1
The day the monster stole Caralee’s future started out as dull and shiny as any other—with children and young folk scattered around the sandy circle that served as a gathering place for the families of the nameless village. In this half-ruined amphitheater, they took their lessons from a woman dressed in undyed linen, her head, neck, and chin wrapped about with a threadbare gorget. Later, most would return to the cable fields with their elders, or stay within the village for piecework and other chores.
Caralee sat cross-legged on her favorite schooling seat, smiling at the crack in the sky. An age ago, her seat was a column; now only the plinth remained, scoured smooth by centuries of sandstorms into a seat-shaped groove that cradled Caralee’s bottom just so. The stone fit her far better than her burlap shmata ever would.
Marm-marm pointed at the fractured sky. The morning sun rose above the horizon, gold and brilliant, but the sky, she’d taught them, was far too dark. Once, it had been a much lighter blue, which was a color Caralee found difficult to imagine so far above and in such quantity. Wouldn’t that be awfully bright? She’d learned that when the sky had been light blue, the stars had been invisible during the day. That, too, she struggled to imagine.
The crack in the sky looked like frozen lightning, jagged and forking. At noon, when the sun passed behind it, you could see that the crack was four or five times longer than the sun.
Other students lazed or whispered, but Caralee leaned forward, elbows on her knees, eager to answer Marm-marm’s questions and ask her own.
“Who can tell me about the sky?” Marm-marm shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand while pointing with the other, tracing the lines over her head. “Is it broken? Why is it broken? How is it broken? How can we tell that it’s broken?” Marm-marm always asked too many questions at once, which was Caralee’s favorite thing about the woman. Caralee never said that to her face. That would clam up Marm-marm’s curious mouth, which was the last thing Caralee wanted on any day.
“Mphh!” Fanny Sweatvasser grunted through a mouthful of her own hair, then wicked her wet curls out from between her teeth so she could offer up one of her habitually bizarre answers. “A mightily infestatation of metallicky creatures”—Fanny pronounced the word cree-aht-choors, which gave Caralee a headache— “crawled from their nests—their nests are the stars—and are a-spinning their bea-ut-iful cobbyweb across the sky.” Fanny hunched her shoulders and gazed at the sky with delighted horror. “They want to catch the sun and steal away its light until it’s as wee as a star. Then they’ll hatch more cre-a-tures from that star and lay eggs in our brainpans with their rustipated penises.” Fanny spread her lips in what would have been a smile if it hadn’t been as flat and haunted as the wasteland horizon. “That, Marm-marm, is my answer.”
“Oh, Fanny.” Marm-marm looked like she’d swallowed some vomit. “Can anyone offer a less, hmm—a different answer?”
“Hey, Fanny,” sassed Diddit Flowm, bouncing his knee. “If your stupid star-critters are gonna hatch from the sun, then why’re they gonna put eggs in our heads? That makes no sense.”
His friends smirked, and Caralee laughed to herself. For Diddit, that was a truly massive amount of insight.
“I asked for an answer, Diddit Flowm.” Marm-marm scolded the boy without much enthusiasm. “A little help, Caralee?”
Caralee wanted to point out that, as usual, Fanny had taken a tiny grain of truth—tiny, mind you—and ran away with it, returning with something so ridiculous that the truth could no longer be found. But Marm-marm had asked her for answers, and Caralee loved answers.
“Well, Mag says that the crack in the sky used to be a little thing.” Caralee didn’t have facts, so she began with observations. Caralee had been raised by Mag, alongside her grandson, Joe Dunes, and was the wisest person Caralee knew, even if she didn’t have as much book learning as Marm-marm. “Mag also says that the sky was lighter during the day, although I don’t see how that would work. I mean, how would we—”
“Yes, Caralee, thank you.” Marm-marm always called on Caralee, but never let her finish. “When Old Mag Dunes was wee, that-uppa-there crack was wee, too, and the day sky shined bright blue.”
The other students oohed at the thought of such a pretty, bygone sky, but Caralee liked the crack below the sun. It was interesting, a commodity in short supply, here at the fringes of the wasteland. She loved the sky, with its stars peeking through their darkly colored veils.
“And,” Marm-marm pressed her advantage. “We couldn’t see the stars whenever the sun came out. Back then, the sky only darkened to shades of indigo near dawn and dusk.”
“What’s a findigo?” asked a boy with wild hair and one eye that was always staring at his nostrils.
“Anyone?” Marm-marm asked the seated students, propped up on stone blocks and other remainders of the Land of the Vine. “What, asks Marmot Kleyn, is findigo?” She scanned the faces of her students, most of whom were still sleepy, and cared little for learning. Caralee waved her hand high, but Marm-marm gave the rest of the class a few seconds to catch up, if any were so inclined. They were not. “Yes, Caralee?” She braced her hands on her hips and stretched her weary back. “You can put your arm down, girl. You know full well that you’ve no competition here.”
Don’t call me “girl” is what Caralee almost said, but thought better of it. She grabbed her arm like a separate thing and dragged it into her lap as if it had a mind to shoot up and start waving again.
“Yes, Marm. For starters, ‘findigo’ ent anything, but indigo, was a plant—and it’s a color, too. It sits right between violet and blue, on the rainybow wheel.” Which we learned last year and there are only seven scatting colors to remember, she thought but also did not say.
“That’s right. Now, can anyone tell me why a crack in the sky and a darkening sky might be connected?”
“Well,” Fanny began, and Caralee suspected that she was not about to answer Marm-marm’s question. “First of all, the rainybow wheel was invented by the droods to hide the fact that they keep all the green in one super-secreted underground well, excepted for water, it’s got green. All the greens.”
“No, Fanny, just no.” Marm-marm pressed her hands to the sides of her head, fidgeting with the wrapped burlap gorget that hid her neck and cheeks. “If there are still droods in the world, they may not be singing fruit from treebones anymore, but they have most certainly not stolen all the green and hidden it in an underground well.”
Fanny narrowed her eyes, now convinced that Marm-marm was part of the plot.
“And the rainybow wheel is real,” Caralee added. “Marm-marm has a picture of it in her learning-book. You’ve seen it, Fanny.”
“But have I?”
“You have!” Caralee was aware that she was shouting. “You’ve seen it! You’ve seen the rainybow wheel, and green and indigo are both scatting on it!” Fanny was a fool, but Caralee wasn’t cruel enough to say so out loud.
“You’re on the rainybow wheel, chucklehead.” A sandy-haired older youth—not one of the students—entered the open space and strolled up to Marm-marm as if she were a girl at a dance. Caralee wilted.
“Hullo, Marm,” he said, angling for charm and not quite succeeding.
“Good day to you, Joe Dunes.” Marm-marm forgave him with a twitching smile, and Caralee wondered what it would feel like to have Joe Dunes aim his charm at her and fail. Sands, he could even win! Caralee wouldn’t mind.
Not that she’d ever say that aloud, either.
Copyright © 2023 by David Edison
