca,” inspector Avrom said, handing the baby back to Eirene, who passed it again to her sister. “And you, Eirene? When for you?”
“Forty days, I believe. I’m hoping for another boy, since Prisca had one.” Eirene looked at the sleeping child. “I’ll settle for healthy.”
“Yes, well, where are the other two?”
“Garricke is down for a nap,” she said.
“But I can get Ursule for you.” Eirene tried to beckon her eldest child without the inspector following, but he followed too closely behind. They entered the back room on each other’s heels.
“Who’s child is this, Eirene?”
“Just a playmate,” she lied as her son greeted the man.
“I am Mynerva, daughter of Eirene and Gaylen.”
Eirene’s face went ashen. She cast a look at Ursule, glaring at the girl. The inspector had control enough to banish him to the Manor without any thought. Because of this, she had given her daughter one task – quiet her brother and stop any talk about Mynerva until the inspector had left their cave. Law was law, and once the inspector left, he wasn’t allowed back in for a number of months. Now, however, he had cause to take her son or come back unannounced whenever he felt the need to.
“Eirene?”
“Yes, Inspector?”
“Is this,” he consulted his clipboard, “Garricke? Your son? Why is he in a dress?”
“QUIT CALLING ME GARRICKE!!!” The child was dressed head to toe in girls clothes and took quite a bit of pleasure in raising a booted foot and kicking the inspector in the shin.
Inspector Avrom cursed and glanced at his leg. The heel of the boot had ripped his trouser and cut his skin. “Eirene, how long has this been going on?”
“This morning, sir.”
“Eirene, how long has this been going on?” He repeated the question, absolutely sure that it had been happening for more than a day. “I won’t ask again.”
She understood the repercussions of what was being said to her, and she didn’t want to answer. She knew what the ultimate result was going to be.
“Come with me, son.” Inspector Avrom grabbed at the child and missed, falling to the floor. Now he’d have bruises and a concussion to add to his list of ailments.
“You can’t take him! He’s four! It’s a phase!”
“Eirene, stand down.” Cautiously, he pushed past the pregnant woman, unwilling to lose the child in the system of caverns. As inspector, he knew of the two tendrils of cavern that snaked backwards into the ground. Avrom was much too large to fit down them, but there was ample width for a four year old to get quite a ways in before getting stuck. He grabbed the child again, this time receiving a bite on the arm. He yelped in pain, but tightened his grip on the squirming child anyway.
“You can’t take him! Not like this! Don’t!” Eirene tried to run after him, but her huge belly hindered even normal slow movement.
Avrom spun, swinging the child’s legs like a broken pendulum. Garricke’s foot connected squarely with his mother’s belly and she fell to the ground in pain, a gush of water coming from her almost instantly.
&nb
sp; Gaylen was torn between his wife and the inspector. Ursule appeared at her mother’s side, waving her father on without word.
He ran after Avrom and his son, stepping into the inspector’s path. “You can’t have him. This isn’t right!”
“This is the law, the way it is supposed to be! You know you’re wrong here!”
“Consider my wife. She’s already lost so many children, and now you’re taking this one?”
“Sir! I am not telling you again. Stand down, or I will take you in as well!”
A scream came from within the cave, and Gaylen’s hair stood on end. “If your actions have cost my wife this child, too, I will have you sent to the Manor, do you understand me? Unhand my son, right this minute!” He reached for his child, but Avrom swung his free hand, hitting Gaylen square in the face. Blood immediately spurted out of his nose. Avrom walked down the hillside, the squirming child kicking harder at him as he walked.
Gaylen knew it was futile to follow him, so he turned back into the cave and to his wife. The look on his daughter’s face said it all. Ursule was now all he had in the world. He fell to the ground with his daughter and cried on the cold stone floor until he could cry no more.
***
Down the hill, Avrom had crossed the kilometer and a half to the bridge in record time. After crossing words with the sentry, he was granted pass of the bridge. The evening was already darkening, and the oil lamps were casting an eerie glow on the wooden planks of the bridge. It felt to Avrom like six kilometers, but in reality was only three hundred and twenty-nine meters long – he knew the number for sure because he not only helped build the bridge, but also was assigned to inspect it every year.
The walk across never got easier. In his years as inspector, he had brought dozens if not hundreds of people across the bridge and deposited them in the confines of the Manor. Anguished people, those like Eirene, were a dime a dozen, but the law was law and he had sworn to uphold it. They were in place for a reason – sworn to protect people from the degradation of society because of undue burdens placed on them because of problems. He didn’t know what caused them, sometimes it seemed to be a freak thing. Other times, like in Garricke’s case, he wondered if it was a case of a bad combination of people. Maybe if Eirene and Gaylen had been looked at more carefully, the union would have been denied. He wondered if the issues – Eirene’s seven miscarriages and now this – would still have occurred if she had been partnered differently.
“Hello, Avrom.” Bryor stood at the doorway, standing as tall as she could with her bowed legs. “What is the problem with this one?”
“You’ll find that the outward appearance doesn’t match that underneath. This is, in fact, a boy.”
Bryor shook her head. Now that they were in the Manor, it didn’t matter anymore. If this child wanted to bang his – her? – head against the wall in the corner all day, Bryor didn’t care to correct the situation. Garricke was no longer citizen number gee-four-seven-nine-six-two-eff, a solid black bar obliterating him from the citizen record. He was a memory, a ghost, and as a ghost, Bryor saw no reason to make him conform to the rules of society. She reached out a gentle hand and took the child from his abductor. “We are done with you now, sir. You can leave us now.”
“I need a count.”
“One, two, three.” She said. “There, a count. Would you like a count of five, perhaps a count of ten would be better?”
