The Light That Is Left

Their mother had died sometime in the night and for many days the sisters had sat beside her body waiting for her to awaken. Now they had only her bones. Silent as the great water. But always, they remembered. 

~

The sisters lived among the fisher-people, among the great jagged stones that lay piled and massive along the shoreline. Under the grey, formless sky for which there was no end and no beginning. On occasion the sky wept and the tears were cold like the wind that blew in from off the great water. After their mother died, the sisters lived their young years bravely, observing the lengths of lightened sky change with the growth of the reeds and grasses along the stone-strewn shore, bearing the shiver of the cold like a rascal come creeping into their bedding, and always the nights were long and frightening, riddled with nightmares if sleep came at all. And in the mornings they had but the sullen silence of their mother’s bones for continued guidance. The sounds of the waves crashed with rhythmic malice upon the rocks.

            During the spans of brightened skies, the fisher-people moved out among the rocks and laboured with their wide nets made of coiled reeds. Their long hooked toes clung gingerly to the jagged contours of the stones as they squatted and lent forward with the weight of their nets. All through the day they dragged their nets back and forth across the shore. A daring few paddled further into the great water on thin skiffs made of the bound and twisted stalks of thistle-shrub. The thistle had to be shorn clear before the skiff could be straddled and the task was gruelling and painful and so only a few succeeded.

            At the breaking of the light, the fisher-people hauled in their catch, dragging their nets heavily over their shoulders, over the stones to the dry land where they slept and observed their customs and rituals. On a broad flatbed of compacted stone that had been hauled into place for the purpose, they piled their collected catches of the day into one heap. The fish were fat and whiskered and writhed together in a coating of silvery slime. The fisher-people then mended their nets in the last of the lightened sky and tended to any wounds suffered among the rocks. They toiled quickly, hungrily. Soon, they returned and feasted together, eating the fish raw. Some of the fat and blubber of the whiskered fish the elders gathered and smeared into a paste between gears of heavy stones until a fine grease pooled below and this they divided into smaller vessels and struck with sparkstone to make nightlights. The dancing flicker made a million nights and days at once.

            Among the shadows, the sisters hopped and squatted like shadows themselves, desperately eating whatever scraps of fish they found. They scavenged and ate until their hands were scuffed and sore. When night lifted, the sisters went out among the rocks and washed the dirt and grease from their hands and mouths in the shallow pools in the recesses of the stones. Then they went back and hopped again among the morning society of the fisher-people, as many had kept secret stashes of fish from the night before and there would be a bit more to find and eat if they were thorough and lucky. The fisher-people paid the sisters little notice, occasionally flicking their whiskers at them or sweeping an arm in a broad dismissive arc. The sisters yelped at the swatting arms, hopping here and there as tiny-legged songbirds living among bears.

~

Boden hopped backwards as two fisher-people clicked past her, nearly clipping her arm with the hard claw of their hook toes. They glanced her way briefly and made a flurry of noises, a clicking of their tongue and teeth and a long cooing sound, none of which Boden understood with any meaning, if meaning there was.

            She squatted next to her sister and crossed her arms, gazing after them towards the high rocks where the fisher-people where gathering in the grey light with nets and skiffs. The waves were quiet this day.

            Spiar sat in silence. She was gazing off towards the great flatness away from the water and running her forefinger along the length of her scar. The funny feeling of the flesh, raised and smooth and coarse all at once. She liked it, as she hated it. Like the tall rocks that covered in ice during the cold times that were difficult to climb and yet such a joy of strength to overcome. Her finger followed the scar over her upper lip, where it tickled to touch, a strange shiver, and up across her cheek towards her right eye where the scar spiralled in on itself like a coil reed. Like the patterns they found some times carved softly yet with eternal precision into the smallest stones. The same pattern on the shell that had given her the scar.

            “Touching it all the time won’t make it any better,” Boden said.

