Sip

by Brian Allen Carr

  Mira’d been out hunting and this was early in that endeavor for her, most likely less than a year after her mother started demanding wild shade. Mira was maybe six then. Maybe seven. She couldn’t recall for certain. Murk was around her same age.

  Besides nearly dead, he was shadow-wasted, his eyes pitch, skin pale, disease of lust all about him. It was the first time he’d been that way. He drank his shadow just before it could be stolen. It wasn’t uncommon. It was better to be a shadow addict than become what Mira’s mother was—a beggared version of yourself, dependent on others.

  He’d been chased by a group of strange men, had sought refuge amongst the thorny trees, but, upon seeing that their pursuit would not be abated, he lowered himself to the earth and consumed the darkness that fell from his form.

  So, they hacked off his leg.

  They dragged him from the huizaches as much as he’d allow—his small hands doing their best to cling to the branches he hid amongst—and when Mira found him, Murk’s hands were pierced clear through by thorns, sticky with blood.

  She’d seen plenty of lack-limbed men and women, ambulating sickly through far-off fields as she hid herself behind the shrunken trees of the landscape.

  Stories had been told.

  She’d heard, though had never seen to prove it, that some device existed which, through science or magic, extended the life of these limbs, and that they dangled, removed from their owners but not dead and not rotting, in the sunshine to produce human shade to be consumed for a fee.

  There must have been a hellish quality to it—some condition of the machine that kept the limbs animate—which granted the dismembered elements the ability to regenerate darkness. Mira had taken from enough animals to know that, once sipped away, the darkness was gone forever. She had come across the same rabbit twice. She’d seen how in the sunlight their shadows were less dark than her own, paler because they’d been skimmed from. But Mira also understood that nothing about the world was absolute.

  When she found him, Murk was dying and deranged, the hackled meat of his absent leg perched upon by dozens of mad-buzzing flies.

  He tried biting Mira as she plucked his hands from the thorns.

  She’d never be able to entirely understand why she helped, why she took him home and treated him. Poured salt water on his hands. Lit a fire and cauterized his leg—her mother telling her how but not helping—wrapped his wounds with herbs and gauze. Let him lay near death on the floor of her home, and she wasn’t entirely certain he remembered all the good she’d done for him. It rarely came up in conversation, and he had never truly thanked her.

  When she was sure he’d live, she’d dragged him back to the thorns where she’d found him. For all she knew, he thought it was a bad dream, a sort of festering nightmare that he’d woken butchered and flubbed by.

  But they’d remained in some way linked. They seemed drawn to each other in the wilderness. He had a way of finding her, of earning her aid. She had flown him like a kite. She had dodged bullets for him that first time he sent her to the train. She had no idea why. He would ask some preposterous thing, and she’d oblige him. She’d listen to his rants. She’d tolerate his abuses. But she never told him the secrets of her own. Where she put her shadow, how she hid it. How she could sleep on her own even without one. And that stupid song he sang . . .

  “It doesn’t work,” said Mira.

  “What?” Murk would be singing, his black eyes transfixed as though performing for an imaginary crowd. His hips wagging in a sort of one-legged sex way.

  “Your song?”

  “Why not?” He’d go still.

  “Two suns would make two weaker shadows. That’s all.”

  “So . . .”

  “So it’d be the same as having one single shadow,” Mira said, her brown eyes riled as though she were saying some impossibly simple thing. “If anything, sing for a brighter sun.”

  Murk mimed a strangling gesture. “Sometimes,” he said, “I just can’t fucking stand you.”

  Mira thought the same thing.

  The evening the train was stopped and Bale cast out, Mira and Murk were together. They’d gone back to the train to contemplate it in tandem. There was no certain objective to this mission. They moved amongst the thorny trees, their clothes catching against the snagging limbs, watching the train’s circling with squinted eyes. Cicadas grumbled their quasi-mechanical static. A fluorescent hiss of a mating song. The lusty scent of mesquite sap dribbling.

  When the train’s brake was thrown, and the shrieking halt ensued, the two waited curiously.

