What? Sam's posting something? It's true! This is part of the first few chunks of my NaNo that I will be posting in order to get it ready for various readers. I'm eternally grateful for any and all opinions.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In Persian, the name "Leila" means "moon beauty".
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Kabul
Leila’s body was a temple.
It had fallen into disrepair—sixteen years of life, seven years of war. Maybe in mathematical terms, that was a shame. But why be beautiful when your skin could tell stories? Dirt here, scars there—this script was more telling than tattoos, carved in deep where needles couldn’t reach.
She was a storyteller. Her father was a poet. He was also a banker, and a milkman, and a subversive. He was also terrible with numbers and words and milk and opposition. He may as well have been mute, but he made money, and as far as anyone was concerned, that was all a man needed to do. Like Leila, he had fallen apart—forty years of life, seven years of war, two wives, one of them deserted. That was Leila’s mother, the runaway. It was ironic that Leila couldn’t run. She wasn’t lame—not really. Wahid had put his teasing into verse:
My daughter, my lovely, lovely moon
Who trips over the sun as she rises!
It was ironic then that Leila, like her mother, would escape.
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The Promised Land
Tuesday was the day Isaac was going to have a new sister.
His parents had been talking about it for months, counting down the days—only seventy-four days until your new sister, Isaac!—and preparing the house like they were awaiting a teething puppy: putting valuables on high shelves, buying a television remote with bigger buttons, throwing out expired sour cream. They stopped short of coating table legs with Bitter Apple, and for that, Isaac was glad. They had done that when he turned four years old. That was back when he had a Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. As far as he was concerned, he had always been the same person. But when he began to eat bark and stopped talking altogether, he suddenly became New, Autistic Isaac—the hand-flapping monster who wandered the house and coughed up doctor’s bills that made his mother cry while she vacuumed.
It was those doctor’s bills that made him wonder whether or not he needed a new sister at all. New sisters were expensive. They warranted buying armloads of new clothes and schoolbooks and an extra jug of milk each week. This sister was particularly expensive because of where she came from—it cost money to put her in a plane and bring her all the way to Waverly. She came from a country far across the ocean, whose sandy rocks had embedded themselves in his father’s Army jackboots and fell like foreign hail when he clapped them out over the lawn. The first time he did that, he ran his thick fingers through the piles on the ground and looked almost sad.
He had known the new sister’s father when he had been stationed in Car Pool. That was the reason that Isaac had a new sister at all. Everyone seemed to think it was the work of the Lord, that two people so far away could call each other on the telephone and talk in loud voices, like people drowning in static--are you there? What? You're cutting out, are you there?
His Resource Specialist, Miss Smith, had brought a new sister home from across the ocean as well. Her new sister was tiny and had brown slit-eyes and looked nothing like Miss Smith at all. Isaac’s mother had informed him that his own new sister would be about the same age as his old sister.
But would she have slit eyes?
He pondered these questions as he dragged his backpack down to the City Transport stop on his family’s leg off the Interstate. The city had been kind enough to put up a plastic shield and graffiti-spattered benches to hold the farmers and meth addicts who took the bus into town each morning to do whatever it was they did. Isaac just liked to ride the bus. His body always felt like there was a rocket attached to his back, pushing him forward even when he was sitting down. Riding the bus was the only way to make sure the world caught up with his body.
Today, he would take the bus into the city and meet his family at the Agency. It was better than riding with his father, who took the back roads in their pickup truck. The car had bucked so hard one day when Isaac was five years old that he had bitten his tongue and tasted blood. When bad things happened to him, he took care to ensure that they never happened again. Sometimes, they happened. Statistically speaking, it wasn’t likely.
He made touchdown on the bench next to an old man in overalls and boots. Isaac’s hand made a refreshing smacking noise in the early morning fog. The air had been damp and cold in the morning recently, and it made cigarette-curls of vapor through his chapped lips—chapped even though his older sister Claire had rubbed Coconut Dream Gloss onto them. It tasted acrid, and he’d tried to wipe it off on the wall. It left a gooey pink smear that he had blamed on the cat.
The old man glanced at him. He used to glance at Isaac a lot more, but in recent months he had gotten used to his jerks, his clapping, the fact that he pulled on the strings of his hoodie because it rubbed against his neck. Sometimes there were other people at the stop, and over time, Isaac had learned this man’s name was Pete Maslowski, and he owned the corn fields two lots away from the Holdingtons, subsidized by Con-Agra. He also had a Labrador named Stacey who was more faithful to him than his wife had been—she had left him for a smooth-talking banker from Valparaiso. Pete wasn’t bitter. And besides, Stacey was expecting a litter.
Isaac shifted on the bench, pulling his Speech Cards out of his pocket and thumbing through their worn edges. Country people smelled differently than city people did. Pete and Isaac smelled like damp and thunderstorms and barn cats and rotting hay. City people smelled like perfume and exhaust and bubblegum and fresh newsprint. They also did not have to wait as long for their buses. Isaac dragged his Reeboks through the damp clay; they were black and the shoelaces were always coming untied and forming snowballs of brown along the ends. They began to peel away just as the gravel at the top of the road began to crunch. Like city people, he could always smell the bus coming—the exhaust, the slightly sweaty smell that leaked out from between windowpanes. It was white at the top but coated with mud, to the point where the sides, up close, looked like the surface of the moon. Lorn always drove on Tuesdays. Isaac could see his Cubs baseball cap from the tint on the windows.
Isaac covered his ears as the doors squealed open. Pete stuck his quarters into the slot and sat in the Priority Seating area, where only cripples and pregnant people were supposed to sit. Isaac wasn’t sure if Pete qualified, but pressed his ticket against the scanner and sat at the very back, where the heating fan licked at the tips of his hair. Lorn smiled at him in the rearview mirror. Isaac set his backpack on the seat next to him and waved back.
He pressed his cheek against the windowpane, watching out of the corner of his eye as steam snaked out from between his lips and coated the glass. His teeth rattled until the bus pulled onto the road and followed the loop all the way to the Interstate. It was still early; early enough for a pink sky and deserted stretches of thoroughfare. Haze hung over cornfields and wheatfields and pig pens, and dusted the bottom edges of directions to McDonald’s and Jesus: I Trust in You! billboards.
This was Isaac’s world.
It had the feeling of formal shoes—familiar but not fitting quite right. It had the feeling of home and of future at the same time.
He wasn’t sure if it could become his new sister’s world, at all.
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