Another start

Given the choice, given the chance, Haraan would have remained asleep. There could be no escaping them, his memories, either waking or dreaming, but his mind in the latter state wouldn't object to the contradicting evidence of who he was.

His first memory, so it contended, was of sand, of flapping and pouncing along some secluded, sable shore before his mother's jaws reined him into deeper waters. His first memory, argued another: clashing a pair of forks together to music while wrapped in his mother's arms.

We may rest easy at night despite whatever turmoil life brings into our lives, whether we lose our possessions in a fire, accident or arson, or if the loss is felt on an emotional level, such as the departure of a loved one, on the basis, the simple refuge, of acknowledging ourselves as human beings -- when we can't count on anything else, at least we may count on that, irrelevant to circumstances as that fact may be. Excuse the pedant, the contrarian, the fantasist: we go to sleep human, we wake up human, such it is that we may rely on (or resign ourselves to) it as certainty.

Such is not the case for Haraan Akema Siarke, who despises sleeping in a dragon's body, for he wakes up convinced he wears the wrong shape.

***

Let us be fair. Haraan has certainties to his life as well -- what a punishment it would be to live a life without certainty, a cruel hoax devised by something beyond God, for God creates life with the guarantee that whatever has life does not merely exist as does a rock, or the sky, or fire; it lives. Juxtaposition is a beautiful instrument for deriving certainties.

If he were the optimistic type, Haraan would admit he was living, and not living dumbly as a bacillus, or a stalk of kelp, but as a creature capable of reasoning and recollection, and not only that, but of abstraction, too. His human memories inform him two times five gives him ten and he can believe that without an array of pebbles spread before him to illustrate the point.

Why two times five equals ten is useful to know as a dragon, he couldn't say. The most important knowledge his dragon-self possessed tied intimately with his senses: the stench of oil signaled the presence of what his human-self called a boat, or a ship, it really depended on how big it was, but his dragon-self only cared that it had dragged his mother into the sky with giant hooks when he had been eight grand tides from the egg. The hooks had ripped through blubber into her arteries, so the oil mixed with blood.

Every time he had come close to a boat in the ocean, so his dragon-memories told him, every time he smelled their oil in their frothy wakes, he also smelled a little of his mother's blood, too.

Haraan is certain about hating boats. And as the first bars of dawn light begin to filter through the water, he is not at all optimistic about the coming day.

***

Why these contradictions? he wondered. When the contradictions overlapped in time, such as the matter of his first memory, they left holes in other places: entire seasons, tides, other spans of human and dragon measure both obliterated, leaving behind faint, smeared hazes of intuition best viewed as through the corner of an eye, if these ex-memories could even be seen with eyes.

On a very cold, very analytical level, it would be better to dismiss his blasted, carved-up past and focus on living out the rest of his days as a dragon. But no sooner did that idea come to him that other voices cried foul, most of them his, some of them imagined, conflated, or redacted from his recollecting, the rest, from her.

Especially from her. Hers was the only voice that didn't object as an echo in his brain.

"Not now, Kaela," he moans, rolling over. He knows she floats just a foot above him; he can scent her. She smells of strawberries today, tangy and light on his tongue, slowly, inexorably drawing him back to the waking world. Stop making me think about everything.

"Something came back to you yesterday morning."

"And it's only confusing me more. Let me sleep." Something blunt digs between his back and the sand, trying to nudge him up. He hears her voice bubble up from under him.

"I think we're going to find lots of memories today."

Lady, she is insistent -- and until yesterday, religion hadn't played any part of his life. He'd woken up with visions of temples, their inward-curving columns and somber, candle-lit statues of humans garbed in fabrics ruffled by impossible winds, the name of the goddess he invoked just now. Chants of worship resonate through his head before he realized what they were doing -- making him remember -- and quashed them. He brushes his companion away. "Not today."