  “Ever seen ’em do that?” asked Mira.

  “Nope.”

  They waited, watching.

  Quickly, Murk got bored. To pass the time, he snapped his fingers. If you did it right, it’d make the male cicadas come close. He liked pulling off their wings.

  There was an emptied-out cicada chrysalis on the tree trunk Mira leaned on. She plucked it off—its sticky legs and broke-open bulbous eyes. As Murk contemplated his snapping, glared around for coming bugs, Mira perched the thing in his locks, said, “There’s something in your hair.”

  Murk reached absently with his non-snapping hand, geeked out a bit when his fingers touched the discarded exoskeleton, said, “Meh,” and pawed at the thing like a spaz, stepping away until the crunchy remains were in his fingers. “Hilarious,” he said to Mira, and she was chuckling, and then they heard the bugle.

  “Is that music?” Mira asked.

  The train had stopped in such a position that Mira and Murk could see those gathered beyond.

  “Kind of,” said Murk.

  “Better than that song you’re always singing.”

  Murk poked Mira’s ribs.

  She was close enough to see her reflection in his blackened-out eyes.

  In the distance, someone stepped across the tracks.

  Murk tucked his messed hair behind his ears. “That boy’s naked,” he said. “And he’s running.”

  About that time, they started firing shots. The white rocks kicked dust. The bang-bangs of more gun blasts rang out and the naked guy picked up speed. The runner rolled, rose, and turned toward the trees.

  Bale in Exile

  Bale sat naked, his back to a mesquite trunk, huffing breath. The limbs of the thing draped down toward the ground, bends of them rested on the dirt. It was as though the tree was a bark-covered hand, roosted on its fingertips. The thumb was the trunk, the limbs the other fingers. Above, the canopy he took cover under, somehow the palm of the thing. He’d never been beneath a tree. He lounged in awe of it. He heard a few more shots. He inspected the rifle, ejected the magazine, counted the rounds. He’d half expected Drummond to leave a single bullet, a way out if he chose it, but his big brother had loaded up. Bale had fifteen shots. His feet ached, he had scrapes down his front, and he had to find food, water, and shelter. The wasteland of his life to come was, at that time, unimaginable. It’d be like trying to consider where you stand in relation to the universe while a house you’re trapped in is on fire. His balls dipped in the dirt. He could feel grass blades in his ass crack.

  Mira, Murk, and Bale

  From where she was, Mira could see it was Bale. She and Murk were hidden from his view. They had split up, she and Murk. They lurked behind trees, fully camouflaged.

  “Why’d you leave the train?” she asked.

  Bale aimed toward her. “Mira?”

  “I came out to ask you something. Yesterday. You shot. You missed. That why?”

  “I missed on purpose,” said Bale. “And, yeah, I guess partly.”

  Mira paused to think it through. She picked an acorn from the ground. She was beneath a live oak, and acorns were scattered everywhere, dropping from the branches every minute or so. Bale had his gun. Murk camped where he was. Mira was thinking.

  If you’ve never seen an aco
rn, it has two main parts—the cupule and the nut. The cupule’s like a little hat, designed to fall away from the hard shell that covers the fruit, and Mira picked this off, set it on the tip of her pinky, wagged the finger like a little performer with a cap on. She contemplated the naked nut then, rolled it in the palm of her other hand. She took the cupule from her pinky, seated it back on the nut. She took it off. Set it back again. “Murk,” she hollered, but Murk didn’t answer. “Murk,” she hollered again.

  “What?”

  “Throw him your jacket.”

  Bale felt better in the jacket, but his feet still throbbed. He had Mira’s canteen, and if he raised it too high, his naked parts showed. Mira turned away and Murk snickered a bit as the stream of water running from the canteen slowed, and Bale held his tongue out as the last beads of water dropped.

  “I know the feeling,” said Murk, but Bale thinned his eyes, lowered the canteen, didn’t understand him.

  “They made you leave?” Mira asked.

