The Light Pirate(54)
Wanda brings the drying racks up to the top level of her home, closest to the sun. Here, she has her screen boxes set out, to keep the flies and the scavengers away so that while she sleeps through the hottest part of the day, down below, the food stays safe as it dries. From time to time a crafty predator will break into her screen boxes and steal what she’s laid out, but every time it happens, she makes a better box. It’s been a while since anything managed to steal from her.
Her nightly work done, there are still a few more hours of darkness before the sun crests the tops of the mangroves and living things must either take cover or go crisp in the daylight. She allows herself to rest. The work has heated her; it’s important to notice such things. She lies down, taking advantage of this time with the stars before she must move down below the foliage. Phyllis taught her the names of constellations, but she can’t remember which is which anymore. She could never see their supposed shapes: a bear, a lion, an archer. Such a human sort of order imposed on an unplanned spray of light across infinite darkness. But that was Phyllis’s way—naming things, categorizing them. When Phyllis was still with her, they would spend these moments of rest talking about the things they’d noticed that day. They reminded one another of the beauty here. An ibis, with a flash of silver dangling from its beak. Young mangroves rooting down into the water, an island in the process of becoming. An orchid blooming on the side of a decaying house, its thick, bare roots clinging to the rotting wood. A school of fish jumping headfirst into the waves.
It’s much harder to do this alone, but she tries. She pictures it in her head. There is no point using her voice anymore. Iridescence on mackerel scales. Wet, pulsing fish guts. The sky reflected on the water. The sound of one night bird courting another.
Overhead, a brightness darts across the sky, and then another, and another. A meteor shower, she realizes. Phyllis used to plan for these. The year after Wanda’s father died, Phyllis would wake her in the middle of the night, carrying blankets to lie on and a thermos of honeyed tea to sip from. They’d go to the roof and look up and Wanda would feel slightly better just being beside Phyllis: this woman who knew when to look and where to look and how long the whole thing might last. Phyllis knew, even then, that Wanda needed help finding beauty amid the violence. She still needs it. But there is no one to show her now. And this, this spectacle unfolding above her—it doesn’t comfort her the way it should. All she sees is a reminder of how much she’s lost.
The grizzled tom that departed her boat earlier scratches his way up one of the tree trunks and comes toward her, rubbing his body against hers. There is a small but tenacious population of feral cats wandering the swamps. This one is bolder than most. He reminds her of a kitten she had once, but that creature left her, too. Like everyone else. Or, more likely, it was taken from her. A gator, a coyote, a sinkhole. It doesn’t matter which. Another lost love.
The tom ignores the fragrant fish fillets, laid out in the screen boxes to await the sun, which is a relief to her because she can’t spare any. Instead, he pushes his face into her limp hand, insisting that she scratch him first on one side of his head and then on the other. This is a different sort of hunger, one that she understands all too well. She obliges and he purrs and then when the sun begins to rise they retreat to the shade below; down, down, down to the darkest place they can find. She sleeps in stops and starts, sweating, dreaming of canned peaches, thick and soft and sugary on her tongue. She half wakes and thinks how cruel it is to remember them now that there are none left.
When the heat sinks and the dark rises, Wanda rises, too. She packs away the dried fish and gets the canoe ready. With the empty jugs strapped down, she climbs in and heads for the spring. This swamp is her home; she knows its twists and turns as well as any person could. But even so, the swamp is ever-changing. A maze without an exit. Things die; new things grow. The storms are always moving the landscape in unexpected ways. If she traveled in the daylight, she could observe these events, take notes, keep abreast of the shifts. But the daylight is no longer her domain. She travels in the dark, when the only way to navigate is ramming the bow of her canoe into a newly fallen tree or getting lost because her landmark has been swept to sea.
It’s easiest to save these kinds of errands for nights when the moon is fat and yellow, but seeking freshwater on the brightest nights of the month is its own risk. If it’s easy for her, it’s easy for everyone—and the idea of the remnants of Rudder out in force, rowing their boats and their rafts, pushing their skiffs, flocking to the spring as if it is their lifeblood (it is), frightens her. It’s hard to say how many are left. The number, like the landscape, changes all the time. In the dark, everyone is a stranger.
Some chose to stay. Others had nowhere to go. And now, a new generation is being born: children who have never known anything but this. Still, for every one that stayed, hundreds left. Thousands? Possibly millions. It’s hard to say; numbers like this don’t feel real anymore. If they ever did. Most of the refugees crushed north into the cities and the plains and the mountains, where there are undoubtedly many problems but not seeing another human being for months on end probably isn’t one of them. Or maybe it is. Wanda would not know.
Tonight, there’s no moon at all. And without the moon, she hopes that there are no foragers to disturb her. The hull of her canoe slips through the water, the darkness whispering all around, the warmth rising from her paddle as she cuts down through the hot, wet air, into the water, and up again. She prefers it this way, threading her way through the swamp with only her ears and her memory and the ambiguous shapes that loom up out of the blackness to guide her. Creatures chatter and call and scamper. Nocturnal eyes glow, staring as she passes. The sounds the water makes all around her are as full and varied as an orchestra: water slapping against the hull; the sharp dip and soft sweep of her paddle’s edge; the seamless whisper of an alligator’s back breaching the surface; dew falling from a palm frond, ringing the water like a bell; a brisk allegro measure of splashes as frogs jump, one after another.