Young Writers Society

Farcry

After it rains in the city, there are bodies in the lake beyond, washed away by the currents of the waterways. The fishers, with their eyes bright and narrow, see them bobbing from their boats, and they pick them up limper than frogs, strip them for their clothes, and burn them. The fishers are fire people, at heart.

At the edge of the lake is a boy with dark and narrow eyes, tangled, brackish hair. He has waded into the water, which is shallow enough that he can still see his feet. He is looking at his feet, which are half submerged in the gritty sand

The careless young of the big fish begin to join him, green-black jellies that settle skittishly at his ankles and will dart off at his slightest movement. They do not dart off now, as the boy has been wading in these waters many years now, and knows, in return for their company, not to move.

He holds in both knuckly hands a metal cup, the shine long gone from its facade, and if the fish were less careless, they would've looked up and seen its moon face above them, seen the shadow it cast. Perhaps, they would've seen the dark and narrow eyes lit with the brightest little lights at the deepest of their depths, calculating.

The boy's name is Naz, and in these moments the big fish, the old, wise creatures, turn their paths from him and from their children, for the water is unkind to its young.

"Papi!" The boy, Naz, calls, after, holding up his prize. His father is a bright-and-narrow-eyed fisherman, a thin spot in the distance, and he does not turn to look. Naz, with his stained cup and resigned, drawn mouth, splashes out of the shallows. The rolled-up edges of his pants are jaggedly wet, but he doesn't notice as he tramps back to his home,inland from the shale shore. Out of the water, he has the grace of a colt, working stiffly with his momentum against the ache in his knees that surfaces on damp days. Early this morning it had hurt so much he couldn't get up until late, but now it is a dull memory, and it, too, fails to distract him.

In the hut that is his home, he pours the jelly into the bucket that holds his bathwater. Naz watches it dart around and around until it settles at an edge, at which point he touches the surface of the water to set it swarming off all over again.

He continues this game for a long time, until the sun catches the little window of the house and sets the basin alight. He realizes that it is near noon, and runs as fast as he can back out onto the shore.

It is not really as fast as he can.

He falls onto the claybed, the beginning of the rocky beach inches from his face, and he lies there, stunned, awhile. He wishes that his knees could have hit the shale and shattered, that he could feel the blood and taste it and assure him that he was not weak, just clumsy. But his knees have hit only the soft, deep, sucking clay of the near inland, and when he tries to unearth himself, he finds that he is, that he is so weak.

"Naz?" says a voice, and Naz begins to cry, because it is his father, back for a midday break, whose soft fleet footsteps he can hear, pounding like heartbeats towards him, through the mud choking his ear. "Naz, are you alright?" Naz feels the older fishers surrounding his father with their grizzled beards and crinkled skin, and the young, just-men with their still-soft stubble on proud jutting chins, watching him with their rods slung over their shoulders in a cold silence. But Naz's father's hands are not cold as he lifts his son out of the clay and places him, standing, in front of him.

"Boy, what have we here," he says.

"Papi," Naz says. His eyes are averted and he is stiff, for trying to keep his lip from trembling. "I'm-"

"Here we have," Papi says, "A boy so hungry he nearly broke his neck for a bite. And he was not," he continues, hefting his net, which is visibly full of fish, and sweeping his bright-and-narrow-eyed grin at the other fishers, "misguided." He claps Naz on the shoulder as if Naz has done something right, and though that sinking, wet clay feeling has migrated quite uncomfortably to the pit of his stomach, he manages a shaky smile, to which the other men generously hurrah and disperse with their own catches.

"Ally! Come back here a moment," Papi calls back to a just-man, just leaving. Ally rolls his neck, annoyed, to look back at his senior.

"Take this back to the fires. Time you started with the dirty work." Naz's father says. He means the large, lumpy canvas bag at his feet, the contents of which Naz knows by now is too horrific to begin imagining. He imagines it anyway, wonders if the soft, bloated eyes are already eaten out, or hanging by mere sinews floating in the too-large sockets... he shakes his head, dispelling the spectre.

Ally makes a face.

"Al."

"Ugh, fine." Al rolls his eyes, rubs his neck. Can I keep the clothes? For my girl?" he asks, suddenly petulant. "She's not feeling too good lately."

"Just this time. Boil them."

"Yeah," Ally grumbles, and begins to drag the bag sullenly behind him, to the pit aways off of the village where the city's bodies are burned and buried.

“Now. Let’s get you cleaned up,” Naz’s father says, examining his son’s muddy face, whose eyes look much lighter against the black clay plastered on it. They are amber, positively orange, eyes.

Naz looks down sheepishly, seeing the black jelly at the edge of the basin in his mind's eye, circling. “That might not…” Tentatively, he begins to laugh, and Papi joins him without a reason of his own, because his father likes laughing so much, and laughs from his belly like there is a fire inside it, always looking for a chance to hiccup back into the air.