Pieces

This story is by Rebecca Reed and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

From the pitch darkness, a slip of mysterious radiance from an unseeable source illuminates the identification bar code tattooed over his undulating carotid. It beats a steady rhythm in time with the unbroken tempo of his breathing. A whooshing tide of a sea neither of them have ever seen is programmed to play on the soundscape machine for another six hours. She slides a broken ceramic shard from under his pillow, then herself from under the covers.

Stealth and silent she dresses, then retrieves a leather satchel from a cupboard meant for the household miscellany. Tucked within and wrapped in parchment is the protective rosemary salt she swept up from the perimeter of their home that morning. Packed in alongside is fresh salt purified under the last full moon housed in a velvet drawstring bag, inviting gifts for the offering and the pottery piece as a casting tool. The breathy exhale from the airlock door is the only sound as she departs.

“Where did you get this?” he held up the latest piece of broken crockery meant for the spell, explaining her earlier futile search for it. She shrugged and took it from him, rubbing the charged implement between her thumb and two fingers as both diversion and demonstration.

“I dunno,” she white lied.

“It doesn’t match anything we own.” His gaze sharpens, “Your worry stone also appears to be changing in size and shape.”

She snickered as she kissed away any further questions. “Well then,” sauntering dramatically, the token held high above her head. “It’s failing at its final usefulness.”

The elevated bullet train station is sixty stories down and another sixty stories above ground level. She boards with her thoughts on the hedge riders who came before her, pondering what they must think of her methods. She navigates to a favorite seat across from a faded scrawl of graffiti:

We are the legacy of the ones you could not burn.

Capable of traversing more than two hundred miles in less than an hour, the train speeds to escape the heaving city and out to the wilds beyond. She knows this path well. She trusts it still.

“I’m glad I found you,” his tone simpering rather than adoring.

She did her best to divert him with a smile, deep and genuine from within her eyes. “I’m glad you found me, too.”

“Every day you stay—”

“It’s the obvious option—”

Talking over each other, followed by a dreadful silence, their fractured, unspoken sentiments piled up inside them.

Life is shrouded by the strain of his disease and defined by volleying stabs of unintended guilt followed by rapid-fire apologies. She decidedly shares in the burden of his weakened blood, acutely aware of the life-long term of his suffering.

What he found impossible to say, she already knew. It was an innocent omission in the stupor of their early connection and understandable for him to desire freedom from that reality. The insidious presence abruptly introduced itself to her by way of emergent medical care, transfusions and the near miss with fatality. It was an inherited imprint he would never escape until life escaped him. The solitary thing undermining their marital bliss while compounding their bond. Her own untold secret made forgiveness easy.

At the end of the line, she is the only passenger to remain. She exits at the deserted station nestled in woodlands, waits momentarily for the automated silver snake to zip away, then strips down bare. Under a moonless sky near midnight with its crowded canopy of stars, she pulls from deep within the satchel her cloak: a skin-fitting catsuit armored with technology to confuse drone patrols and make her indecipherable to digital photography as well as ultrasonic waves to ward off predators. Over her limbs the silky armor glides, both enchanted and ritualistic. She fastens it snug around her neck to conceal her incandescent bar code. On a deeply steeped night like this, bars and their numbers are a beacon for satellites.

Mewing noises float from the forest; a white and tabby-striped cat, its speech stuttering as it trots closer, eager for recognition. She pulls fish in a serving pouch from her pack, tears it open and sets it down for her guide. The feral purrs as it scarfs, pausing only to gaze up at her, blinking its gratitude and licking its muzzle clean.

Once she pulls on the skullcap, she engages the electronics. The feline’s flirtatious scamper invites her to follow. With the frameless spectacles in position, the nothingness of inky darkness is instantly illuminated in contrasty night vision. Receding columns of tree trunks appear in number with the sparkling eyes of the cat the only sign of life.

“When I go, what will you do?”  Another unanswerable question in his consistent search for reassurance.

“You’re going to outlive me.”

“We both know that’s not true,” he mumbled.

“Let’s enjoy our time without morbid what ifs.”

“You have so much to offer,” his voice unsteady, “I’d want you to be happy.”

His purest instincts expressed as unrest over the perceived losses given up in trade. Her own sacrifice morphing into selfishness. 

The thrum from overhead of drones in arrowhead formation brought her to a halt. A dozen or more, slow moving, so definitely not duty bound and more likely simply in transit. She stands motionless until the cat calls the all clear, its coat marbling over, turning to solid gray as a sign they’re almost there. Through brambles and thickets, she keeps a bead on the surefooted cat until they arrive in the familiar clearing on the other side, where the rutted, untraveled roads cross.

“I don’t want to go.”

“They’re your friends and we should get out,” she worked to thread an earring into her lobe. “Let’s go make some good memories tonight.”

He sulked and glared at her party dress and high heels.

To the untrained eye this junction is an untended dumping ground. To those in the circle, it is sacred space. The now solid black cat strolls around with self-satisfied whips of its tail, then skitters away through the brush.

The two roads converge, one locked on true north, running directly south, the other in perfect right-angles east to west. Tangled overgrowth acts as camouflage for the wax and ashes of spent spell ingredients, sigils inscribed on scraps of paper and charged objects. The mother vessel of broken pottery—matching the charmed shards carried with her over the years and slid under his pillow each night—sits exactly as she left it on her last outing.

She unpacks the rosemary salt and walks the perimeter counterclockwise, the grains filtering through her fingers as an animated whisp on the breeze. With housekeeping done, she places her own offerings of incense and herbs on a boulder already heavily encumbered with fruit, colorful crystals, shiny trinkets, talismans, figurines and flowers in all stages of decay.

Utilizing her new store of salt, she casts her circle at the center of the crossing. While facing each directional, she chants words of respect and appreciation. With the edge of a found-rock, she scratches her intention into the shard: the twelve-digit number she knows from memory and the words, let him live. From within the circle’s safety, she hatches from the protective suit. She stands with her exposed skin against the night, head tilted skyward, arms outstretched and calls to the powers under her breath.

“We should travel,” she mused. “A beach. Water would be therapeutic for both of us.”

“Do you think we’re soulmates?” more as accusatory statement than inquiry.  

Indignant, she turned to face him. “I’m certain of it.”

The wind tousles her hair like flames above her head and rustles the limbs of the trees just as a disembodied voice rattles into her ear, “You have nothing left to trade.”

Smacked from her hand by forces not her own, the shard topples outside the salt circle and beyond reach, where it buries itself in the loose soil like a startled crab.

Frantic, she retrieves from her satchel the parchment that carried the rosemary salt. She balls it up in her hands, kneels within the circle and chants in rhythmic whispers repetitious words of protection and grace, as bits of salt from the velvet bag are pinched and then rained over the wad of paper. She shrieks when it goes up in flames.

The far-off hum of drones filters in from the horizon as the ashes whip upward and away from her palm. Quick to dress, and after a swipe along the ground of her satchel to dismantle the circle, she sprints into the woods.

***

“You awake?” his drowsy voice pierces the quiet. He stretches as he rouses, a hand slid under the pillow met with a muffled clunk.

Startled to upright he finds himself alone. He yanks his pillow off the bed to reveal jagged, broken pieces of pottery, dozens in number, each inscribed with let him live and the digits of his bar code.