A story from Dreams of Earth

That Annihilated Place

by Ali Jamalzadeh

Fiction · about a 25-minute read

The tide runs out at dusk, and Isa Keju watches it go from the top of her father’s pole. The pole stands in the outer flat, driven into the sand before she was born, its crossbar worn smooth by two generations of thighs. The silver fish come off the flats in ropes. Her spear goes down and comes up wriggling. She is not watching the fish.

It is there again. Far out, at the world’s edge, a landmass dancing in the hot air. The old people say the heat dreams it. But she has watched it for eleven years, and the heat always dreams the same dream, in the same place, in the same season. She squints until her eyes sting. It holds. A far land. Another place.

She eats apart, her back against a palm, while the village goes dark around her. In her hut she lies awake, listening to the palms handing the wind along, one crown to the next, all the way down the beach.

In the black before dawn she works her way down the beach, silent as a crab. She slips past the moored canoes and unties a raft. Into it goes the sack she has been filling for a year: coconuts, dried fish, a gourd of water, a knife. She pushes out over the water.

Past the break she turns once. Her island gathers itself behind her, a low dark mound with everyone she has ever known asleep inside it. The sun comes up at her back. For the first time in her life she does not look over her shoulder before drawing her necklace out from under her shirt. It is the first thing her freedom buys. On the cord hangs a toy plane of sun-bleached plastic, fat and cheerful as a puffed-up bird, its paint long since licked away by salt, the only piece of the old world she has ever touched. She wraps her fist around it and sets her jaw at the horizon.

The setting sun brings the storm. She watches the water go the color of an old bruise before the wind arrives all at once, and the sky moves to close over her. Lightning strobes the sheets of rain into walls of white stone. Then the weight lifts from her stomach as the sky tips, and she loses consciousness in the churning black water.

She wakes the next morning washed up on shore. Severely dehydrated, blood caked on her forehead, lips split, hair threaded with kelp and seagrass. The pulsing waves against her body. The arrival of small feet, slapping the wet sand at a run. Jebro, the chief’s grandson, shouting her name up the beach. Then the adults, their hands, the sky swinging as they lift her. That weightlessness again in her stomach, the same mixture of disappointment and relief, and the same blackness takes her.

The blackness dissolves to memory. Walking the surf line with her mother, hunting shells. Something standing in the waves. Gleaming, serene in the wash. A heavily eroded plane engine, washed up from the old world. But she did not understand that then. All she knew of it was its beauty, the kind of beauty only terror can produce. She reached in awe to touch the rusted scalloped fan blades, packed dense as the leaves of an unfurling lotus, and her mother caught her wrist so hard the shells jumped out of her fist, and dragged her up the beach at a run, Isa craning back at the flower the whole way. In the morning it was gone.

Then another memory. The sun laying itself gently down behind the waves, the water going copper against the sky. Her mother blowing heat into the cookfire, ready for fish and laughter. A raft appeared at the edge of the surf, and her mother stood up smiling. Isa watched the smile die by degrees as her mother understood what it meant that the men were paddling so hard. Two of them dove off and swam ahead, ran past the women into the village, and came back with the doctor while the raft was still crossing the break. The men lifted a shape off it that hung between their hands the way no living man hangs. Her mother screamed and ran into the water, and other hands held her there, screaming, while the doctor knelt over Isa’s father on the sand, pressed two fingers under his jaw, waited, and sat back, and shook his head once. The raft was hauled out of the waves onto the sand, and one of the men held up a stingray that had come in with it, by way of explanation.

Isa watched it all in confusion. Then the understanding settled in her stomach like a stone, and she felt only rage. She ran on her squat little legs to the water’s edge, screaming her kicks and punches into the indifferent waves until she lost her balance and fell crying in the shore break. Hunched on all fours, hands sunk to the wrists in wet sand, her eyes blurry with tears blinked open in surprise. A small plastic plane, fat and cheerful, bobbing in the lacy foam, weaving playfully between her arms and thighs.

Isa wakes from the blackness under a thatched ceiling that is not her own. Three days since the sea threw her back. Mohi Loeak sits beside her. The same man who knelt over her father and pronounced his death, older now, greyer, more gaunt than he should be. He looks relieved, and smiles warmly. She bends her neck and winces at its stiffness.

“I guess I didn’t make it.”

“Lucky you didn’t.”

“Does the chief know?”

“Of course.”

She leans back and closes her eyes, deflating into her misery. Mohi reassures her.

