I turn to Shashi and scoop her up. Her arms encircle my neck, and a calm comes over me. We walk for a while like this, taking in the smells and meaningless noises of camp. The brass spyglass and my beat-up pada-sara board weigh comfortingly against my back.
When we are nearing the edge of camp, we round the corner of a tent and come face to face with Jagmeet.
Jagmeet’s eyes widen. He looks us up and down, sees the rucksack on my back, Shashi resting against my hip. He opens his mouth, as if to say something. But nothing comes out.
I make a tiny twitch of movement. Like clockwork, quick as an instinct, he steps aside.
I want to say something, something that encapsulates everything I am feeling: the regret, the sorrow, the anger, the relief. The tiny gratefulness. But I cannot seem to put words together, and before I know it we have moved past him.
I turn back, make eye contact.
“Goodbye,” I say.
We walk out of the camp, and no one stops us.
* * *
After a while we are walking aimlessly amongst the litter of an empty rockfield, adjacent to the beach. The morning sun makes the landscape a maze of slopes and angles, shadows and light. Each footfall crunches on gravel.
We will be patient, Shashi and I. As patient as Jagmeet, perhaps. We will face the wide, boundless desert, and head slowly toward Ankora. When we are hungry, we will find a square of crumbled wall to snuggle up against, our bottoms warm in the sand, and summon bread. Perhaps someday, when we reach Ankora, we will find what we are looking for.
Perhaps one day we will meet Mami and Dadi again. Perhaps not. But even without them, we will make a life. We will be family, just the two of us. And perhaps I will find someone else to play pada-sara with me. Someday.
I think of Tarq, of the city divided. Among my people there is a proverb: A bird who wants to fly need only flap its wings, but an elephant who wants to fly must give up everything but its ears, and jump.
Mami, Dadi, we are jumping.
And during the cold nights ahead, when we are tired and lonely, when the lights of Ankora glint invitingly off the coast like golden stars, perhaps Shashi will turn to me, worried, and ask if we are lost.
I will know just what to say.
No, Shashi. We are not.
Copyright © 2016 Jeremy Sim
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Jeremy Sim is a Singaporean-American writer and author of over a dozen published stories, including appearances in Cicada, Crossed Genres, and Flash Fiction Online. He is a graduate of Odyssey Writing Workshop 2013 and Clarion West Writers Workshop 2011, where he received the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. He lives in Berlin, Germany, and moonlights as a game writer for Amplitude Studios. Find him online at @jeremy_sim or www.jeremysim.com.
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COVER ART
“Tortoise Caravan,” by Marek Hlavaty
Marek Hlavaty is passionate illustrator who has been working as a freelance 2D artist since 2002, including illustrations, in-game and animation backgrounds, covers, and visualizations. Most of his artwork is in the game-developing and publishing industries. He believes that good painting should pull your mind into another world. View more of his work online at DeviantArt or on his website at www.prasart.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
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