Zachary Jernigan - No Return

Churls lifted her head. It weighed too much, so she let it fall against his. “What happened after that?” she whispered.

She felt him shake his head. “It’s insane, ridiculous, but it happened. Once we were past the waves, you dropped my wrist. When I turned to you, your eyes were closed. I spoke your name, and you wouldn’t respond. Your body glowed from the inside. White, like the moon. It peeked out from under your eyelids. I touched your hand, the glow faded, and you crumpled onto the sand. I know it sounds crazy. I’ve tried to reason it out, but I can’t.”

Churls closed her eyes, listening to the swift beat of her heart. Vedas’s hands pressed against her chest and back, cool and firm—and suddenly, she recalled her fantasy. With his body so close, the invention became more real in her mind than any story he could have told her. Pulling a two hundred and fifty pound man from the ocean? Glowing like the moon? She did not want to think about such things. Focusing too intensely made her head ache. Drifting felt so much nicer.

Yet something nagged at her. A piece of the puzzle was missing. She tried to stop thinking about it, but knew it would come now that she had admitted its existence.

“There is one other possibility,” Vedas said before she could ask the question. “You could be a witch.”

She did not dignify this with a response. Her heart was not prepared for jokes.

“Do you think you can stand?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She exhaled slowly, evenly, preparing herself for movement. “Why?”

While still supporting her, he rose from his knees into a crouch. “I’d like to reduce your dislocation now, if possible. It’s a common injury while training. I’ve done it before. It will heal faster the sooner I get to it.”

“What do I have to do?”

He lifted her easily. She gasped when her arm fell, and he told her to let it hang, which hurt slightly less. Standing on her own was difficult and painful. Her legs shook and she doubted they would hold her weight. Thankfully, he supported her every movement, and finally leaned her against a tree trunk. Her eyes fluttered with the strain. She registered her surroundings as a collection of vertical shadows and harsh light.

“Something else,” she whispered. “Vedas...”

He said nothing in response. Perhaps he had not heard.

She breathed shallowly as he lifted her arm and placed his shoulder under her armpit. She wished he had given her something to bite.

“This is going to hurt,” he said.

“I know,” she managed through gritted teeth. “Just get to it.” She took a deep breath, and in this moment it came: the question that had been nagging at her demanded a voice.

“Berun?” she asked.

Vedas paused, and she knew the answer.

“Sorry,” he said, and rose from his crouch, levering her humerus downward against his chest, forcing the ball back into its socket with a loud pop.

She screamed, and then the lights went out.

‡

He wove a sling for her shoulder out of palm leaves and a larger one to hold her body, and then set out across the island. He stopped to feed her coconut flesh, urged her to drink. She rocked in his arms like a newborn, drifting in and out of dream-troubled sleep. Each time she woke, the visions had already faded, leaving her with only a vague sense of loss.

The waking world was little more than a dream itself, a series of confusing tableaus. The sun progressed in jerks above her. The ground rose and fell so that the view upon waking was always different. A shimmering lake with Vedas’s reflection in it, her own face peering over the side of the sling. Flashes of light, the sun through tree trunks. A squat, ugly animal standing before them, grunting, stamping hooves into the black earth. A wall of hieroglyphed stone.

Vedas stood upon the gnarled, red-black spine of the island, which extended northward to a distant shore. She sat up to take in the view and promptly fell back, exhausted by the minor exertion. There was a city on the western shore of Tan-Ten, she knew. Its name eluded her. A gambler’s paradise , someone had once called it.

She licked cracked lips. “How far?” She could barely hear herself speak. “Four miles, give or take.”

“What’s it called?” she managed, but fell asleep before hearing the answer. Upon waking, trees surrounded them again and the name had come to her. “Oasena?” she asked.

“Yes. Only a couple miles to go, but the sun is going down. We’ll have to stop soon.”

She drifted away yet again. The next time she woke, night had fallen. She lifted her head and peered around. A fire smoldered before her, casting weak light over the small glade Vedas had chosen for camp. He slept on the bare ground at her side, sprawled as though he had collapsed there. She reclined on a bed made of palm leaves, angled so that she sat upright, cushioned so as not to roll to the side and injure her arm.

Her bladder ached. The makeshift bed rustled loudly as she struggled to rise, but Vedas did not so much as twitch. Probably exhausted, she reasoned, guilt constricting her chest with astounding force. Her mind had cleared and the weakness in her limbs was gone. She walked on stiff legs into the black forest to relieve herself.

As she stood from her crouch, a single white light appeared in the distance. Every time she blinked, the ghost of her daughter drew closer.

“Hello, Fyra,” Churls said.

She allowed the girl to take her hand. Once again, she felt nothing at the contact.

The forest slowly grew in detail around her. She stared at the stars through the broad leaves, and eventually found the moon. A neat half circle, it nearly touched the black line of distant treetops. Almost morning. She had slept one whole day, and almost through the night.

All at once, she understood what had happened after the wreck. The obvious conclusion.

She had glowed white like the moon.

Vedas had saved her life, and in exchange Fyra had saved his—the girl liked him, after all. What shocked Churls most was not that the thing had happened, but that she accepted it so readily. It brought no joy to know she was safe, that Vedas was her hero, and that the dead could exert control over the living. At no point had she been offered a choice. She wondered if she had ever been in control. If she ever would be.

She removed the sling, rotated her shoulders, and held her right arm horizontal without pain.

“Did you do this?” she asked.

Yes , Fyra answered. Do you like it?

“I’m not sure.”

The long pause made Churls look down. Fyra had screwed her face up tight, just like she had done as an infant. The expression that always preceded a fit.

“Stop it,” Churls said. “You’re not a little girl anymore.”

Fyra frowned. You don’t like it? I can do other things . I’ve been practicing .

Ice formed in Churls’s chest. “What other things, Fyra? What else have you done?”

I’m not alone , Fyra said. She let go of Churls’s hand and faced her mother. There are others here. They’re everywhere . Some of them teach me things, like the trick I used to save Vedas . Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have done it. He would have died, Mother . You would have missed him .

The child was smart, Churls gave her that. She kneeled, and though it pained her to do so, she stared her daughter directly in the eye. “That’s not what I asked, Fyra, and you know it. Don’t brag about what you can do, and then tell me nothing.”

Fyra reached out. Churls flinched, but resisted backing away. The child’s hand passed into her chest, but all Churls felt was the steady thrum of her heart. Fyra’s head cocked slightly to the side, and her eyelids fluttered closed.