He feels her wake pass over him, getting a whiff of strawberries again. He hears a sigh as she drifts into the curve of his chest and settles there, her dorsal frill tickling his skin. The sigh is his; he cannot decide whether it was a sigh of frustration, or a sigh of relief. The first night she had done this to him, snuggle up with him, that is, he had been asleep, only to bolt awake in fear. Despite one part of him having lived life quite happily in nakedness, the other, blurred, fragmented part of him screamed in an awkward terror groomed by a half-remembered, air-breathing, clothes-wearing society. He realized a week later that that society was nowhere nearby to judge him, and the warmth, the deep-seated whisper of her pulse, was nicer to have close by at night than a cold boulder.

"Are you still sleepy?"

"Very sleepy," was his reply.

She shifts, thinking to herself, probably. "Am I still waking you up too early?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"I'll wait more next time."

"Until you can tell what color your flipper is in the light."

"Okay."

She would get better. At first, she woke him with several hours to go before sunrise.

1

Given the choice, he would have preferred to stay asleep. He had to deal with them regardless of his state of consciousness, the fogs, the fogs which crept over the hills and crevices in his head, the fogs he knew were keeping his own memories hostage. In his dreams, they were just as hazy as anything else -- he never had to question what lay within those memories as he passed by.

Or, rather, those memories never got to question him.

And so it happened, every morning, the daily fight to keep his eyes closed for a few minutes longer -- but the act of keeping his eyes closed roused other parts of his mind into waking, and with the waking came the questioning.

What was so strange about waking up underwater?

What did he care about being naked?

To address the first question, waking up underwater was a perfectly normal thing for a dragon. Waking up in a bed, not the kind that formed by chance in a thick swath of sea grass, but in a bed covered with cloth sheets and cloth blankets, with a pillow stuffed with feathers under his head -- wouldn't be. As for the second, he was plenty warm enough, owing to the layer of blubber wrapped under his skin. And yet, he couldn't stop looking for anything flat and wide enough to drape across his stomach, even if he only found stones -- such as the one lying on him right now.

In short, he missed having underwear. Here he was, a creature with fangs in his mouth, webbed spines running the length of his back and tail, a pair of horns long as his head -- and he was prepared to trade them all for a piece of cloth he could pull between his back flippers (and how would he do that without fingers to grab on with?).

As the days passed, hints of before trickled back to him despite the fogs' best efforts -- the first had been a smell, the second, the word belonging to that smell.

That smell, the smell of fruit, tangy, and light enough to stay off his tongue, drifted through his nostrils now. She was nearby. In the end, sleep lost out, as it always did, every day, and Haraan opened his eyes.

"Has anything else come back to you?" she asked him.

He nodded.

"What was it?"

"Chalk."

"Mmmm." The little dragon before him closed her eyes and smiled as if receiving a back rub. "I know that one. You can use it to write stuff."

Another memory struggled against its hazy prison, its fierce babble dumbed into a moan. Something thin and rigid pressed between his fingers -- from when he had fingers, if he ever _had_ fingers -- he couldn't choose how these things came back to him and what he remembered by touch was hard to ignore.

"Really? Don't pencils do that, too?"

The smaller dragon shook her head. "They're different. You use a pencil on paper, but you use chalk on a street."

"Spoken like a human."

"I am one. And you are, too."

"I still don't believe you."

"I remember bein' human. All we have to do is get you to remember, too."

Haraan groaned. She said that same thing every day for the past half-tide. "I doubt that's going to happen. The way I am right now? I'm fine with it." The lie burned on his tongue. "Really."

He rose from his resting place from last night -- nestled against a quarter-arc of stone set on top of more stone, cut in even blocks and laid in a flat, interwoven pattern. He knew the arc had belonged to something called a fountain, and that it belonged above the water so it could shoot more water into the air. Wide stairs led up and out from the area around the fountain in four directions, passing under algae-slimed arches at their apexes.

sustenance - three (part three)

Though they were only a quarter mile from downtown Liliota, the route they took swung wide around and stretched for over a mile. Between their house and the harbors below stood proud Vista Heights Ridge, the edge of some fictional titan's reckless footprint.

The cobblestones took them past the chapel, a white-washed and weather-beaten pyramid that, despite its tiny, fifty-person parish, appeared to balance the sky on its blunt summit. Twelve columns rose from its sides like teeth in a smile. Each column contained a bell, seven of which rang out in a scale of tenor voices to bid Kaela good morning.