“I have asked him to ignore your little expedition.”

“Oh? Why would you do that?”

“I have some work you can help me with here.”

She narrows her eyes at him.

“Besides, in your condition you are not fit to fish.”

She struggles to sit up and finds her arms wobbly beneath her.

“Fine, I’ll grind your herbs. Not that they helped my parents when they needed you.”

Mohi drops his eyes and nods.

“Death pays little attention to our begging now. The doctors who could negotiate with death are all lost to the past.”

She sneers. “So instead we have superstition and ritual to keep us company while we wait, suffocating on this island, pretending the world ends at the reef.”

“What do you imagine is out there? It must be very fine, if it is worth dying for.”

She looks around nervously. He reassures her.

“It is all right; you are a doctor’s assistant now. My privileges extend to you.”

She reaches to her chest and panics. Her face goes mean and her eyes dart to him like a snake. He smiles and points to a wooden bowl beside the bedding. She finds her necklace in it, puts it on, and breathes.

She struggles up and walks on unsteady legs, before crumpling into the wicker chair next to the hut door, and watches the shore through the swaying palms. Something she has always held, feels emptied.

“The ocean is a ring of death choking this place. Draining the life out of it like a slow illness. Every year the people get meaner, sicker, and more lonely. When I was a girl there were two women in the village who could not carry a child. Now it is nearly half of us. I don’t know what is out there. Maybe the world beyond is death like the others say. But if death comes for me, I won’t be lying at its feet, waiting in this place.”

While she speaks he moves around the hut, gathering things wrapped in cloth.

“Your problem is not death, and it is not this island. Not being able to carry a child does not mean you cannot carry a purpose. Mine is to negotiate with death on behalf of our people. My abilities are weak, as you have noticed. But I am the only doctor the village has. I learned everything I know from my father, who learned from his father, who learned it from a man who came from beyond the waters, in the time of the old world.”

Isa bristles at mention of the old world, glancing around anxiously. He reassures her.

“As a doctor such things are not forbidden to me. Or to you, now.”

He resumes.

“This man had skin as white as coconut flesh. If he stood outside under the sun uncovered, his skin would blister and burn like grilled fish. He brought with him items from the world beyond this island.”

He kneels and unwraps the bundles on the mat between them.

“These belonged to that man.”

Isa’s eyes work slowly and carefully across a heavily rusted wristwatch. Cracked reading glasses. A swollen journal. A fountain pen, and a small worn bible with a cross pressed into its leather. She shrinks at the mark. Even she knows its meaning: the death god’s sign, arriving in the surf on the burnt remains of the old world. Unaware of her own movements, she reaches for the journal, opens it, and stares in wonder at the inked script.

“His people had a way of putting speech onto paper. It would still be possible to know what the man said even now, so many years after his death. My father spoke his words in here as well. I can tell where the marks are shaped a little differently. That is my father’s voice. He is still speaking to me with those marks.”

Isa holds the inked pages to her ear with wonder.

“What do the words say?”

“I do not know. I was a boy, and the sun was out, and my father was too gentle a man to beat the studying into me. He died young. Like yours.”

Mohi sits quiet, observing some silent eulogy inside himself.

“In his last year, when he understood that death was coming, and that I would never hear the paper, he stopped teaching me marks. He drew. Wherever a page held a thing that could save a life, he made a small picture beside it.”

He turns to a page where, beside the rows of marks, someone has drawn a fish with a stroke through it, the drawing of a careful man who is not a drawer of things.

“This page speaks of the fish that carry the spell in their flesh. I know it because the drawing tells me. I know twenty pages this way. The rest are mute to me…” Isa looks up at his sudden stopping. His mouth pressed firm, his eyes glassy and sad in a way that pulls the breath out of her. “All that he knew, and tried with his love to teach me, is somehow gone, though I hold his voice in my hands. I have no one to share what little I carry from him, and so little wisdom to offer the village. You cannot blame them for being scared and superstitious.”

He gently closes the journal and turns it over with a reverence and intimacy that makes Isa embarrassed to have witnessed it. “I will have to burn it before I die. If the others found it they would say I have been inviting death into the village all these years.”

Isa sits in the weight of his silence before reaching out, cautious, to pick up the glasses like a delicate insect, marveling at the light refracting through the cracked lens. She looks up, holding eye contact with Mohi for the first time. He smiles.

“Keep them, if you like. And the part about being my assistant was a story for the chief, so he would go easy on you while you mend. When you are strong, go back to your fish.”

