Mark de Silva - Square Wave

So he bought some cheap cotton yarn, in red and yellow, and some needles, on the condition the shopkeeper would show him how to make a cap of his own. He sat down with Crutch and did. After several aborted efforts, Crutch produced a comfortable, imperfect cap with a wavy brim that managed to keep the light away.

But the caps could offer more relief than this, he saw. Sinhalese traders frequently wandered through the villages selling them. Crutch would do the same. He, and later his shipmates, began knitting and selling these caps on long walks through the villages, offering them for a bit less than the shops and the other roving traders.

Through the sale of rice and caps, Rutland himself had found his way to some small amount of independence. Whereas the Englishmen had previously been passed around the village as unwanted lodgers, they were now in a position to buy building materials, and even the labor of the villagers, to house themselves.

Trade had been only a pretext for Rutland when he’d first joined the crew of the Ann , a merchant vessel, in London, in 1658. Now, though, this well-bred man of privilege was finding that commerce could ennoble your life when pedigree failed, and you found yourself scrabbling with common stock for survival.

Rutland’s place was mostly built now. The walls were made of rattan-fastened boughs, which he let stand without the usual clay plastering, as he’d not yet adjusted to the exceptional heat (nor would he ever). The roof was thatched with banana leaves and tall grass in an oddly patterned weave that the villagers were expert in. The oddness, apparently, made it watertight.

Rajarathnan had been most helpful of all in building the shelter, and he asked for nothing in return. It was his floor Rutland had first slept on in Belemby. Rutland would stay in a room separated from the main house by a thatched wall and take his food on a small table and stool — an honor the family paid him, as they themselves, like most others, ate on the floor. He slept on a mat, as they did, and after a time he found it no less comfortable than any bed in England.

Knox hadn’t adapted so readily. He was the worst, in some ways, seeming stubbornly lost, as if he didn’t understand this world and didn’t think he should. But then, he’d had to watch his father die. Anyway, Rutland thought, Knox’s eye was sharp and might evolve. Maybe he’d even start trading like the rest of them and get himself a house.

Rutland returned to the pot dangling above what was now a crackling yellow fire. He stirred the mixture and tipped the pot into his usual basin. The night was only beginning to perfect itself. He sat in the light of the fire and took his meal. Before the sun was lost entirely, he got to his feet with two mangosteens in his waist pocket and one in his hand. He squeezed the fruit and the thick purple rind split along a seam. A clear juice ran down to the dirt below and swelled into muddy lumps. From the shell he pulled the fruit whole, a tiny white orange. He took the segments into his mouth and headed out to the forest in search of an armful of wood as the fire wound down.

One whore pushed the other along the sidewalk leading out of the city hospital. The wheelchair wobbled and bounced along the cracks, and with each impact Jen’s body came throbbing back to life. She was swathed in gauze, soft and hard, for the three cracked ribs, the two snapped clavicles, the broken orbital, the dislocated shoulder, and the subluxated elbow of the opposite arm. (These were just the injuries above the waist.) Her limbs felt as if they were not quite hers, as if a slightly firmer shock might separate them from her altogether. Perhaps that’s what was needed, the thought came to her and went.

Mariela, the other whore, born Ecuadorean into respectable circumstances but long since transplanted to the social fringes of North America, led the chair down an incline to the pavement. The jolts came in a triplet, the first and third accented. The chair crossed that neat, narrow avenue, freshly corrugated after a recent collision, under heavy rains, between a Camaro, a Kawasaki, and an ambulance carrying victims of another car accident. The motorcyclist left with a bruised femur and a wrecked bike. The Camaro’s passengers, four teenage boys, were effectively cremated on site, their bodies being inextricable from the flaming car. Those in the ambulance escaped unscathed, though the two in the back died shortly after of their original injuries.

“I need a couple of things,” Mariela said. “We do. But I can do this after, if you want.” Jen’s head shook and then bobbed fractionally. Her eyes held a long blink as her head came to a rest, slumped.

Mariela steered the chair through the propped double doors of the grocery. The clerk gave her a glance before fixing on the blue rubber wheels of the chair. He made his way up from the loose sweats Jen wore (Mariela’s), the billowy sleeveless shirt, the soft cast at the elbow, the sling, and the figure-eight splint peeking out at both shoulders, to her right eye, watering lightly, the lens saturated with blood on the outer half. His gaze flicked back and forth between the splint and the inflamed eye.

“I’ll just get this stuff real quick,” Mariela said, mostly for the clerk. She picked up a green basket from the stack beside the door, leaving Jen near the deli counter. Wax paper separated the slices stacked into squat towers, of beef, of chicken, of sausage dotted with bright white fat, and of hams and turkeys, honeyed, baked, boiled, smoked, and cured.

Around the towers plastic wrap had been hung, so that the top slice, not being papered over, could be plainly seen. Despite the wrap, the meat on top had suffered; the edges of the slices had dried and darkened. Near the center the textures were more natural. Each was a signature, each played on Jen’s eyes: the slick marbled surface of rare roast beef, heavy with blood; the fine uniform density of ham; the coarse grain of roasted pork; and the lighter, airier textures of chicken.

Behind the stacks, more tightly wrapped in plastic than the slices, was a small slab of the corresponding creature, prepared just so. In the case of the chicken slices, it was a half of a chicken behind them, the only animal whose form remained. At the other end were the sausages, where the shapes of the creatures going toward them had been entirely erased.

“Turkey, right?” Mariela returned with a full basket.

“Thank you,” Jen said, with a gravity that seemed to transcend turkey. The clerk came around and took off the plastic wrap on the slices. Jen motioned to the slab instead. “Thin.”

He hoisted the animal and pushed the saw pedal. The blade whirred, the teeth flashed. The man drove the bird through the ring, shaving nine or ten limpid slices from the slab that collected on the far side of the blade in a translucent pile.

“That it?” the clerk asked the women as he wrapped the meat in paper and dropped it in a plastic bag.

“Is that it?” Mariela asked.

Jen turned to the basket. Tuna, skim milk, English muffins, a six-pack of Michelob, a small bottle of Advil, then cold udon in a ginger sauce and a bag of green apples under that. Her eyes lingered on the fruit, though she had something else in mind.

“Cigarettes?” she said.

“Yeah,” Mariela said.

“Dunhills,” Jen said.

Mariela gave her a funny look. Jen had started smoking them as a joke, back at UVA, when as a sophomore her interests seemed to have turned a bit tony in her friends’ eyes. She’d declared in classics that year. She’d always loved to read, to disappear — in fiction, in plays — so why not find out where it came from, how it first happened? And if you didn’t actually use a pipe, like a don in an old leather chair, weren’t Dunhills what you smoked reading Aeschylus?