Far below, the processors echoed the chapel's gesture with futility, their single, shrill steam whistle a struggling whine in the air.

Mama said, "You're late for work, love."

"Oh, no." Papa's pace remained steady, or as steady as he could manage with the stuff sack hanging from his shoulder.

They passed the kitemaker's house, a peeling cement box poised beyond the ridge's edge by diagonal struts hammered into the rock face. Ornate lanterns hung from these struts; how they got there mystified Kaela.

The kites themselves jostled for territory in the dusty windows, rhombuses and peacock tails, cubes and halberd scale fabrics, hammered thin as flower petals. One shaped like a moth always caught Kaela's eye as she passed — the iridescent patterns on its wings dismissed the light given it, returning its complement instead. Today, it blazed cobalt blue and royal purple under the fiery gloaming.

"Very rare," the old kitemaker had told her once, taking it down so she could hold it herself. "Diaphne skin. Divers go a hundred feet below the ocean to find them slugs."

The material erupted into concentric circles of black and white against Kaela's fingertips. "How do you know that?" she asked.

"I was one of those divers," he replied, fingering the velvet flier. His eyes focused somewhere faraway. He let her hold the kite for a little longer, then he returned it to its place and shuffled back to his workbench to resume his stitching.

One day, she told herself, she would have a kite like that.

Kaela's family reached the bottom of the ridge in shadow. The Squat, as this burrough called itself, was the exclusive domain of the processors: six corrugated metal facilities with sliding doors the size of houses on their ends and no windows, each of them belching greasy smoke from clustered chimneys taller than any tree on the island. They crouched behind chain-link fences on beds of gore-slicked concrete and steel rails, and their shipping bays fired carts of entrails or fillets or eyes at each other along these rails depending on which facility could make the best use of them.

Kaela skipped ahead to examine a fivepetal creeping out from under one of the rails. As she brought it toward her nose, she heard a bang, then her name shouted behind her. A hand seized her wrist and wrenched her away as a cart screamed through the space she had just vacated.

"Fayling—!"

She turned, and Papa's blood-tinged eyes drilled into hers — no, through hers. His hand remained clamped to her arm, his stuff sack abandoned on the ground behind him.

"Kaela— fayling Prozzet and shbyk—" Papa's face contorted as he sputtered and babbled. "Fayling carts— fayling stupid girl!"

Mama came over and put her hand on his shoulder. "Haust, let go," she said, swallowing hard.

"Didn't even look." One by one, his fingers released her wrist, leaving white imprints on her skin.

Kaela's pulse did not quicken during her near-accident or its aftermath. Spreading across the ground as a bloody, broken mess never crossed her mind. But she had felt the wind on her face, saw the flash of yellow pass before her eyes, and then Papa got upset.

The first thing she did whenever he was upset was apologize. "I'm sorry, Papa," she said.

Her remorse was genuine and spontaneous — the memory of that cart, unapologetically fast and coming at her, grew feelers and linked with the hunch of her father's shoulders, his averted head, his white-knuckled fist. That cart made Papa mad, so she would have to make sure she was never that close to a moving cart again.

"Stay close," said Mama, taking her hand.

Her parents led her past the processors to the docks — twenty-one guano-stained berths, most of them occupied, with a small flotilla of other ships puttering into the harbor to contest the rest. Spindly cranes like long-billed birds lowered tarpaulin buckets into the different holds. Groans weighed down the air — abused fenders against docks, sea-weary sailors leaving their ships, crane engines retrieving the captains' catches. Thousands of fish slammed their tails against the buckets as they were lifted into gravity's domain, layering thunder over the groans.

Kaela took as few breaths as she could until she habituated to the place's organic miasma of withered scale and congealed salt.

sustenance - three (part two)

Kaela swept her last bite of pancake through swirls of syrup and bacon flecks. As she ate it, she didn't lament the last pancake she would have for a long time, or wish she had more, or wonder when she would have pancakes again -- the bliss of that sweet thick salty buttery morsel on her tongue was the sole recipient of her attention. It slid to the back of her mouth, down her throat, and settled in her stomach with a warm nudge. Breakfast was finished. She passed her dishes to Mama, who stacked them and took them over to the sink to wash.

