Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“Anybody gonna help carry this stuff?” Mags yelled from the kitchen, with volume enough to be heard inside and out.

“Damn,” said Josh; then, loudly, “You betcha!” He thumped up the porch stairs, past me, and into the kitchen.

Paulo and I each had charge of a pie. Josh got the beanpot, swathed in toweling. We tramped across the lawn to the sawhorse tables, and put our contributions down next to everything else.

People smiled at me, and waved, and introduced themselves. It was like China Black’s and the Night Fair both. I couldn’t decide if it was the worst of both or not. The people who introduced themselves often told me how long they’d known Sherrea, or how they came to know her, or asked me how I had. Sher, it seemed, was universally acquainted around here. It was the first time I’d thought to wonder how she came to know about this place, and what it was to her. I was very polite to everyone.

I wandered toward the bonfire, wishing I knew how long I ought to stay. Then a flash of light on a face at the corner of my vision startled me, and I turned to look.

Theo was walking next to me, and the light had been glancing off his glasses. “Hey,” he said.

I stopped walking. I’d been talking to strangers all evening; I could do this. I had only to gather my much-tried manners and put them to work again. “Hello. How are they treating you?”

“Great. I think. Only there’s nothing to do. I keep thinking about whether Robby’s surviving without us.”

Ignore the strange feeling in the stomach; rely on the manners. “I expect so. And you’ll be able to go back soon, won’t you?”

“To what?” Theo asked. “Occupation under Tom Worecski?”

I frowned. “But that’s what it was before you came here.”

“It’s not—never mind. Look, I’m gonna ask somebody tomorrow if there’s anything electronic they want done around here. D’you want me to volunteer you, too?”

“No.” I almost turned and left, but I remembered: manners. “No, thank you. I’m not doing that anymore.” Then I left.

Tom Worecski had had the archives burned. That had damaged that part of me, but it hadn’t killed it. Something else had done that, something I couldn’t name, that had seared away the connection between who I was and what I knew. I still knew electronics, I still had languages and language, all the things I’d woken with out of that parody of birth fifteen years ago. But they didn’t belong to me. Nothing, I’d said to Sher. I owned nothing. My body was on lease from the past, a machine I’d rented and lost the paperwork for, and I had no idea where my mind had come from. All the things I knew might have been stolen from someone else.

I managed to stay in motion, and so avoid having to talk to anyone else. I saw Frances for a moment, at the opposite end of a table. What, I wondered, did all these nice people make of her? So well spoken; lovely person, actually, for a mass murderer. She returned my look with a grave, piercing one, and I moved on again.

I didn’t see Sher until much later. There was music at the edge of the bonfire: guitarists, singers, a fiddle player, a mandolin, someone with a clarinet, and a shoal of drummers who sounded as if they’d played together in the womb. Someone offered me finger cymbals, but I declined. At the edge of the light, people were dancing.

On the opposite side of the hodgepodge circle of musicians and audience, I saw Kris, the woman from the beet field. She sat on the grass with her arm around another woman. They were both smiling, alternately at the musicians and at each other; they whispered in each other’s ears; they laid their heads on each other’s shoulders. The other woman kissed Kris on the cheek, halfway between her cheekbone and her jaw. Josh had removed the stitches from the inside of my mouth just a few days ago, in about that spot.

I stood up abruptly and walked into the dark. I ended up on the other side of the big central tree, leaning against it, staring up into the branches. The candle lanterns hanging there had almost all gone out. I concentrated on my breathing, on letting my chest rise and fall, on seeing if I could take in exactly the same volume of air each time. The day and everything in it seemed to have conspired against my composure. But it had survived, and with a little attention would continue to do so. This had been a bit of testing for real life, that was all.

“It’s all right,” said Sher, beside me, in a wrung voice I’d never heard from her before. “Nobody wants you to hurt. It just seemed so strange—you were so different. But if you have to shut us all out or break… then shut us out.”

I put my hands over my face for a moment. Then I let them drop. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

I heard her breath run unevenly into her lungs. “It doesn’t matter. Never mind.”

The farmhouse was close, but I would have found it anyway. This body I was leasing had always had good night vision. I closed the door of my room behind me, folded the borrowed clothes, and went, eventually, to sleep.

The next day I hunted through the fields until I found Kris, and asked her to put me to work. She was in one of the smaller garden plots this time, a long straight stretch between the dairy barn and the horse paddock.

She got up off her knees and banged her hands together to get the dirt off her gloves. “Sure. What are you good at?”

“Nothing,” I said. It was a useful word lately. “I’ll have to be trained.”

Kris grinned and waved at the rows. “Then you’re doomed to learn to weed. C’mere.” She pointed. “That’s an onion. Don’t pull it out. Anything that doesn’t look like that—see here, and here—is a weed. In this row, anyway. You’re trained. Off you go.”

In half an hour the cramped, unfamiliar position met my healing injuries and joined forces against me. I was sweaty, too, even though the work wasn’t strenuous. But it was just what I wanted. It slowed down thought, and channeled it into unfamiliar paths, ones my life to date hadn’t sown with mines. I was surprised when I reached past the last onion sprout and found that it was the last.

“Good work,” Kris said. “The next row is lettuce. It looks like this.”

A minute into that row, and Kris pointed to the thing in my hand. “That’s also lettuce.”

“Oh,” I said. After that, I did better.

Eventually I could figure out for myself which were the weeds. At that point, Kris moved on to the next garden plot, and I had the first one to myself. It was hypnotic work, with its own loose rhythm and a set of physical techniques both precise and trivial. The way a slow, smooth pull would bring a weed up by the roots and a jerk would snap it off at the surface. The way dandelions had to be pulled by all their leaves at once. The machinery of my arm moving out and back, reach, pull, toss. I could do this. I knew where this skill came from, and whose it was. Mine, mine. Wherever the rest of me was stolen from, this was mine.

Via Kris, who had taught it to me. Then was it Kris’s skill, after all?

And someone must have weeded China Black’s garden. Whoever it was, I shared this knowledge with her or him.

I’d stopped in midmotion, still crouched and kneeling, the latest thing I’d pulled still in my hand. It was a thin-stemmed little plant with short oval leaves climbing in pairs up the stalk. At the end was a cluster of star-shaped flowers in an aching, vibrating magenta.

I had pulled one of these before—in China Black’s garden. “Sparrow?” Sher’s voice came to me, from the end of the row.

I couldn’t breathe, except in little bursts that seemed to catch halfway down my throat. I had pulled one of these when, angry with Sherrea for something I’d done, I hadn’t listened while she told me again: You don’t belong to them. You don’t now, and you never did.