            Spiar said nothing. She stared out across the great flatness squinting her eyes a little against the grey to see the strange dark spikes that seemed to stick up from the ground. Giant spikes so far off. Spiar had seen a dead cow once. Nothing left but the rib bones sticking up from a carcass half buried in the dirt. That’s how she saw the dark spikes in the grey. It was like some huge animal had died way out there and not but its bones remained rising up from the flatness. Her finger moved to her upper lip. Started again.

~

They had been scavenging among the lower stones below the great ones where the waves rolled back and forth but hardly ever crashed. Sometimes the fisher-people lost some of their catch through tears in the coils of the reed nets and the fish fell in between the lower stones and got trapped in meagre pools. The sisters hopped from stone to stone, the water rolled around them, flooded occasionally over them. When the waves rose and caught them, Boden let go and gave up to the pull of the current and let it draw her out a bit into the deeper water before it naturally flowed back and returned her to the hold of the stones. Spiar was different. When the waves swelled near her she dove under the frothy whiteness, pushing through the draw of the current with a slow, almost imperceptible endurance until she felt the wave roll past and then she climbed up onto the nearest stone and looked for her sister.

            The waves rolled in and refreshed the meagre pools. Crouched above a small crag between two jagged stones, Spiar looked down through the augmented ripple at a strange wavering brightness.

            “Here’s something, Bo,” she said.

            Boden looked up, wiping water from her eyes. “I seen those already,” she said.

            Spiar shook her head. “Uh uh, you hadn’t.” She thrust her arm into the water like it was a spear. “There’s something here.” Her arm moved back and forth, submerged above the elbow, and she turned her head to the side, sticking out her tongue and squinting as if her ability to see had been transferred from her eyes to fingers. Her arm went down deeper. Then she exhaled, having been holding her breath all the while, and she pulled her arm out.

            Between her fingers, clutched and dripping with muck, was a pile of small, closed up corral shells.

            Spiar looked up at her sister and grinned toothily. “They’re sharp,” she said.

            Boden hopped nearer from an adjacent rock and squatted. She cocked her head to the side, a renewed, inquisitive expression on her face.

            Spiar dunked her hand into the water again to wash away the muck and when her hand emerged they both saw the bright colours of the shells. Dazzling blues and greens. Spiar poked and rolled them around in her palm with her finger.

            “Like the sky,” Boden said, almost whispering.

            Spiar looked up at her sister, confused at first by the comment. Then she remembered and she grinned again widely and with a ravenous spark. “Let’s eat ‘em,” she said.

            They reached down into the crag several times more before heading back to the dry and in all they gathered seven shells, six that were the same blue and green colour and one that was greyish silver like the shine on the dark water. They divided them three and three, though Spiar insisted she get to have the single silvery shell because it was prettiest and owing to her that they found them at all.

            Back on the dry, they avoided the society of the fisher-people and snuck away unnoticed to their nest. Farther inland from the shoreline of great stones there spanned a vast flatness that reached to the grey horizon. The flatness was filled with stubby brush and spindly grasses of all manners and nothing else. The soil was dry with patches of coarse rock dirt.

            Between the shoreline and the flatness the earth was uprooted and overgrown across a labyrinth of huge angular stones that lay collapsed upon each other and half buried for a great distance. Where these huge stones may once have stood as towers now they lay as the desiccated crypts of some cultureless graveyard. The stones were grey, blackened in patches, covered in mosses and creeper vines, and quick to flake into dust if touched roughly. Square-shaped holes cut through the dry stone in many rows and revealed the hollow interiors of the structures. They were each of them divided into smaller spaces, nearly all of a similar shape and size like stone boxes. There was a damp, fermented odour to each of the spaces, similar for the presence of decay but distinct for whatever particular creatures or objects had once rotted away inside.

            The old spaces were well covered from the skies weeping and the coarse winds and it was far enough away from the fisher-people to offer security yet close enough for the sister’s to hear the sounds of their society, as odd a comfort as that was, and to hear if a good catch had been brought in. For these reasons the sisters’ mother had bore them there. Their nest was buried far inside the labyrinth through a series of cut holes and passages, forming a path that the sisters alone knew how to follow.

