Sandymancer by David Edison EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: David Edison
- Language: English
- Genre: Dystopian Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The day the monster stole Caralee’s future started out as dull and shiny as
any other—with children and young folk scattered around the sandy circle
that served as a gathering place for the families of the nameless village. In
this half-ruined amphitheater, they took their lessons from a woman dressed
in undyed linen, her head, neck, and chin wrapped about with a threadbare
gorget. Later, most would return to the cable fields with their elders, or stay
within the village for piecework and other chores.
Caralee sat cross-legged on her favorite schooling seat, smiling at the
crack in the sky. An age ago, her seat was a column; now only the plinth
remained, scoured smooth by centuries of sandstorms into a seat-shaped
groove that cradled Caralee’s bottom just so. The stone fit her far better
than her burlap shmata ever would.
Marm-marm pointed at the fractured sky. The morning sun rose above
the horizon, gold and brilliant, but the sky, she’d taught them, was far too
dark. Once, it had been a much lighter blue, which was a color Caralee
found difficult to imagine so far above and in such quantity. Wouldn’t that
be awfully bright? She’d learned that when the sky had been light blue, the
stars had been invisible during the day. That, too, she struggled to imagine.
The crack in the sky looked like frozen lightning, jagged and forking. At
noon, when the sun passed behind it, you could see that the crack was four
or five times longer than the sun.
Other students lazed or whispered, but Caralee leaned forward, elbows
on her knees, eager to answer Marm-marm’s questions and ask her own.
“Who can tell me about the sky?” Marm-marm shielded her eyes from
the sun with one hand while pointing with the other, tracing the lines over
her head. “Is it broken? Why is it broken? How is it broken? How can we
tell that it’s broken?” Marm-marm always asked too many questions at
once, which was Caralee’s favorite thing about the woman. Caralee never
said that to her face. That would clam up Marm-marm’s curious mouth,
which was the last thing Caralee wanted on any day.
“Mphh!” Fanny Sweatvasser grunted through a mouthful of her own
hair, then wicked her wet curls out from between her teeth so she could
offer up one of her habitually bizarre answers. “A mightily infestatation of
metallicky creatures”—Fanny pronounced the word cree-aht-choors, which
gave Caralee a headache— “crawled from their nests—their nests are the
stars—and are a-spinning their bea-ut-iful cobbyweb across the sky.” Fanny
hunched her shoulders and gazed at the sky with delighted horror.
“They
want to catch the sun and steal away its light until it’s as wee as a star. Then
they’ll hatch more cre-a-tures from that star and lay eggs in our brainpans
with their rustipated penises.” Fanny spread her lips in what would have
been a smile if it hadn’t been as flat and haunted as the wasteland horizon.
“That, Marm-marm, is my answer.”
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