Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

Earl showed up as promised and they walked the bank together, boots squelching down into the sodden soil near the bank, clumps of reed stems going pale where they met the earth, crushed flat under their feet.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally, when they reached the southern tip of Garden Island. Looking north from here toward the other islands, you could see only the rooftop of the community center and a few of the other buildings. A lazy plume of smoke swirled up into the clouds, the remains of the breakfast fire. Lunch was always a cold meal, a lean repast of kaysev in its humblest forms-greens for salad, hardtack made from the everyday flour.

Cass had been skipping lunch too often, she knew that. She was much too thin, her muscles taut and sinewy across her shoulders, her back, her arms. She would go join the others, just as soon as they were finished here. She would eat extra, she would nibble sustenance like a squirrel.

“Maybe hold back on this one area,” Earl said, indicating a section of Cass’s planned lettuce patch. “I don’t think it’s gonna go, but this winter’s been bad for rain.”

Cass nodded. She’d expected as much. She had the rows sketched in twine tied to sticks sunk into the spongy soil, waiting for a dry day to plant.

Earl hitched up his pants, their business concluded. He was a kind man, Cass knew that, the leathery kind of sixtysomething man who would have been a putterer, a retired gent who refereed Little League games and built sunrooms and gazebos for his wife. He never complained about the arthritis in his joints though it was clear that mornings brought him almost debilitating stiffness. As they walked slowly back along the path, he favored one leg; if a trove of Advil or Tylenol popped up, there would be some relief for him-but that was as good as wishing for helicopters or snow cones, since everything good had been raided from the easy scores long ago.

“So you got your crew coming down after lunch,” Earl said amiably.

Cass was surprised he kept track. Benny, Carol, a few others who pitched in occasionally-they came to Garden Island on the afternoons when Suzanne watched the kids, everything revolving around the child-care schedule. The kaysev field was separated by footpaths into six long and narrow sections, and on picking days the crew worked alongside Cass, bent-backed like the migrant workers who used to dot the strawberry fields along Highway 101 from Salinas down to San Luis Obispo fifty miles to the west. It was hard work, painstaking and slow, making sure they didn’t miss a single blue-tinged leaf. The markings could be subtle-on the youngest leaves in particular, there was nothing but a light tint at the base of the veining, only the slightest crenellation along the edges of the leaves. In a mature plant the signs were unmistakable-the leaves were ruffled prettily and the underside had the blue shade of the veins on a fair-skinned woman’s breast. For that reason Cass discouraged her team from picking any of the young plants at all.

Benny and Carol had become as efficient as she was and so she no longer double-checked their baskets. They were a good team, close-knit. The dynamics had shifted, Cass knew that-at first she and Benny and Carol stood together at the end of the rows, hands pressing at their aching backs, resting and talking for a few moments before heading back down the field. Now she mostly worked at her own rhythm and it was the others who took their breaks together, their laughter occasionally ringing out over the hush of the island. At the end of the day, when everyone carried their baskets back to the kitchen, the others were subdued, overly polite, asking after Ruthie and Smoke, asking if she needed anything else, help with some chore. Cass always said she was fine, she had everything under control, and it seemed to her they were happy to have her answers and be able to leave her company.

Earl wasn’t like that-or maybe it was only that he moved so slowly he could not outrun the pall she cast. For a moment Cass was so grateful for his kindness that she had an urge to hug him, to put her hand in his big work-rough one. He could be like…a father to her, maybe. Her own father left her for good early on, and her stepfather was rotting in the hell he richly deserved by now, and it would be nice-so nice-to have someone who cared about her. Cass blinked at the shock of painful longing, made a small sound, an exhalation of breath.

Earl stopped, put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Cass, are you all right?”

She tried to evade his kind eyes. They were sharp and shining in their nest of wrinkles in his weathered face, but he had seen.

“I’m fine.”

His hand stayed heavy on her shoulder for a moment. “You need to take care, girl,” he said gruffly, and Cass knew it was reproach as well as concern, that he recognized the signs of her hangover. Well, she deserved it, didn’t she, and as they walked the rest of the way she redoubled her fierce silent promise that tonight would be different, that tonight she would abstain from everything that was wrong.

The hardtack, spread with a bit of jam to sweeten it, did not go down easily and did not do well in her stomach afterward. Still, Cass got through the afternoon, keeping to her own row and painfully thinking up responses to the others’ cheerful greetings. The sky cleared by late afternoon, turning a brilliant sapphire suffused with unseasonable warmth, and Cass’s skin sheened with perspiration as they walked back together.

They turned their baskets over to the kitchen staff, who would wash the leaves and pods and roots and turn them into a dozen different dishes. Today’s harvest was mostly tender leaves, succulent and pale from all the rains, so it would be salads, stir-fries and maybe even an exotic soufflé made with the precious eggs from the three chickens found in a creek wash a quarter mile from a farmhouse near Oakton. People joked that the chickens were New Eden’s VIPs and everyone was anxious for the day a rooster would be found and ensure future generations of poultry.

The few pods they’d found were still young and tender enough to be eaten as is; though mature pods were edible they were tough and fibrous and usually reserved for the work studio, where they were dried and turned into a coirlike material that could be used for mats and scrubbers. But the shelled beans could be tasty if they weren’t allowed to get too large-at that point, the beans would be dried, oil pressed from them and the rest ground for flour.

The meals would be prepared with care and presented with ceremony by the women and a few men who tended the kitchen. People needed to take pride in their work-Cass understood that. She even wished she could feel the same, and she envied the beaming servers who set out dishes garnished with lemon slices, the juice squeezed so that everyone could have a little in their boiled water.

Cass lingered in the yard, pretending that she was caught up in a boccie game, in reality putting off the moment when she would have to face Suzanne. That was how she came to be among the first to hear the cry go up.

“Blueleaf!”

For a beat after the syllables hung in the clear warm air, there was silence. Cass whipped around and stared at the long table where the rinsed kaysev was laid out to dry, two of the kitchen staff-Rachael and Chevelle-frozen over a sorted pile, looks of horror on their faces.

Cass leaped to her feet and ran to the table. Chevelle mutely handed over a bunch of leaves. Cass examined it with shaking fingers and yes- oh, yes, there it is -the cloudy blue tint at the base of the leaf, trailing up into the veining, which was almost azure before it shaded to green. The leaves were too young yet to have clearly ruffled edges and they lay cool and smooth in Cass’s hand.