Sundered Bones [Prop / Vasco]

v a s c o

I don't wanna be stoned
I don't wanna be stoned anymore
Don't wanna be alone
Don't wanna be alone anymore

Rain came down yesterday. Brought rolling thunder and flashes of white lightning across gray clouds overhead. Shedding rain as though their drops were angry at the specks of dirt underneath our feet. Whole hours where the drum of it clanged against the metal roofs and shot streams out of gutters and into the street. Flood warnings went out in the southernmost part of the district where the earth lays flat like a man on his side, not ready to get up. We sent out a radio call to take shelter up in the justice building where we turned out offices to make cots and the magistrates chambers to a mess hall.

I spent half the day between dispatches of people surveying the lowlands for stragglers and fetching any available boats – in case floods trapped those in their homes or some got washed out – and serving the porridge and bread we had put together in the mess hall. This was the sort of work that I could disappear into. I became nameless in grief when the hushed families were too worried about their livelihoods to pay any sort of mind to me being mayor. No need for any sort of deference when one kept imagining their whole world having disappeared under murky brown waves.

Listening to people talk about what they’ve lost had a way of creating a little halo, a light to reflect on all the rest of your life. Not to get down to thinking at least it isn’t so bad, since silver linings fray and tarnish. But that if you really listen, and hold your breath, you can understand the pauses between each of their sentences. How when someone doesn’t have to speak out their grief for you to know that it’s suffering of the soul. To lose everything you’ve ever known is to sink under those same brown murky waves without sight of the surface.

Sometimes it’s enough to want to hold there, to sink under water and wonder if you wait long enough, the fire in your lungs will burn out.

I didn’t pity them, not for what might’ve been lost. More that all of us live in a world where the greatest good is to live a long life hoping not to lose ourselves. Imagine, living forty, fifty years with just enough, only to see it all washed away. And some might say it’s selfish to miss all those little things, of photos at the nightstand, or that little baby tooth you’d kept from your daughter, but when you get old enough, you recognize there’s more than people that can’t be replaced. All those memories that we’re supposed to carry on can fade, especially out under a hot sun and cracked earth.

Six died.

Someone had whispered in my ear that he’d gone out and while it’d been quick, meant eleven was out of the eighty-eighth.

I served a few more plates of porridge and biscuits before I’d tipped my hat and excused myself from the make-shift mess hall.

Rain still came down crossways as I rode off toward where the O’Malley’s farm. I could’ve waited for a bus to take me (though there’d have been a transfer and with the state of the roads, not as likely to have been passable) but something had told me I needed to get to them as soon as I could.

Nothing’s so important as to let someone else know you’re there for them. And even after all that I’ve seen, the selfishness of the capitol, of other districts or men in my own family, I believe there’s a better side we’ve yet to see. I get that there’s bad people, and a whole system that people try to use to pull one another down. Crabs in a bucket, as I like to say – no one seems to like anyone else to do better – but that doesn’t mean I have to keep following the same path.

Every last drop of rain seemed to whip across my fast as I charged on horseback, fighting through the storm. My hands numbed as they clutched at the reins, head down while I galloped along.

Maybe it’s a futile effort to hold out my hand, to expect anything I could do would change the world we’ve made. Eight long years and it doesn’t feel any safer, any better for my daughter. But then I remember the people of Eleven during the fires two years ago, and Katelyn working to make things right. We were a lot stronger hand in hand than standing on our own.

I turn the old mare around at the edge of the drive and steady to jump down into the gravel. My boots hit a puddle and I’m up to my ankles in mud. I couldn’t help but laugh as I steadied a walk toward the little farmhouse. The rains slowed to a drizzle and I held at the front porch.

“Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley?!” I called out, my voice hoarse, as though the hours I’d spent riding had scratched it bare. “Hello? I – I came as soon as I’d heard. I wanted to…” help, I wanted to say, as though the word were ever strong enough for fresh grief, “See you all, to bring you what I could for the next few days.”

I’d never used my mayor’s salary for anything other than to give away. Some just needed it more than I thought I ever would.