  “Yeah.” Bale tried to drink again from the drained canteen. The thing huffed emptily when he pulled it from his lips. He checked the ground around her, “Because . . .” but, in his investigating, he could not find Mira’s shadow. “It’s gone again?”

  Murk laughed, “She never shows it. Keeps it hid.”

  “Back there she had one that could turn off and on. Only one like it I ever saw.”

  “She what?” Even black-eyed bastards get their feelings hurt some, and if you were there you would have felt the air go weird.

  No one spoke. A kiskadee called its steady, trill peal. Acorns dropped. Ground skinks flittered through loose leaves and debris.

  Bale must have felt the mood drift a bad way. He threw Mira her canteen back.

  Bale’s eyes moved from Mira to Murk, Murk to Mira.

  He considered their hair.

  “I got the same haircut as my brother too,” he said. “All the guys in the dome do. No choice to it. Girls have different haircuts. I mean, they all have the same haircut, but it’s different from the boys.” Bale kind of touched his head as he talked and Murk closed his eyes.

  “I’m growing it out,” Murk said. “It’s gonna be to here,” he said, rubbing his fingers just below his shoulders. He wore a gray T-shirt that was half eaten by moths, cotton so thin you could see his nipples straight through it.

  “He thinks you’re my brother.”

  “You’re not?” said Bale.

  “God no,” said Mira. “I’d have to kill myself.”

  “Guys in the other train town had different hair,” Murk said. “Long on top and combed over. Shaved on the sides. I had mine a bit like that when I was younger. Mira would cut it for me. She’s got clippers. Remember?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Other train town?” said Bale.

  Murk gained his bearings. “Yeah, there’s a few. One east of here.”

  “How far?”

  “Half day’s walk, I guess.”

  “Can you show me?” It was really just a nervous question Bale asked, but once it was said aloud, he felt he had to justify his asking it. “I know there’s other domes. Didn’t realize they were sending out trains too.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  It was quiet then. Bale’s toes were bleeding.

  Drummond Left Behind

  Drummond breathed deep the calming outdoor air. He raised his binoculars, scoured the countryside, saw nothing of consequence. When he climbed down from the tower, Flamsteed was there.

  “You know we have to detain you. It’s only for a short time,” Flamsteed said.

  Drummond stared into the captain’s eyes.

  Drummond and Flamsteed entered a car of the train, followed by three others. Most of the train was empty. The captain and a few other superiors kept quarters there. The engineers who operated the train lived aboard. And there were holding cells. They made their way down a corridor to one of these. The captain spun a wheel on the cell door’s front and Drummond heard a lock release. The door was eased open, sang rustily, and Flamsteed said, “I’m going to have to search your person. For your own safety.”

  The cell was dark, rust scented. “For my safety?”

  “Under periods of isolation suicidal ideation is common and if you have a weapon, or some semblance of weaponry, your thoughts might chance into dark terrain.”

  Drummond raised his hands over his head in anticipation of a pat down.

  The captain frowned. “I’m afraid that won’t be sufficient.”

  Drummond was puzzled.

  “Your clothes,” said the captain. “I’ll need you to disrobe.”

  Drummond stepped naked into the dark, dank room. He heard the captain clank the door closed behind him, heard the lock spin, heard it catch a metallic latch and the click of it echoed in the darkness.

  He slouched in the gloom, sagged to the ground. After a while, the train began to move.

  In the dark, Drummond’s mind twisted visions from imagined colors. He watched with eyes open in the stark, shuttered-off world as figments of Bale knelt beneath a mesquite tree, toyed with his rifle.

  He checked the walls around him. They were steadfast. He jumped for the ceiling but couldn’t touch it.

  There was no way out. He knew. He knew before he started. The investigation was futile but he needed to assure his mind.

  Ghastly

  Bale fantasized his surroundings were some kind of make-believe. Foreign images. Newfangled smells. Nothing triggered memory. Moving on aching, bare feet behind Murk and Mira, he wondered if his new acquaintances would feel as overwhelmed in the dome. But he decided it wouldn’t be the same. They’d feel confined. Why wasn’t the opposite true for him? He didn’t feel free, let out of a cage. He felt weighted down by the vastness of it all.