His throat catches and he falls into a long coughing fit. Isa looks at him, concerned. He catches her worried look and waves it away.

“It is nothing. I am not used to talking so much. I will make us some tea out of berry skins while you rest.”

He struggles to straighten, and she puts the glasses down and hurries to help him. He tries to wave her off but lets her. Her own legs fail her though, and for a moment the two of them hang on each other in the middle of the hut, each one sinking, each one hauling the other up, laughing, which helps nothing. She catches him falling and lands him in the chair she was sitting in.

She begins moving with confidence through his pantry. She pulls out the mortar and pestle, and starts on the tea he was going to make her. Berry skins and something grey she does not ask about. He watches her work, smiling like a man who has gotten away with something.

Neither of them ever says the word apprentice. She grinds, and boils, and carries, and stays.

He teaches her fish first, because fish is where the dying usually starts. The open sea is honest: anything from the deep water beyond the reef can be eaten without a thought. It is the reef that lies. Never the big old ones from the lagoon’s south mouth, where the spell sleeps longest in the oldest flesh. A doubted catch is laid out on a flat stone, its liver beside it, and you watch whether the flies will land. Flies that refuse are a warning. You cut the tail and read how the blood runs. Flesh that goes soft within an hour of death is a confession. And last there is the tomcat, one-eared, belonging to no one, fed by everyone, who eats first from every doubtful fish, and then the village waits on him while the shadows walk a hand’s width across the sand.

“He has been wrong twice,” Mohi says, scratching under the cat’s chin. “Both times we buried men anyway.”

“Then why keep rules that lie?”

“The rules are not gods. They are nets. A net does not catch everything, and a net with holes still feeds a village.”

To reach the paper map he first lifts down an older thing that shares its place in the rafters: a flat lattice of thin sticks tied where they cross, a small white shell knotted here and there, stiff as a scrap of dried net. A wave chart, he says, from before the paper came. The men who tied them could lie blind in the bottom of a canoe and know where they were by the way the sea knocked. No one alive can read it. He sets it down gently all the same, out of the way.

The paper map he spreads between them is a drawing of the island, circles inked across its southern half, each circle traced over an older, fainter circle, his father’s copy of his grandfather’s copy. He puts his finger among the circles.

“These grounds are under a spell from the old world. Inside the circles the game is thick and the fruit hangs heavy, because no one hunts there, and no one picks. That is the trap of it. Stay a day inside and you will sicken by nightfall, and know to leave, and count yourself taught. But the spell is patient. Walk its edges for a season, and the sores come. The burns that rise with no fire. The children born wrong, or not at all. It cannot be seen. It cannot be smelled or tasted. It keeps no calendar you can learn, and it cannot be begged, because it is not listening. And it does not stay inside my grandfather’s circles. The whole island wears it thin, like smoke from a fire no one can find. That is why every year there are fewer of us, and why the fewer are sicker. All we can do is keep far from where it burns hottest.”

She looks at the circles a long time, and when she speaks it is not defiance, it is arithmetic.

“Then we should all leave.”

“Everything the sea sends us says the same thing: the world beyond this island belongs to death. In the end they were unable to bargain with their god. Our village is all that is left. We are now the soundless shapes drawn onto a paper no one can read.”

He spreads the paper flat with the full sweep of his arm. “Do not judge the others for their superstitions. Their fear is their attempt to understand their dying. It is our job as doctors to understand it as well, and to keep our people going. My twenty pages of pictures are not enough, so I pick the potent medicines from inside the circles. Borrowing from death in this way is the best way I know to help our people. But it has invited him into my body. Soon he will take me, and I have no one to pass on what little knowledge I have.”

Mohi sighs performatively and looks sideways at her. She returns a sarcastic smile.

“If you are going to die on me and leave me to take care of these idiots, then at least entertain me with stories of the old world.”

He fills her nights with them. Stars that came loose from their moorings and fell for years, dragging slow white scars across the dark, littering the world’s far edges with glowing bones. Ships with no crews, tall as islands, that wandered the currents for a lifetime before the reefs took them. The sun-bleached cabin of a flying machine that came ashore on the south beach when his father was young. It is the doctor’s work to disappear such things quietly, before the village can panic. She thinks of the metal flower she could not help but reach for, and of her mother running, and understands at last who her mother ran to fetch, and says nothing.

Finally Mohi tells her the oldest story he keeps. Passed from his grandfather to his father to him, repeated so many times the words have worn smooth as steps.

