4- kid

table of contents

***

The kid had a name.

Most kids in The City

didn’t.

The City

discouraged naming people,

said names distracted them from

their jobs

in the factories,

in the farms,

in the offices.

Only the patrollers got names:

if you chose to join

(technically, everyone who joined

chose to join

but

you got food if you did

and they sometimes fed your family too

and there wasn’t much food if you didn’t),

they gave you a number,

and the higher up the ranks you climbed,

the shorter your number got.

But this kid had named herself Rails,

and she secretly thought of names for all the kids

she played with in the street: doll kid

was Laughs,

the youngest was Youngee

the oldest was Orange-ee,

because his skin looked orange.

I didn’t tell her

that on earth

a hundred years ago

that’d probably be a slur.

Of course,

Rails and Laughs and Orange-ee and the other five kids

would probably die on earth–

I didn’t know what I inhaled here

but it wasn’t oxygen,

and the protection spell

I’d set before I left

was fading

like an insect’s cocoon.

So before I hunted rats, I showed Rails

a summoning circle,

told her she could mess up the symbols in the dust

if she wanted me to change into a monster and crush her

and her whole home.

She scoffed at that too,

and kicked a foot through a symbol–

I did notice, before completing the circle.

I just wanted her to know I was serious.

So my walking stick finished the symbols

in the dust.

The circle and symbols glowed,

bursting into flame,

and I didn’t change into a monster

but my cloak did catch on fire

so I had to put the hood up

so my face wouldn’t burn

and the pillar of orange light

dancing on the pipes and

off the copper

wall

made her scream.

“Told you,” I said.

Dragon black cloaks

hold flames

like sea mammals hold breaths

so I undid the knots and threw it off me with a gust of wind

so the flames could heat some tangled pipes

and I could carve a new circle on the ground

with my walking stick.

“How’d you do that?” Rails whispered.

“I’m a witch,” I said, completing the new circle,

and the spring warmth of the protection spell floated around me,

settling in my lungs like dew,

on my skin like a gel.

“What’d that one do?” she asked.

“That one lets me breathe here.

It also

shields me a bit from the heat.”

“So you can catch rats like that?”

She poked fingers at the ground. “Making circles?”

I chuckled. “I have a faster way to catch rats.”

And I waved the flower petal.

Then I spat on it, bloody saliva beading on the waxy plant.

“Ready?” I whispered.

Her forehead crinkled.

“Don’t move,” I said,

and uttered my demon incantation

of death.

A mutter, a distant yowl

floated from the petal,

drifting toward the nearest life source–Rails.

I whispered that it’d feed on nothing there

but thin skin and thinner bones,

and blew it toward the dome wall.

The mutter ballooned, and half a dozen rats plummeted

from the pipes overhead.

Rails yelped and covered her

dirty bald head.

“Told you,” I said.

Then I drew the mutter back

and inhaled the life force.

Took off a couple years, at least.

The petal in my hand crumbled,

and I picked up the smoldering cloak.

“Want to learn how to cook over a dragon fire?”