  “Where we going?”

  “To Mira’s,” Murk said.

  “We’ll get you dressed there. In my father’s old clothes. Need to rest a minute?”

  Bale’s green eyes shocked in their sockets. “No,” he said. “Just wish I had shoes.”

  On they moved, through odors foreign to Bale. Sweet and damp. Clean and heavy.

  In the distance, the sun was halved by the horizon. The light of the world went orange, became laced with the dark outlines of tree limbs. Birds sang their clucking language. Insects chirped and jingled tunes.

  “We don’t have far to go,” said Mira. Then, “Just through those trees.”

  “Should you bring anything back?” Murk asked. “For your mom?”

  “Probably. Keep an eye out.”

  “There’s a green jay, on that branch there.”

  “I hate taking from small birds.”

  It seemed Bale was listening to alien language.

  “Under the conditions,” said Murk, “don’t think you should be picky. We can’t really take our half-naked friend here hunting the countryside.”

  Mira knelt to dirt, watched the bird shadow dance with the mild breeze. She traced the tree-cast darkness on the ground, zeroed in on the bird’s shape. “Sorry,” she said toward it, then, carefully, she sipped up a bit, changing the darkness just before it disappeared, the bird, having felt the molestation, leaving its perch by batting its wings, taking to the sky.

  “What was that?” asked Bale, but Mira, whose cheeks were now slightly bulging, only shook her head and they moved forward. “What’d you do?” Bale asked again.

  “Just watch,” said Murk, and the three moved on into the mesquite forest that housed Mira’s home.

  There, they followed Mira to the porch where her mother sat, pale. Her eyes oddly tired, her countenance jittery. Ghastly, you might’ve called her.

  “Evening,” Murk said to her, and the woman replied a kind of nonsensical utterance.

  Mira lowered her face to her mother’
s. The two touched lips. The woman fell to sleep instantly, her tiny face aiming off at nothing as her head slumped toward her shoulder. “Shade trading,” Mira said. “I guess that’s what you’d call it. Her shadow was stolen. She can’t sleep without it.”

  Bale’s pretty teeth in Bale’s hung-open mouth.

  Mira did the best she could, but her father was smaller than Bale. She rummaged drawers, rooted through closets. In the end, Bale wore a dark denim shirt, pants of the same material and boots of brown leather with yellow nylon strings. A laborer’s kind of uniform, it seemed to him. Sleeve cuffs at his forearms. Pant hems at his calves.

  “How’s it feel?” Mira asked.

  “Like I’m wearing someone else’s clothes.” He seemed a goat in an outfit for house cats. “Snug but whatever.” Mira had also found him sleeping things. Shorts too small for him. A ratty kind of V-neck that barely reached his hips. Bale hoisted these clothes. “I’ll wear these others for now,” and he made his way back to a bathroom he employed as his changing station. It was Mira’s, the bathroom. Girl colors and pretty smells. Bale had to fight the urge to hunt around. He didn’t know what he’d look for, exactly, but it seemed such a personal space that there had to be good secrets there.

  The sleeping clothes were maybe even snugger. When he went back to the heart of the house, Murk was seated in a shabby recliner.

  “Hey, hey,” Murk said, and motioned with his finger for Bale to do a twirl, but Bale didn’t. “So we’re not going tonight?” said Murk. He had taken off his leg and sort of cradled it across his chest.

  “Going?” said Bale.

  “See the other train, if you still want to.”

  Bale had forgotten. “I do,” he made some unintelligible gesture, “but, yeah, I’m tired anyhow.” He didn’t know where to sit. Nervousness kept his mouth running. “Just wanna know what they’re like. Back home, we’d talk about the other domes. They were numbered. Well, numbered and lettered. I was in B3. Always said that A9 had the prettiest girls, C2 was supposed to be nothing but deaf folks. Don’t know if any of that’s true. Don’t know where all that came from. I just kind of wanna see, y’know, what they wear, I guess.”