“Before the war, the white men kept their god’s fire on this island. The south end was theirs. There were fences, and pits, and at the last they poured a great grey hill of stone over what they had buried, round as a turtle’s back, and no one may walk on it to this day. Their boats came and went for years. Low in the water coming in, high going out.”

“Then one morning a second sun rose in the west. It burned the eyes and made no warmth. The ground swayed like the deck of a raft, and the thunder came, one clap that did not end, and the old men said the world’s war had begun again. And in the afternoon it began to snow. No one had ever seen snow, but the white man had told of it: how it falls small and soft out of the sky, how the children of his country catch it on their tongues. So when the white powder came falling out of a clear sky, the children ran out to catch it on their tongues. They played in it until dark. They rubbed it into their hair to make themselves old men, and chased each other laughing down this beach.” He is quiet a moment. “By evening their skin burned as if they had lain all day in the sun. Within a week their hair came away in their fists. The ones who played longest died soonest, and the ones who lived carried the spell in their blood, and passed it to their children, the way we pass down our eyes. There was no curse on this island before that morning. His grandfather swam every water of it as a boy, and nothing in any of them ever hurt anyone.”

Her mother took two years to die. She was strong, and then she was thin, and then came the sores that would not close. Isa was twelve, and gathered her mother’s hair off the sleeping mat each morning before her mother woke, and buried it behind the hut, every morning, for the last year. The village had reasons before the first rains came. She had grilled a doubted fish and cheated the tomcat’s wait. She had walked the south beach on a wrong moon. She had touched something, mocked something, offended something. Everyone was certain, and no two of them were certain of the same thing. Isa asked the doctor, back then, which rule her mother had broken. He was the only person on the island who did not have an answer, and she hated him for it, at twelve, with her whole heart. She is only now old enough to understand that his silence was the most honest thing anyone said that season.

Now she counts. It starts small, a habit with no name. A row of white shells on the sill of the doctor’s hut, one shell for each family that nets the lagoon’s south mouth. When someone in a family sickens, she turns that family’s shell over. A second row for the families that fish the north. Season by season the turned shells gather in the south row and stay scarce in the north one, and she moves them apart, and watches them gather again. There is no word in her world for what she is doing.

Mohi finds the rows one evening. He looks at them a long time, says nothing, and does not tidy them away. Later that night, sitting by Isa, turning the journal’s pages by the fire, he stops at a page that is nothing but columns, small marks ruled in patient lines, page after page of them.

“He counted too,” he says. “The white man. Fish, days, rains, the sick, the dead. Column after column, right to the end.”

“Why?”

“I think he was trying to see the shape of the spell.”

She looks at the shells on the sill, white in the firelight, and something in her chest turns over like a swell crossing a reef.

The village does not soften toward her. If anything, the doctor’s hut gathers the old whispers into one place and gives them a roof. She hears the shape of it in the words that stop when she comes near.

The births are the worst of it. There are not many anymore, and she attends them all, because Mohi’s hands have begun to tremble and hers do not. On a night thick with rain she kneels a long time over a fire-warmed mat and does everything right, and it is not enough, and the child comes soundless into her hands and stays that way. The mother turns her face to the wall. The grandmother, singing against death since dusk, stops singing, and her eyes cross the fire and find Isa the way you find the crack a snake went into. Isa washes the small body herself, since no one else moves to.

The mushrooms Mohi favors grow along the circles’ western edge, and gathering them is her work now, because his legs will not carry him so far. She failed, over many nights, to convince him that she should sell her body to death the same as he has. But he knows her pigheadedness well enough by now to stop arguing. She is coming out of the trees with a full basket when four village boys step out of the forest’s darkness onto the path in front of her. They approach slowly, with the wide smiles of predators. They have decided, they tell her, to teach her some respect for the village’s rules, since the doctor refuses to. They speculate on why the doctor shows her such preferential treatment, and decide they deserve the same payment. She goes to walk through them and one catches her wrist, and the others laugh at her squirming the way you laugh at a hooked fish, and something in her goes very quiet and very simple. She lowers herself in quiet submission, sinking her hands deep and stiff into the sandy soil. The sand rakes across the nearest pair of eyes, and not one of them notices her gutting knife until it opens the wrist-catcher’s cheek from ear to jaw. Then she is through them and running, the woods swallowing the sound of the one screaming.

