Chapter 2 Calix #2
“I would never laugh at you.”
In fairness to Calix, that was true. He had never laughed at me. I softened a little bit. “Okay. Come on.” We turned and started heading toward my mom’s house.
“By the way,” Calix said, nonchalantly, “how is your mom?”
“Fine.”
Calix stopped walking. “That bad, huh?”
“What? What did I say?”
He took a deep breath. I stopped walking, too. I watched him gaze around the blasted landscape. I hated seeing it through his eyes. I didn’t like Limer either, but it was my home. It was his, too, but he’d just spent ten months in the capitol city, surrounded by literal cloth of gold.
“I didn’t realize how bad the drought was,” he said. “It’s not as obvious in Corcagia.”
“Must be nice.”
“I just wanted to tell you… we’re working on it. The Body is working on it.”
“Working on what? Making it rain?” We had started walking again. We reached my hut. “Forget it. Let me just check on my mom and get my stuff. I’ll be out in a moment.”
“Oh, I’ll come in and say hi.”
A spike of panic pierced my heart. “No! No. I mean, thank you, but that’s okay.”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed about your mom. I’ve known her since I was a baby.”
“Calix, no, she won’t recognize you, she’s —”
Calix strode right past me into the house.
I almost hit him. But I didn’t have time. My mom had already spotted him and set up an enormous wail.
My heart flared. My whole body locked into protecting my mom.
In that moment, Calix could have been a stuffed animal for all I cared.
He had frozen in place. I raced past him, almost knocking him over.
I was already babbling to my mother in the low voice I used when she got like this: “Mom, Mommy, Mom, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
Her shrieking was growing louder. My panic was like fingernails on a chalkboard.
I had to get her calm and comfortable, now.
I had no time to cook the herbs I’d gathered this morning.
I grabbed them from my basket and fed them to her raw, apologizing again and again for their bitterness.
She didn’t seem to notice my apology; she recoiled from the herbs.
When she tried to scratch me, I pinned her wrists as gently as I could with one hand and fed her with the other.
Finally I coaxed the half-vial of water down her throat.
After a few minutes, she quieted.
Calix let out a breath. As if it was over. Ha! As if it would ever be over.
My mother’s eyelids flickered. She settled back onto the cot, coughing lightly. But she didn’t scream anymore, and she was no longer worried about Calix. She stared at me with glazed, incurious, childlike eyes.
I licked my lips. Hopelessly, I dampened a rag with saliva and wipe the blood and spittle from her lips. I tucked her into her place on the cot. I built up the fire. As if by doing all these little chores, I could undo her distress.
Finally, once my mother was pacified and snoozing, I rounded on Calix.
Calix already had his hands up. His face was white. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know — but Persephone — what did you give her?”
I didn’t answer. I was fuming. The herbs were nowhere near as powerful if you didn’t heat them first. That meant a whole basket, wasted. A whole six-hour midnight walk down the drain. I grabbed my now-empty basket and my notebook and made to push past him out the door.
But Calix grabbed my arm. “Persephone!”
“Fuck off. You know what I gave her.”
His grip tightened. “Tell me you haven’t been going to the underworld.”
“I haven’t,” I said stoutly. “I’ve been going into the fields on top of the underworld.”
Calix’s eyes widened. He squeezed me so tight I thought he’d leave marks. Some dangerous part of me wanted him to. “At the quarter-century mark? Are you nuts?”
“Nuts? I am trapped!” I screamed at him. “Look at her! I have no choice!”
But Calix was relentless. “You’re crazy. You shouldn’t even still be living in Limer. Haven’t you noticed? The population is half what it was a year ago. Anyone with any sense has left, at least temporarily, to stay in a neighboring village, or in Corcagia —”
“I would love to go to Corcagia,” I hissed.
I waited, my heart in my throat, for him to say, Then come. Come with me.
But he didn’t. He just glowered. Eventually his hand slipped from my skin. I felt my arm gingerly. No bruises. No nothing. I slumped.
“I don’t like it,” Calix said. It was all he had to offer. “I’m worried the godlings will… take you.”
And crack my bones open. Suck my marrow out. “They’re not going to take me. I’ve been going there for three months.”
I thought he would have a heart attack. “You what!”
“Shut up. If you don’t like it, then help me with my idea.”
He gestured at my empty basket. “If your idea is anything like this… gods, Persephone, you’re telling me you’ve been going to the underworld to gather edenica herbs… for three months…”
He almost couldn’t get the words out, he was so sick at the thought. I felt a small stab of satisfaction. grinned at him mercilessly. “Oh, no. My idea is nothing like this. Trust me,” I said. “It’s way worse.”