Papa followed her with his plate and glass and utensils, and said "Thanks, Kellie." He placed his burden into the washwater. "I need to get ready." With a nod from his wife, he lumbered toward the stairs.

"Will you help me with these dishes?" Mama asked Kaela, who was watching Papa make his way up to the bedroom. Her daughter didn't give the question a second thought, and hopped on the stool next to the sink. The water was hot enough to make her arms tingle when she aired them, but Mama always told her she would get used to it, so she kept her arms submerged.

They were done in a matter of minutes and Papa was still upstairs, his feet thumping all over the room.

"Do you think he knows he's going to be late for work?" Kaela asked, drying her hands on a towel.

Mama finished stacking the dishes in the cupboard and closed it. "Not today," she said. She put an arm around her daughter's shoulders and gazed at the stairs. "Not today."

***

When she first saw Papa coming down the stairs, Kaela didn't recognize him. While he was gone, he had grown a hump almost as large as him again on one side of his back. It rustled and jingled inside. Furthermore, it was yellow. Kaela was mystified.

"Haust! Do you have to bring all that stuff with you?"

Stuff? A picture Kaela saw in a store window downtown sprang into her mind. A battered tent in the middle of a flat, snow-blown plain fought to shelter its sole occupant against the gale. The occupant carried his gear in a stuff sack to protect it against the wet and cold.

The hump on Papa's back was a stuff sack.

"Is it going to snow soon?" asked Kaela.

A look of confusion crossed Papa's face. Winter was two months away.

"That stuff sack's from the camping store downtown," Kaela explained. "They have a picture next to one of those in the window. The one with all the snow. Is it going to snow?"

"Is she talking about Natural Utilities?" asked Mama, furrowing her eyebrows. "Kaela, they ran that picture last year. How did you remember that?"

"Well, I've really wanted to see snow one day." She started to tell them step by step, but Papa burst out laughing before she could get to the coconut connection.

"No, Kaela, it's not snowing anytime soon," he said, struggling to balance his burden. "Ha, prozzet, what a strange girl we have, Kellie."

"She's not strange!" Mama kissed Kaela on her head. "Our lives would be much less interesting without you. Let's get going."

The intestinal stench of Liliota Island's industry swept up the ridge to greet the family as they left through the front door, but the stench was mild here and carried away too fast by the wind to be noticeable closer into the town. Instead of taking Keplin Street north to the clinic, Mama walked south with Papa at her side while Kaela skipped behind, free for a day from the encumbrance of a bookbag.

sustenance - three (part one)

To Kaela, days were either fast, or slow. On fast days, she told her parents about a fivepetal blooming in the cobblestones, or that the coffee at Hellen's smelled extra nice today, or the exact melody she heard from the mama finch by the bridge. Fast days were simple, dominated by some semsory morsel she vivified with wide-eyed awe.

She remembered very little from fast days.

The day before had been a fast day. Papa came home late, Mama didn't come home at all by the time Kaela went to bed. So Papa was the only one to hear about the newest painting at Velia's gallery.

"And the colors swirled together like this." Here Kaela wrapped her hands around one another and spun them. "I sometimes think I see a penguin in it, but then it becomes a slug, and after that an anteater."

Papa bit his lip and continued nodding as he had been. He had passed that painting on his way in and saw nothing but splotches of careless paint.

"I'm going to go to school tomorrow and color something swirly. It'll be green and orange and lav -- lavvvv..." Her brows furrowed as she struggled to recall the difficult color. What had Miss Velia called it?

"Lavender?" offered Papa.

"That's it!" cried the daughter, throwing her arms around him. Then she let out a yawn, wide and unashamed. "Lavender. Sounds nice."

Papa held her tight to his chest as he carried her to bed. He took longer than normal to tuck her in, but she failed to notice.

"Good night, Papa."

His hand, a giant, fleshy mitt of security, patted her head twice, three times, four times. He paused. "Good night, Kaela." He switched off the light and turned away, coughing into his sleeve.