            When they reached the final passage to their nest, Spiar paused and squatted below the last square-hole that led inside and waited for her sister. Boden hopped down from the wall adjacent and scurried to join her. They squatted together, their forearms on their knees, and listened for sounds through the hole.

             “Hear that?” Spiar whispered.

            Boden turned her ear. It had become established between them both that Spiar had better ears for sounds, while Boden had clearer eyes for far away things.

            “What is it?” Boden said.

            Spiar started to speak, then paused and perked attentive. “Yep, there’s a fur-tail in there. I can hear it scurrying in our bed.”

            “Guck,” Boden said. “In our bed?”

            “Whoever gets it gets to eat the legs.”

            At that they both sprang up from the floor and hopped over the square hole. Its bottom ledge had long been worn down into a rounded hump from their coming and going and they rolled over it and landed gingerly on the floor inside.

            Spiar leapt to their bed of braided grasses and started stomping with both her naked feet waiting to hear a shriek. Boden stood where she had landed and swept her gaze across the floor and to the corners of the room. A vicious shriek came out from the bed. Spiar jumped back from where her foot had stepped on something bony and warm and much larger than she had expected. The braided grass bed shifted with the movement of the creature from one end to the other in its panic of escape.

            Spiar stood still with one foot in the air. “That isn’t no fur-tail,” she said.

            Boden looked at her sister, all at once afraid. “What is it, Spi?”

            As if beseeched to reveal its nature, the creature emerged from under the bed and scuttled to the far wall where it hunkered as close to the join of floor and wall as was physically possible.

            Boden squawked when she saw it. “That’s a stinger, Spi!”

            Spiar nodded. “You stay still over there.”

            The creature scuttled suddenly farther along the join of floor and wall into the corner and there it halted. It’s long whiskers twitched. The bony ridges that shielded its back opened reflectively and a set of silvery wings fluttered and then retracted. It was the size of either sister’s forearm.

            Spiar had since lowered her foot and she stood solidly now and her knees were bent in a springing fashion.

            “Bo, toss me my slicer,” Spiar said. “Don’t move quick. Don’t let it run.”

            Slowly, Boden stepped backwards until she reached the far wall and she crouched to the stone cutting plate where they would prepare the fish if ever they caught a whole one. They had two slicers fashioned from wedges of white underwater stone, sharp enough for shaving off the scales and removing the guts through the blubber. Boden took out Spiar’s slicer. It was slimmer than Boden’s with a smooth curve to the handle and a streak of blue through the white of the blade. They kept them under sheaths of broad vine leaves to keep the stone damp and strong. A practice inherited from their mother.

            Boden stood slowly and retraced her steps. Spiar had since lowered her foot onto the grass bed and she stood solidly now and her knees were bent in a pose to strike. Distrusting herself to toss the slicer, Boden side-stepped across the room to the bed close enough to place it into Spiar’s hand.

            “It’s the same kind that got momma,” Spiar said.

            Boden looked at the creature. Its whiskers twitched frantically and there was an irrefutable impression of terror streaking like ice through its bony shell and stiff crabby legs. But she sensed also a propensity for violence, distrust, and danger. Where were the creature’s eyes? Like the fisher-people, whose eyes she had never seen, she could extend no trust or compassion to this creature, sensing but a tension of hostile otherness. It was the same tension and terror that had infiltrated her life the night her mother had died, the stark otherness of death. She could remember that night only vaguely. Something had stung momma, crept up into their bed as they slept in her arms and given their mother a sharp bite on her ankle. But Boden had never seen what it was. She had woken only after her mother’s gasps broke through her dreams and Spiar shook her shoulders, screaming, “Momma! Momma!”

            If Spiar said it was this creature, or a creature much the same, then Boden believed it. Her sister had always been first to know things that for Boden it took much longer to see and even longer to understand.

