The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [25]
This was true. Path frowned.
“Or it could be,” his father continued, “that they ain’t no people alive here. Could be something else. Not people, I mean. Other things. Hiding in the buildings.”
“Put me down.”
So path was placed, unceremoniously, onto the hot ground.
The sling had a rigid frame, clamped to path’s torso, and three short, strong legs that locked into place, enabling him to rest in an almost upright position. He could look around, at least until his neck became too sore to hold up his heavy head. More or less propped upright, he peered over the top of the sling, watching eddies of sand dance with the silent structures.
“Goodness knows what could live here.” His father held a hand over his eyes as a visor, though there was no sun and had not been any sun in his life or even in his father’s life. “I’ve heard stories.”
“Will you just go down there? Find out.”
“Likely kill us for trespassing just as soon as give us water or listen to any words you got to say.” Path’s father licked chapped lips. He was haunted by this adventure, by leaving his home, by what his son had become. Without looking back or saying another word, he suddenly turned and walked the grade, awkwardly, all elbows and knees, like he always moved when he was without his cumbersome burden.
Path closed his eyes, just for a moment. His lungs ached. He tried to control his breathing. The sounds he heard with his eyes closed were old bones tumbling against each other. He tried to recall details of what he had been like before the light had stricken him, transforming him, but he felt nothing inside. Nothing much remained from that time. Vignettes, tastes, an isolated cry. He knew only that he could never return to his old life or to his father’s house.
When the winds died a little more, path opened his eyes again. The only thing moving out there—other than his father, of course, who was still walking away—were flies: hundreds of the insects, in thick masses, hovered over the huddled houses like irritated spirits. Had they been there before? Path was unsure, and this unsettled him.
His father meandered, nearing one home before veering off toward another. A painful display to watch. Path looked away, in the direction from which they had just come, where the shapes of rocks in the badlands were being relinquished by the receding night: to path, squinting, the formations seemed to be giants, once stalking the landscape in great strides but frozen now, in place, by the advent of this day.
Yet rocks, he knew, were as incapable of walking as was he.
Until this point in his life, path had never seen so many huts. Not like this. Not in one place. His own home had been mostly cave, with several crude partitions to keep out blowing sand. There were a handful of people living in the area he came from, maybe seven or so at any given time. Mostly men, living alone, in similar caves. No children that he knew of. Ever. And women seemed to have been sucked empty, as if the land was so devoid that it stole any form of essence that could either give or sustain life. His own mother had withered to nothing, just a husk of skin and bones, losing her flesh and then her mind until at last she roamed the yards, a hollowed spirit, staring at path when he was left outside, or shrieking silently at the clouds. Eventually, she faded away to nothing, tattered on the winds.
What was left of path’s mother they buried in a jar: a handful of grey parchment and slivers of yellow bone.
He could remember her.
The spot throbbed where the light had touched him, the mark on his forehead, as if the luminous finger were still pressing hard against him. He had awoken from fourteen years of sleep with the burning desire to leave the desert, seek out people—not people like those who lived in the rocks near his home, or those weathered relics who gathered at the local market (which was really just a few blankets of junk set