The day's images rushed through Kaela's dreams as if a movie projector had gone rampant. Her time in the classroom with the crayons meshed with the boulders at the bottom of Vista Heights ridge, the tolling of the chapel bell merged with the meows of the tomcat browsing through her neighbor's garbage. Kaela's dreams were pastiches, vignettes, combinatory until she saw things only she could comprehend.

In Kaela's dreams, Liliota's downtown district whirled and folded on itself, danced with the harbor it circled, until she saw a different city entirely, with great islands in the harbor and rivers cascading down the surrounding land. Proud buildings of stone and glass and metal rose, extended into filigree spires toward an amber sky. People hung from these spires, jumped from one to the other, each of them defying the earth's pull with lithe, animal grace.

A black-haired boy, cobbled together from her classmates' faces, sat beside her on the curb, his mouth agog, his eyes looking up in worship at the jumpers and swingers. She could tell he wanted to be up there with them.

But then they both dissolved into a chaos of colors, and she materialized on mountaintops of piled cobblestones, waded through the floes of a volcano. She found herself in a city of clouds and pastel hues, touched hands with angelic folk bearing the faces of the baker, or Papa's drinking buddies.

Her parents had long since learned not to ask her about her dreams, as Kaela happily spent all day doing so -- one detail was meaningless without the rest.

Rrrrrrrrrrring-thuck.

"Good morning, Kellie."

"Good morning, Haust."

"Good morning, Mama. Good morning, Papa."

"Good morning, Kaela."

As Kaela took her turn in the bathroom, Papa pulled Mama in and gave her the biggest kiss she'd ever had out of him.

Once the family was downstairs, Mama had a surprise waiting to be dropped into the hot pan.

"Bacon, Kellie?" Sitting behind the table, Papa ogled the wrapped package in Mama's hand.

"Isn't it my perogative to cook my husband a great breakfast before he goes off?"

One by one, the bacon strips splashed into the pan with a celebratory sizzle. Mama left the window above the stove closed, to let the rich smell linger as long as possible after the meal.

And Mama wasn't done with that. "Kaela, could you get the milk, the butter, and an egg from the icebox for me?"

"Pancakes? Is it pancakes?"

"You bet it's pancakes."

Kaela cheered and jumped up and down. "Can I help make them? Can I?"

Mama nodded. She pulled out a stool for Kaela to stand on and took the flour, sugar, and salt out of the cupboard.

"What will you -- what will there be to eat all this week?"

"It's all right, Haust," said Mama. "I've been making a little extra at the clinic lately. We won't go hungry, I promise."

To Kaela's puzzlement, an ugly scowl crossed Papa's face. Wasn't it nice to have things to eat?

"You're not skipping dinner again, are you?"

"No, Haust."

"Providence." Papa put a hand over his face and fell silent while Mama pushed the bacon to the side of the pan for the eggs. A wonderfully bubbly, rubbery aroma rose from the stove.

Breakfast was served as the sun crept in through the window and splashed warm light over the table. Kaela pinched herself, as she knew other people did while witnessing something marvelous, but she didn't understand why they did so because it hurt. Steaming on her plate was a quartered pancake, stacked and slathered with butter and syrup, two strips of bacon, and an egg cooked her favorite way.

"Thank you, Kellie," said Papa.

"You're welcome," said Mama.

He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, which she accepted with a satisfied smirk. Men, as Mama once told Kaela, were faithful to their stomachs, and their stomachs were faithful to whatever put food in them. While Papa attacked his pancakes with abandon, Kaela ate counting to seven with every bite, another trick Mama had taught her. Between the smell of food and nut coffee in her parents' glasses and the clink of utensils on plates, Kaela didn't have anything else to contribute.

As the meal went on, her parents glanced at each other, resumed eating, then glanced back more and more. Papa started to spin a fork in his hand, a trick from the processor to pass the time.

"Kaela?"

"Yes, Mama?"

She took a sip of her coffee. "Today's going to be a little different. Papa and I will excuse you from school, and we'd like to take you down to the harbor."