            And as Boden watched, she once more gained proof of her sister’s remarkable prescience. Somehow Spiar knew exactly where to stick her slicer to kill it. When Spiar moved, the creature flailed for escape, squeaking and extending its silver wings and slithering in panic up the wall. But Spiar wielded the slicer like a spear-point at the end of her arm and impaled the creature just above its carapace collar at the base of the head. Holding the creature against the wall, Spiar watched the myriad legs twitch manically for a moment and then the whole being went slack.

            In an instant, the creature’s morbid otherness seized the room. Boden started to cry. Spiar shot a look over her shoulder, thinking with alarm that Boden had been hurt, but when she saw her sister she scowled impatiently and turned back. She pulled the slicer from the creature and let it fall to the floor. A moment of indecision gripped her whether to dispose of the carcass or bring it over to the stone cutting plate. Then she remembered the shells they had gathered earlier and the force of her hunger created an idea of a feast and prevailed. She crouched and took hold of the creature’s flat tail end and stood. Behind her, Boden wiped at her eyes.

            “Stop weeping,” Spiar said irritably. “It might have stung us and we’d be dead. It probably don’t have any feelings anyway. Go get your catch, and let’s eat something, I’m starving.”

            “We’re eating that?”

            “Some of it. I’ve seen the fishers eat them. They open up and eat what’s inside.”

            “I don’t want to eat it.”

            “Then don’t. Weep your eyes out instead.”

            Boden wiped her eyes one last time. Spiar watched her and couldn’t help but feel shameful and cruel then.

            “Go on, go get your catch,” Spiar said. “I’ll cut this up for us.”

            They ate together on the floor seated at either side of the stone cutting plate. The legs of the scuttler proved to hold the most meat, if meat you could call it, but Boden refused to eat any of it. Spiar went on and sucked and scraped it out with her teeth from inside the hard casing. They opened the shells with their slicers, splitting them lengthwise and opening like little caskets. Holding the opened shell in the flat of their palm it looked much like the shallow pool from where they had been found. A bluish grey mucus that tasted like fresh water and stone. They ate them wincingly. After only a few minutes, the feast was ended and then Boden got up and fetched one of the yellow, plastic water jugs and carried it back in her arms and sat. They took turns drinking large gulps of water, swishing them in their mouths.

            The light went quickly from their nesting place and in the dark there was little else to do but lie down to sleep and hope to dream. The dreams that came to them were always strange and wondrous. Like the waves that rocked the shoreline, their dreams swept over them and carried them away, showing them bright visions of birds and fat, billowy clouds high above the sullen grey that burdened them to the waking world. The dreams that were especially lovely were those that sung with their mother’s voice. They could hardly remember it but for the profound clarity of a dream that whisks a memory from your past and brings it back before your eyes and in your ears. That raspy warmth of her voice, stern and strong and soothing.

            Come here, girls. Sit down, be still. Let me tell you about a different time before this one, a time that you have to remember, always . . .  

            The sound of their mother’s voice was like the whole dreaming world humming with warmth. Here there were no stones or walls, no hook-toed fisher-people, no darkness and no tears. Here they were in their mother’s arms, as they had been before, wrapped in the heat of her body, shielded by the strength of her voice.

            “Something’s cutting me, Bo.”

            Boden was dreaming. She heard her sister faraway and then all at once she heard Spiar moaning very close to her and she opened her eyes.

            Spiar was sitting up in the dark, a shadowed shape huddled forward and rocking slightly. Boden could barely see her sister, but she could feel the heat of her nearby and hear her groaning and whimpering.

            “What’s wrong, Spi?”

            “Something . . .” Spiar strained to say, wincing. “Something’s cutting me. It really hurts, Bo.”

            “Where? I don’t see nothing.”

            Spiar groaned long and loud and then cried out and started to weep. She buckled forward holding her self up on the floor with one hand while her other arm wrapped hard around her stomach. She gripped at her belly, at what little flesh there was to hold, pushing in with her knuckles.