Avrom was always taken back by her attitude towards him. “I need to know how many are here, Bryor.”
“How would I know that?” She looked down at her deformed legs, bowed out to the point she had to walk by swaying. “I’m not created like you. I lack something. Surely you can’t expect me to count correctly and understand how many are here. I’m much too stupid to understand that.”
Avrom never understood her opposition to him. The Manor gave her the ability to breathe air a little longer. If it weren’t for the island, weren’t for the system of care that she had been allowed, Bryor would have been eliminated as a small child, certainly before her second birthday.
“I said that we were done.”
“I can give you a fate worse than death, there’s a boat ready as we speak, if you’d like it.” He sneered at her, dared her to challenge him.
Bryor scoffed at the idea. That was the government’s big punishment. Putting a citizen in a boat, tethered with a rope that would dissolve in two days’ time, leaving them to float off to nothing with no food to sustain them. It was the unknown that they threatened, but everyone knew the truth. They never came back. But she’d never come back anyway. “Avrom, please kindly take your inspection documents and go back to Topan. You may threaten me all you want, but there is no way that you can perform on me a fate worse than death, for I do not exist. And for somebody that does not exist, the last thing I need is to be recorded. How do you write that ‘non-people,’ perhaps? If you are through, I have a child here who is very frightened and probably very hungry and tired as well.”
Still clutching Mynerva’s hand, she spun around and walked the child up to the building.
***
Year New 612
Mynerva walked along the beach and around the curve to the post, an outcropping of rock that narrowed and then widened again just into the water. Five minutes with a pickaxe and it would be considered an island. She jumped the narrow part and hopped a couple times to get her balance again. Not her best effort. The grasses grew tall on the post and she slid through them until she came to the rock that they used to keep lookout. It also doubled as her quiet spot and she hopped up on it, looked around, and then sat back down once she was satisfied she was alone.
So much had happened since she left The Manor, so much that she couldn’t explain or process it all yet. But this spot, this was her spot to regroup, to center herself and take a few deep breaths without hearing anyone else breathing. She put her head in her hands and cried for a long time, and when she finally wiped her eyes, one of the dual red suns was already dipping at the horizon, the sky turning a darker shade of pomegranate. She stood back up on the rock and looked around, still nobody, as she expected. They didn’t always patrol this area.
Mynerva pulled off her blouse, skirts and underclothing, and lay down in the grass, looking up at the stars. Total nudity, exposing her. Exposing her flat torso and her misshapen form. The only giveaway that she wasn’t exactly as she appeared to be. Silently, she cursed Avrom for having ever checked when she was born, a product of a Topan government that strove for perfection instead of harmony. Cursed her sister, Ursule, for having screamed at their mother about it, instead of keeping quiet. She had no idea what the other planets were like, but she was certain that anywhere else she could have blended, been exactly what she wanted to be. But not here. The population was small, but certainly large enough that if she had reinvented herself, not everyone would have remembered her from before. She still had nightmares about that night. How long would it be until they were gone?
A noise in the grasses behind her caught her off guard and her breath stuck in her throat. How had somebody gotten that close to her?
“Mynerva, are you out here?”
“Emmerus. You scared me.”
Her husband mumbled his apology and crossed the grasses until he saw her clothing and then her.
“I needed the privacy.” The weight of everything still clung to her, and she often found she couldn’t get that anywhere else. Too many people looked at her like she was in charge, even though she didn’t want to be. Knew she shouldn’t be.
“Should I go?” He stood still; the last thing he wanted to do was leave.
Pulling herself up on her forearms, she turned and looked at him finally. “Why do you love me?”
“Because you’re beautiful.”
“But why?”
“Look around. Look at what you’ve done. You weren’t content to stand s
till and wait for your life to end, weren’t content to be stricken from the record. You’ve made a difference, Mynerva.”
“You loved me before that. We built our house years ago.”
“Doesn’t mean I didn’t look at those qualities and see them then.” He stripped off his clothes and crossed over to her so that he could curl up with her, pulling her back against his torso, and wrapping his arms around her.
She could feel his muscles press into her skin. She was muscular too, but not like Emmerus was, and she always felt safe and protected when she could feel him near her. He rubbed his hands across her stomach, one resting just over her belly button, and one just under it. Her breath caught in her throat and he could feel her heart pound.
In response, he kissed the nape of her neck. “I love you for what you are, not what you were. You are my wife, and that is all that matters to me.” His hand slid down a bit further, to her first scar, and stopped there. Their breathing fell into rhythm, and they soon fell asleep.
***
Year New 605
The weather was gorgeous – a little too gorgeous, really. The rain had just given way to fog and it was already clearing out during the day. Inspector Avrom Mikkalistr drank the last of his morning glass of mint tea, kissed his wife goodbye, and grabbed his hat on the way out. As a high ranking government employee, Avrom lived on the government isle, the bridge from the mainland to the government was controlled with armed guards. This part of Topan was almost as disconnected as the Manor on the other end of the settlement, some would argue more so.
Avrom crossed the bridge on foot, his satchel thrown over his shoulders so that it hung down his back. At the end of the wooden walkway, he waved at the guards and continued on. He had been at this job long enough that he was there when the guards were born; he was the one who registered their numbers and approved their names.
He had a number of stops to make, and he decided that he would start on the far side of the island so that he could enjoy a long walk on the beach on his way to his first stop. The beach was his favorite place in Topan. No matter how cluttered and crowded Topan would ever get, the beach looked out onto the water – onto a peaceful expanse of blue-gray and away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Now, he had to say goodbye to the calm waters and hello to his first case, which was two pregnancies and a funeral.
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