Papa's fork spun from his hand like an acrobat, splashing down in his coffee glass with a rude clang.

Kaela hardly noticed. A day without school, after this delicious breakfast? "Really?"

Mama smiled, running a hand under Kaela's chin. "Yes, really. How would you like to meet a ship's captain?"

"Like a pirate captain?" Be-tassled coats and peg legs danced in Kaela's mind.

"No, silly, he'd be arrested. He's a fisherman."

"Oh." The pirate accessories evaporated into white smoke. Then Kaela had a thought that blew the haze away. "So if we ask nicely, maybe he'll give us some fish?"

Mama removed her hand. "He'd probably have to sell it to us, dear. He can't give it away -- he would make no money otherwise. But it's good you thought of asking."

"Look for the good and you will find it, right?"

"Of course."

Kaela ate her last bite of pancake. When Papa went upstairs and returned with a huge duffel bag on his shoulder, she was helping Mama with the dishes, her mind too content with the coming day to ask any more questions.

sustenance - two

Rrrrrrrrrrring-thuck.

The alarm clock on his bedstand served the entire family. His heavy hand stifled the tiny bells and made them still. Without complaint or smart observation, Kaela's parents rolled out from their covers and sat on the edges of the mattress, facing away from each other.

"Good morning, Kellie."

"Good morning, Haust."

Kaela emerged from her room holding Kitty across her chest. "Good morning, Mama. Good morning, Papa."

"Good morning, Kaela." Almost synchronized, as always. Papa was the slower one today.

He was the first into the house's single bathroom. He took his showers after work, and no one at the processor worried a rogue cowlick would endanger their career advancement. Showering when he did also lessened the chance the fruity smell of his daughter's shampoo would cling to his hair going into work. While he scraped, spit, and gargled behind the door, Kaela leaned against the wall while she worked problematic tangles out of her daughter's chestnut hair.

Mama used the bathroom next, unleashing epithets ranging from sighs to pugnaciously censored cries depending on the smell Papa left behind in the toilet. Thankfully, the room had a vent pipe leading straight through the roof. By the time Mama finished showering, the steam had encapsulated and evacuated every offensive odor. She came out wearing nothing but a fluffy towel -- wrapped like a beehive around her head.

Sometimes, after Kaela had gone into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, she heard a spanking sound coming from the bedroom.

With her night clothes folded outside where they would remain dry, she took out the shampoo and the soap, and carefully applied both where they needed to go. Only after her skin shone under the intense light did she turn on the water and hop in. One, it saved water, also one of Papa's compulsions, and two, that stopped stray suds from wandering into her eyes, which really hurt. Though she enjoyed how warm it was under the water, her showers never lasted longer than ten seconds. She had created this method without any input from her parents, which sufficed to warm her with pride.

The family dressed and downstairs at the breakfast table, Mama had a surprise.

"Eggs!"

Kaela's eyes lit up as Mama took three eggs from the carton in the icebox (a whole carton!). Of all the foods that came in two colors, eggs ranked highly on Kaela's list. They reminded her of the sun pushing itself in front of the clouds for once, or the crown of a golden creature swimming in a white sea.

"I'm sorry we didn't come home last night," Mama cracked the eggs into a hot, buttered pan. Over the sizzling and popping, she said,"Your father and I went out to celebrate."

Busying himself with making a sandwich, Papa nodded, and grinned.

"Do you remember when we had Mr. Siarke over two months ago?" Mama asked.

Kaela shook her head, though she paid more attention to the unctuous smells wafting from the stove.

"He was tall, as I remember. Hair as gray as a ghost, though he couldn't have been more than forty." Mama was forty five. "Ringing any bells?"

Kaela still shook her head.

"He talked about his son a lot while he was here -- in fact, I believe he's about your age."

Kaela straightened with recognition. "Oh, him." The way she said that was far from approving. "He said he almost never goes home to see him. Isn't that horrible?"

"It is, isn't it?" Mama even sprinkled some salt on the cooking eggs. "He can't go home as much as he wants to. His job puts him out at sea catching fish for seven out of eight weeks."

"Then he should get a new job."

"He's a captain. He has his own ship. And he's making lots of money for his family."