It is Mohi they fetch to sew the cheek, sixteen stitches by firelight, and it is from the boys’ own mouths, boasting and contradicting each other, that he learns how it started. He ties the last stitch, packs his kit without hurrying, and goes out into the dark to find her. At his back the evening fire, the village crowding its light, building force behind a chant to be rid of a violent woman who courts death for them all.

He finds her in the first place he looks. Deep in the trees there is a hollow where the canopy closes over itself and the forest goes dark at midday, and where, over the decades, he has disappeared the artifacts that wash up from the old world. It is where she goes to be alone with her thoughts, her eyes moving silently over the bewildering surfaces and shapes. It is where he finds her now, kneeling at the center of it, a shaking knife at her throat. She does not see him. She only hears his unhurried voice from the darkness.

“The year my father died, I sat where you are sitting. Not this spot. The reef. Same errand.” Her eyes open in the darkness. “What stopped me was not courage, and it was not duty. I knew twenty pages of a book full of my father’s silent words. I thought, in time, I might hear one more page. That would be enough. Curiosity is a foolish rope. But it holds.”

A long stillness, before the knife lowers by a degree. And Mohi’s hand finds her shoulder in the dark.

The day soon arrives when the villagers are set to assemble, and decide how to be rid of her. That morning, at a breadfruit tree, the chief’s grandson Jebro goes up after fruit. He does not know that the wasps built that year in its crown. He is stung a dozen times about the face and neck before his body hits the ground.

By the time they lay him in front of Mohi, the boy’s face has lost its edges, and his breathing has narrowed to a wet whistle. Mohi’s hands know at once. He has buried two men and a girl this way. There is no herb for it. There is nothing on the island for it at all.

Nothing on the island above the water.

He takes the chief by the arm, out of the crowd. He tells him in a low voice that there is a medicine of the old world. He knows where it sleeps. Only Isa can fetch it; he is thirty years too old for that water. If Isa is allowed to retrieve the cure, she must be given a raft and leave to go, given openly, with blessing, so that no one on this island can ever again say the sea is owed her. The chief looks once at the small heaving chest and agrees like a man drowning.

Next Mohi gives Isa the secret he has kept even from her. Under the reef’s north horn, below the tide, there is a mouth in the coral, and past the mouth a passage, and past the passage a hollow hill of air inside the reef, and in it a flying machine lies hidden. His father showed him at fourteen. He has shown no one.

“There is a case in the back of it, sealed against the water. It carries the god’s mark, two sticks crossed. His people kept their strongest medicine under that mark, the way we keep the best of the catch for the chief. Do not open it in the water. Bring it whole, and swim.”

She enters the forbidden lands and finds the reef, but she cannot enter it as Mohi described: the tide is too high, and the mouth of the passage lies underwater. She dives, and the coral closes over her, and the light goes from green to ash to nothing. She feels her way by the walls, palm and fingertips, and the passage keeps going, and keeps going, and her chest begins to argue, and she turns back and breaks the surface gasping under the open sky, no better than she went in.

She hangs on the swell, breathing. Between the rising and falling of the water she sees the dancing edge of the far land, flat and crouching, lying where it has always lain at the edge of her world. She turns back to the reef, fills her lungs until they creak, and dives again. Into the mouth, along the walls, past the last of the light, into the black. She dissolves into the darkness: a heartbeat in her ears, a vague sense of movement through nothing. The point past which her breath will not carry her back goes by unmarked in the dark. The pressure rises in her sinuses, her stomach folds on itself, her chest heaves against her closed throat, the blackness grows patterns, and then, far ahead or nowhere at all, a warbling light grows.

She was four the first time the sea tried to keep her. She remembered it always from below: the light overhead warbling, the waves stacking themselves on top of her, patient, uncountable, her air going up in a rope of silver bubbles. Then a hand came down through the bubbles and closed around her wrist, and her body rushed through the water and up streaming into the light, onto her father’s shoulders. He romped the surf, growling like a wild animal, scaring death away from his daughter, punching and kicking the foam. Stunned and half-drowned, she gripped his curly black hair tightly between her fingers, coughing and shrieking with laughter.

Black water, wet and still. The toy plane bobs up from below. Then Isa’s upturned face and body emerge from the deep. She is inside the reef. The air tastes of salt and rot. Thin diagonal blades of light filter down through seams in the coral, and her eyes blink open as she floats into one of the shafts. She stares unmoving, before a coughing fit rolls her over and she claws up the slick rocks, retching seawater.

