I am somewhere else. It wasn’t my home.
I’d never been here before, but it felt familiar somehow, or maybe just closer in feel to places I recognized. After the clean, picturesque towns, mountains and chateaus where we’d spent the last few weeks in Europe, the grittiness of this new place felt almost...welcome.
Circling cities to avoid detection, we’d been traveling through farmlands and villages for months. We’d stopped in safe houses to sleep. Churches, warehouses, hotels, mosques, a winery in the hills, a bombed out Jewish temple. I told myself I didn’t know what was worse: the nights I wasn’t able to sleep, or having to suffer through the dreams and waking when I could.
But that was a lie, too.
I missed him by the time we hit the next construct, by the time I could dream again. I missed him, looked for him, and when I found him, we would...
Here it was dirty, loud, colorful, hot, poor, crowded.
I walked up a dirt and stone street where a mound of brightly-colored trash covered an open sewer grate, stinking already at seven o’clock in the morning. A shrine draped in winking Christmas lights and gold foil stood in a crack between buildings, a monkey god cavorting among flowers and stick fruit covered in buzzing flies. A caramel-colored cow stood chewing over a pile of rotting greens and egg cartons and chicken bones.
When I paused to pat its backside, it didn’t look up.
Most of my face was wrapped in gauzy cream cloth, but I nodded anyway to a monk in red robes on his way up the street, wearing sunglasses and carrying an espresso in his hand. I felt oddly content with the horrible smells of human excrement and rotting melon and maggot-covered meat. Even with the stench slowly heating in the morning sun, for some reason I felt like I could almost breathe here.
I chuckled at the next shrine, which held a picture of me covered in pink flower petals surrounded by white, paraffin candles. It was my high school end-of-year picture, and my hair had a streak of lime green in it...me and Jaden’s idea of rebellion, which infuriated my mother at the time, since she’d already purchased a photo package to give pictures to all of our relatives. Because of the ban, real pictures were expensive as hell, and needed special permission. She still had a job back then, working for the post office, and she made me pay for the photos out of my meager tip money from an earlier crap job I had, which had taken months. It was probably the last time we really screamed at each other since my father...
I made my way up the hill, using the cane.
The mountains loomed over the town, breathtakingly tall, draped in snow and wisps of low-lying, fog-like clouds. Colorful prayer flags flapped in the breeze, hanging from wires sagging between buildings painted in bright greens and blues.
Most windows had no glass, just wooden shutters and tarps covering square openings. A black paw emerged from one of these as I watched, a second story window in a hotel with tables and chairs on a roof where people sat and drank hot chai, speaking Hindi and Tibetan and seer pidgin. Following the paw came the rest of a squat, tan-colored monkey. Its furred face remained etched in a frown despite the sticky piece of mango clutched in one paw. Gripping wooden slats with its free hand and feet, it climbed nimbly up to the roof.
When it reached the railing a yell pierced the early morning quiet, and a white-haired Indian woman swung at the monkey with a long-handled broom.
The monkey screeched and held his ground, still clutching the mango...and I laughed, watching the grumpy thing vault to the roof of a shack that housed the steaming chai pot from which a girl maybe twelve-years-old ladled tea.
“You’re awfully chipper,” said a voice beside me. “I’d have thought you’d be hung over after the quantities of bourbon you drank last night.”
The seer’s dry tone snapped me out of my view of the mountains behind the fat, ill-tempered monkey and the people on plastic chairs. I turned to see the same red-brown irises I’d been looking at for weeks.
“Yeah,” I said. “Guess I’ve got good genes for drinking until I black out.”
The female seer with the dark braids sniffed, but seemed content to have received an answer.
She folded her arms, gazing around us with some distaste.
“Didn’t Dehgoies explain how alcohol affects your light?” she said, for possibly the four hundredth time. “It’s a wonder the Rooks didn’t find us, with the flares you send out. Between that and...”
The lecture continued, but I heard little of the rest.
The pain slid forward as soon as she mentioned his name. When I allowed myself to go there, briefly, to look for him, a migraine sharpened behind my eyes, forcing me to stop and lean heavily on the cane I’d been using to help out my knee. I waited for the pain to pass, breathing in garbage and incense from a nearby storefront.