"But he doesn't spend time with them. At least Papa comes home every day."

Mama paused, almost as if the weight of what she was going to say next had become concrete and landed on her shoulders. Papa spread mustard over a slice of bread. Oblivious, the eggs fluttered merrily in the pan.

"Kaela?"

"Yes, Mama?"

Suddenly fighting for composure, Mama gazed at a dark spot on the ceiling. Her fist bounced on the countertop in a slow rhythm. When she spoke, however, her words were measured and even.

"Mr. Siarke came back to Liliota Island two days ago. Yesterday, he approached Papa at work. He said one of his hands were injured and said he needed a replacement."

Kaela blinked in thought, then frowned. However, she remained silent, and a brief glimpse of hope flashed across Mama's face.

"Papa accepted his offer," said Mama. "He'll be paid a lot more aboard the ship -- what was it called?"

"The Provident Reaping." It was the third time Papa had spoken that morning -- and it wasn't even a sentence.

"The Provident Reaping." Mama scowled, like it left a bad taste in her mouth. "Not the nicest name I've ever heard."

Kaela asked, "What does it mean?"

"I wish I knew." Mama took the finished eggs off the stove and served breakfast, sending a dangerous topic into hibernation. The family held hands and said grace, and all three of them finished their breakfast before the pan had even cooled.

"It'd be nice to have toast, too," Papa said, wiping his mouth on a napkin.

Mama laid her hand over Papa's. "You'll have it soon enough."

"And bacon. They'd better give me enough for bacon, too. I'm tired of not providing enough for my family."

"All in good time."

Kaela made toward the sink with the dishes in her arms. "What time are you coming home, Mama?"

"I'm going to be out late again. We've had a few elderly residents saying they haven't slept much lately, so they're coming back today for a follow-up."

"I don't have a problem with sleeping. I sleep just the right amount, don't I?"

Mama ruffled Kaela's hair. "Of course you do, Kaela. Now run and get your school things."

Kaela obeyed, her bare feet drumming a tattoo up the stairs. "I really hope those old people will be okay!" she called back as her parents disappeared from view.

***

Haust turned to his wife with a concerned look on his face. "I don't like keeping things from her," he said.

"I don't, either." Kellie kept her gaze fixed on the stairway. "But you know how she thinks, and remembers. And if she would have understood -- there's no point to starting a day in tears."

"I leave tomorrow. We'll have to tell her sometime."

Kellie's eyes lit up. "I have an idea." She turned to her husband. "Why don't the three of us go out to meet Mr. Siarke? At least she'd understand why her father's suddenly gone missing in her life -- and you'll be back in a month.

"We'll be here, waiting for you." She leaned forward, found his lips. Still as exciting as their first, that kiss, and it certainly would not be their last, either.

sustenance - one

Liliota Island smelled like this: vulcanized rubber and rust, mixed with the stench of the processors along Simoan Row -- tanks stuffed full of fish bloated from internal pressure, dying, dying, and dead. Just to the north, the dockyard smelled of salt and organic rancidity, the boats tied to them of fish scales and harsh lye. These scents, borne on a persistent zephyr, found their way up the ridge to the village, where it permeated bruised bricks and coated yellowing windows.

To Kaela, Liliota simply smelled like home.

Her mother worked at the Liliota Island Clinic, hospital for both islanders and fishermen -- Kaela herself was brought into the world there. From time to time, Kaela woke early enough to see Mama off to work, and wouldn't see her again until well after sundown. The day wrought a remarkable transformation on her: scrubs would be wrinkled, sometimes spotted with blood or pus from a fisherman with a fracture left open for infection. Shoulder-length hair frizzed, just a little more shadow under bright eyes like her daughter's. Mama's invincible smile, a kneeling hug right in the doorway, threw her daughter off just enough to keep messy questions unasked.

