along the road, ephemeral

Salwah is, as she tells Apocope at length and with gusto from where she stalks three paces behind him, far too busy for this. Freshly eighteen, headed into her last months of high school, she has high hopes. If she wants to get anywhere—if she wants to build something better for herself—she can't waste study time meandering side streets like a weirdo with her kid sister.

Every five steps, Apocope's feet stutter. He wants to whirl back to ask whether she doesn't notice or simply doesn't mind the shadows that cross their parents' faces when she says things like that. I get it, he could say—what else are all his plans but the same escapist dreams, half desperate and half condescending?—but Silksharp, at least I know I'm ungrateful.

He lets it rest. Today isn't about Salwah, or even about him; it's about the Reaping and the frozen moments between Gloria drawing a slip and calling someone else's name. It's about the image, fleeting and overpowering as a premonition, of Sal living out her life thinking he decided to blow their last words on a prank—of her giving up one wrong alley away, or finding the right place only to miss Dog by seconds and a flash of vanishing light. Things won't be so drastic when he leaves—he has plans for that—but the idea won't leave his dreams alone.

Even so, he can't pretend he doesn't find a little satisfaction in holding a hand behind him and telling her, "You need to shut up."

She puffs up. "Excuse—"

"Trust me!"

She rolls her eyes, but she does it without comment. Apocope keeps his eyebrows raised at her for a few seconds, waiting to see whether she'll find another complaint, then turns, rolls his shoulders, and whistles.

Only in his own echo does it occur to him that Dog might not even be there. Sometimes he ends up eating the food he brings on his own; she could be out scavenging, or whatever else she does out there, and he should have explained ahead of time, he'll never hear the end of it if he dragged Sal here for an empty alley—but Dog hasn't let him down yet, and she doesn't start now. Apocope lets out a breath he didn't notice himself holding at the familiar scrape-click-scrape of her nails, and grins outright as her nose pokes out of the hole in the rickety old shop she's claimed as home.

"Oh," Sal says.

He grins wider.

Dog's ears go back at a stranger's voice, but she still comes out, curving wide to settle by Apocope without getting any closer to Salwah than she has to. "Hey, girl," he says as he kneels to meet her, laughing a little as her tail finally kicks into a wag.

"She's beautiful." When he glances over, Salwah sits cross-legged where he told her to stop walking. "Is th—are those carrots?"

"Yeah, she likes 'em." He waits until Dog pulls the first one from his fingers, then leans as far over as he can without falling to hold the cheesecloth out to Sal. "Here, she'll probably come to you for one."

She takes one. Sure enough, Dog follows the food; she moves cautiously, and stays only long enough to snatch the carrot before returning to the person she knows, but it's enough to light Sal's eyes up. "Is this why you've been sneaking out?"

She says it lightly, but he freezes. "You noticed?"

"Of course I noticed," she says with another more matter-of-fact roll of her eyes, "I'm not Karim. Don't worry, I haven't told our parents. And I won't," she adds to Dog in a lilting coo that Apocope hasn't heard from her in as long as he can remember, "will I, sweet thing?" Dog, still poking around Apocope's lap for more carrots, ignores this entirely, but Sal takes no offense. "No, you're too pretty, right? Of course, look at those ears. And look how calm you are, did you know you're the best dog ever?"

"You say that about every dog," Apocope says, smiling again without looking at her.

"It's true about every dog, wallah." She grins soppily at Dog for one more moment before glancing back up at him. "What's her name?"

He shrugs. "I'm calling her Dog."

Sal pinches her face and says, in the tone that made Apocope and then Karim stop asking her for help with their homework, "You can't just name her Dog. What if Maman and Baba called us both—"

"Maybe she has one, okay?" he snaps over her, so suddenly and venomously that Dog puts her ears back again and huffs in a way that would have startled him halfway down the alley a few months ago. "You don't know, you—you can't just give someone a name."

Salwah stares. The rush of fury vanishes as quickly as it arrived, leaving Apocope small and shaking in its wake. "I'm just saying," he finishes, ducking his head as though breaking eye contact will protect him from being seen. "We don't know."

In the long beat that follows, he hopes she'll let it go. He should know by now that he's never that lucky. "Where'd that come from?"

"Uh." He keeps his eyes firmly on Dog, who in the absence of further angry voices has relaxed her ears. Telling her was easy. "It's, um. Like." Salwah makes an impatient noise. "I'm going by Apocope. At school."

He would, if he knew anyone there well enough to tell them to use it, so it doesn't count as a lie.

"What kind of n—" Whatever his face does, it stops Salwah in her tracks. "Oookay. Ap... Apoc—?"

"Apocope."

"Apocope." She stews on that for a moment, watching Dog's tail whir back to full speed. "Do you want to tell me why?"

The ends of his hair brush over his shoulder as he turns away, scratching Dog's shoulder absently with a hand so close to his face that his fingers turn into fuzzy blobs. Yeah. "No."

The next pause takes longer. He expects her to press the point, but in the end she only asks, with an awkward approximation of gentleness, "You okay?"

No. "Yeah."

Beyond his fingers, his gaze settles on cracked brick. A tiny plant grows through one fissure, clinging to its home with all the strength of its fresh, fragile life but already browning at the edges in the late autumn chill. In the rustle of her jacket sleeve behind him he can all but see Salwah reaching out, hesitating with her hand suspended between them, never quite making contact.

She tries, his sister. Whatever else, she always tries.



at some point I'll thread this kid proper-like, but in the meantime here's another oneshot connected to the first one, because he's on a timeline and I meant to pull this scene together right after the Reaping but then the Games happened

title song is, again, "Animal Life" by Shearwater: the wandering association / murmurs in the dark confessional / and rides along the road, ephemeral / as an animal life.