She works her way down the grotto on unsteady legs and finds the rusted remains of the crashed plane. Its belly torn open, and in the pools of oily black water, plastic and metal and wires strewn violently over skeletons in rotting clothes. The people of the old world still in their seats, rows of them, lashed in at the waist the way you secure cargo for a crossing. She walks past them gently, treading slow through the thigh-deep water, because it seems wrong to hurry past the dead of any world. Crabs pour from under a seat and over her feet in a panic. At the back, above the waterline, a row of little doors. Her fingers cannot solve the latches. A rock from the grotto floor solves them for her.

The case is where she was told it would be. Hard and smooth, sealed at every seam, and on its lid, faded from blood-red to the pink of a healed scar, a cross. She ties it to her back, stands a last moment among the quiet rows, and goes back into the water. The ebb has turned in her favor. The passage lets her out.

Every head rises as one when she enters the chief’s hut. Inside, the boy’s whistle has gone small. Mohi takes the case, lays it on the mat, breaks the seals with his knife, and opens the old world.

Rolls of bandage gone to dust at the edges. Little glass bottles with swollen labels. Tubes, boxes, a coil of clear line with a needle at its end. And a handful of fat yellow tubes the length of a hand, with pictures pressed into their sides: a hand closing around one, a leg, an arrow.

From under his shirt Mohi brings out the journal, and turns to a page he has never been able to hear. Beside the rows of marks, in his father’s hand, is drawn a small bee.

He lays the open journal against the yellow tube, and his old eyes go from the printed label to the written page, mark by mark, curl by curl.

“The same,” he says. “Like two shells of the same animal.” And there, quietly, in his father’s voice, one more page speaks to him.

The crowd at the door has seen the case by now, and the death god’s mark on its lid. A murmur ripples through them: the mark, in the chief’s house, laid against the chief’s dying grandson. Hands accumulate and reach in through the doorway. But before they can gain strength they part for Mohi, who walks through them to the chief. “We must treat your grandson now. Please. We need room.” The chief exchanges blinking stares with his people, and everyone shrinks back against the walls in a hush.

Mohi crouches beside Isa, near the boy and the case. The pictures on the tube say what to do, plainer than any voice: the hand, the leg, the arrow. Isa closes her fist the way the picture shows, sets the tube’s end against the boy’s thigh, and it snaps against him like a knuckle cracking, and the room flinches as one body.

For three breaths, nothing. Her own heart in her ears. Mohi’s hand finding her shoulder.

Then the whistle opens. Wet, ragged, wider, the boy’s body wrenching with some new combination of hope and desperation, and his chest fills all the way for the first time since morning, and Jebro begins, enormously, to cry. The crowd’s terror hangs one moment more, a wave deciding, and then it breaks the other way, into cheering, into weeping, into the chief kneeling suddenly on the floor of his own house with his grandson in his arms.

They try to give it to Mohi. He steps back out of it, shaking his head, and with the flat of his hand presents Isa to the village.

Years later, at dusk, the whole village gathers at the edge of the ocean. Only the chief’s grandson stays up the beach, apart. Jebro, a young man now, the wasp welts a story no one tells anymore, holding the doctor’s journal because he was told to keep it from the water. He has never asked what is inside. He is not a man who asks things, which may be why she trusts him to hold them. He flips it open now, idly, the way he would turn over a stone. The old pages are crowded with small soundless marks. Then come pages sewn in at the back with newer thread, in a different hand: rows of tallies, season after season of them, rains and births and sores and doubted fish, young columns growing up the page to answer the old ones. A drawing of the island traced over and over, its circles a little wider each year. Small pictures in the margins: a fish with a stroke through it, a wasp, a one-eared cat. He turns past all of it without wondering, closes the book, and tucks it under his arm the way he would carry firewood.

The others are watching a raft floating in the shallows. On it a pyre burns violently, a wrapped figure lying face up at the base of the flames. Isa, no longer carrying the softness of a child, pushes the raft away from shore, her large brown eyes glassy and wearied with grief. She wades past the break until the water reaches her chin.

Her necklace slips out from under her shirt and floats up before her face. She looks for a moment at the plastic toy, slowly turning at the end of its cord in the firelit water. Something relaxes in her face. She lifts the cord over her head, lays the necklace on the raft, and gently pushes it off, lingering to watch it float away.

Beyond the fire, at the world’s edge, the far land dances in the rising heat. She turns and wades in through the shallows, followed by the others, back to the village.