Papa worked a similarly daunting shift, often leaving home before his wife, coming back after. A lineman at Processor Three, he spent ten hours a day with a knife in his hand, incising a precise line along a fish's keel and stripping out the guts -- those were fed into boilers and powered the conveyors, or were sold as cut-rate bait to novice captains. He came home, hair like rumpled straw, him smelling of blood, and, on some nights, distillations cut with chemicals to imitate the legendary podanzo. The floorboards creaked violently under his ponderous frame. He developed a phlegmatic cough that never went away. Him being the only father she had, though, Kaela never regarded him with terror or disgust.

Kaela's only job was to walk herself to school, work diligently through textbooks her teacher's teacher would have used, and walk back. Once a week, a list materialized on the kitchen table written in Mama's slanting script. This Kaela took to Windjammer Market, a few korona fluttering like dehydrating fish in the bottom. The shades were always faded over the stalls and holes appeared between the produce and meat and beads and elixirs and toys, but the grocers always filled Mama's orders. They tousled her light hair, praised her for growing so well so young, and even tucked treats into her hand: a Kamanian sweet in gaudy wrapping, a vial of bubble-blowing liquid.

Being six years old, Kaela could make these errands because the basket never came close to full. Tonight's dinner would be a large green onion each, fried with drops of jejamom oil. She liked anything Mama cooked.

***

There were few enough residents on Liliota to allow each family an entire house — Kaela's even had stairs in it. Many other houses on Keplin street noasted multiple stories, too, most of them with decaying gutters or mold on the roofs. Autumn was especially harsh, when storms arrived from the Ourobis and whipped the island before departing to ravage Corth's western coast. Inside Kaela's house, there was a threadbare living room and a kitchen, upstairs were the two bedrooms and one toilet. Each room had a single light set in the center of its ceiling, and only the lights in the kitchen and Kaela's bedroom kept their strings uncut and within her reach. The electric bill was a constant spring of vitriol and ulcers for Papa and it wouldn't do to aggravate him with wasted light.

Kaela spread her groceries on a table that had seen feasts and tears. In addition to the green onions, there was a bottle of milk, a small tin of salt (it wasn't worth evaporating one's own around here), and, amazingly, several curls of fresh dhillweed. The processor allowed Papa his pick of one free fish a week — to have it seasoned with an herb was even rarer.

Her stomach rumbled. Mama wouldn't be home for a while, so she put the perishables into the icebox and took the stairs to her room on all fours. Her room was little more than a converted closet off her parents' bedroom. Her bed would have gone to the incinerator had Papa not persuaded the neighbors to let him have it. Her dresser cost him a week's worth of sleep to make; he spent just as long hacking her a window through the wall. A mile down the hill, when the processors weren't busy smothering the Ourobis Ocean with thick smog from their smokestacks, it spread over the world like a big blue bedsheet and tucked the island in.

Kaela pulled Kitty off of her dresser and set the patchwork toy on the windowsill. She started to blow bubbles into the air and cried out in delight as the orbs configured themselves into other shapes -- long, flexible snakes and segmented caterpillars, a mushy seagull. The toy man had given her a motive vial.

"Look, Kitty," she exclaimed, producing a soap kitten with some effort. "Make friends, nya?"

Kitty stared at the kitten until it popped. The plushie was clearly uninterested in reaching out to others.

Not that it bothered Kaela. Kitty still had her as a friend, and she felt good about that. She continued to blow bubble animals through the window: alley dogs, splayed lizards. Concentrating on something she found in a tide pool, she puffed hard and produced an iridescent slug with frills like lace.

The sun cradled the undersides of the quicksilver clouds with red light. The bell in the chapel down the road rang eight times, then nine. The sky released its last heat and turned to star-studded charcoal. Kaela slapped two mosquitoes on her arm and shut the window, the bubble vial empty in her hand. She dropped the vial into the trash.

The front door remained resentfully silent. Kaela listened to the clock on her dresser tick off the seconds. She gave up after her head began nodding, brushed her teeth, and put on her nightgown. Even as she crawled into bed, she expected to hear the front steps clatter under someone's feet, to hear hinges creak and a voice saying, "Kaela, I'm home." In the glow of her nightlight (a silhouette of a dragon breaching from the sea), she pulled Kitty into her chest. Though she wondered why she still hadn't been fed, why Mama and Papa were out so late, she soon

dropped away anyway and

slept