            Boden sat up, holding her hands out as if to help, ready to hold her sister, if that was all she could do. “What’s hurting you, Spi?”

            Spiar wept freely now, grinding her teeth. She let go of her belly and braced both hands on the floor and hung her head. She wept in heaves and then she started coughing. The darkened shape of her back arched violently and she cried out.

            Boden sat upright, stricken with terror at the sounds coming from her sister. She reached to place her hand on Spiar’s back, but all at once Spiar retched with a panicked, breathless intensity. Slime ran from her open mouth onto the ground between her hands. She heaved once more and vomited. The contents of her stomach came out in a great gush, some of it clinging on her chin and lips. There was a short moment of relief, and then Spiar let out a choked scream.

            Gripping her shoulders, Boden tried to pull her sister up, tried to gather her in her arms to comfort her, but Spiar was twisting and frantic. When Spiar sat up on her own, Boden drew back from her. Blood was running down Spiar’s neck. In the utter dark, Spiar’s features were blanketed, no more than a shadow. Still, Boden could see that something was latched to her sister’s face. It wriggled across her face like some visceral vine, carving into Spiar’s cheek. She shook her head widely, bouncing on her knees, and she cried out in chocked sobs. The living, writhing vine was still snaked down her throat.

            Boden sat for a moment with her hands up, watching in horror. Her sister’s cries were muffled, ringing off the walls, and coming back slowly through the dark. She wondered if her sister was going to die, as their mother had died, unseen in the dark of this place, becoming but another layer of shadow. Even as her hands started to move, they seemed suspended before her as the hands of someone else, travelling through the darkness in half-life moments. She watched as her hands reached for her sister’s face and grabbed the twisting vine and pulled it away, drawing with it a thicker mass up from Spiar’s throat. She heard her sister gasp for air like coming up from underwater. Then her hands were moving again, turning out to her right side. Strings of blood and saliva hung from her clasped fingers and the vine clung and instantly wrapped around her wrist. It was firm and slick between her palms. Then she pulled it free and threw it hard to the floor and she heard the hard splat it made, and she lifted the cutting plate and brought it down over the vine, then lifted it and brought it down on the vine again and again until the wriggling stopped.

             Come here, girls. Sit down, be still. Let me tell you about a different time before this one, a time that you have to remember, always . . . Are you listening?

            Spiar was still crying but her heaves were quieter now, and she was breathing evenly. Boden sat beside her and put out her arms and Spiar grabbed them. Their eyes had accustomed to the darkness now and the darkness broke with a strange film of half-light, floating across the walls and floor like a ghost seeking for a way out. They could see each other in lines of light. Boden put both her arms around her sister, trying to hold her wholly, trying to be as big and warm as she could be. She felt Spiar trembling against her, gripping her tightly, her cries slowing.

            “What do we remember?” Boden said.

            Spiar sucked back tears.

            “Spi? What do we remember?”

            Spiar tried to speak but her voice trembled.

            Boden said the words for her. “We remember that once there was a big blue sky. The sky had big white clouds that turned into animals and made faces that looked down on us. We remember that once the ground was covered in tall trees.”

            “And the trees had birds . . .” Spiar came in, her voice small.

            Boden squeezed her tighter.

            Then, together, remembering their mother’s words, her voice…

“The trees had birds and little bees and the birds sang songs and the bees gave out sweet honey. We remember that once the ground was full of food. Orange carrots and red tomatoes, berries blue and brown potatoes. We remember that once there was a bright light in the sky. The light gave all the warmth and strength to the world. It made the clouds glow, and the trees grow, and the birds sing. It gave us everything. That’s what we remember. Now, we are the light that is left. We must stay bright. We must remember, always.”

~

            In the grey dawn, the sisters packed up what little belongings they had into a rucksack and the makeshift beddings they rolled and tied with coil-reeds. They took their mother’s bones to the shoreline and laid her to rest in the great water. Then they turned from that place among the fisher-people and began the long walk across the flatness to the distant towers in the sky.

The End