The World Without Flags

Then I get the book from the backpack , the book that Eric was reading, The Left Hand of Darkness. The one I took without knowing why. Now I think I know why. I flip through the pages and come to the bookmark where Eric had stopped reading, a good fifty pages in. This is where he stopped reading. I’m suddenly overcome with emotion. If he dies, he’ll never finish his book. It kills me. I take a deep breath.

“How about we start at the beginning?” I ask.

“Unh,” Eric says.

I turn to the opening page, and, by firelight, in a low voice, I begin to read.

69

Our second day at the farm is even better than the first. I wake up late in the morning and have a breakfast of fried fish and cold fiddleheads. Even though I still ache for a handful of salt, the breakfast is delicious. I boil a kettle of water and then pour it over the fish bones and trout heads. I boil it for a while and then pour out the broth into the aluminum mug. I add some mashed fiddleheads and stir it up. It doesn’t look too appetizing. Looks like fish guts to me, but there’s not much I can do about that. Besides, Eric doesn’t care.

I get Eric from the stall and bring him to the fire. Then, as the sun gets hotter around us, I feed him three mugs of the fish/fiddleheads soup stuff. I wonder how much of it actually gets in his stomach, he makes such a mess, but I don’t have much control over that. After I wipe him down with his drooly towel, I let him sit out in the sun to dry off. I try not to look at him too much, but I can’t ignore that he isn’t looking good. His face is hardly recognizable, all sharp angles and bones and beard. His whole body looks skeletal, and his clothes hang from him like rags. He attracts a constant cloud of flies. But I try to ignore all that. I read him a few pages from his book before I put him back into the stall and head down to the brook to fish.

The fishing is just as good. Today I have even more time, so I leisurely fish up and down the brook until I have eight, fine brook trout. I’m feeling so rich with luxuries that I throw back a ninth, just because it’s a little too small. I watch its sinuous black body vanish back into the brook. Watching it, I can’t help but get a little sentimental. We’re a lot alike, after all, both survivors. Then I go around a tree and, with my jackknife, I clean the fish who weren’t quite as lucky today.

When I get back to the farmhouse, I decide to bring Bandit down to the brook to drink and get him out of the sun. After checking on Eric, who is sitting stone still in his stall, I grab our backpack and head back to the brook, leading Bandit. When we get there, I watch Bandit drink greedily and feel a little guilty for not bringing him down here sooner. “I’m doing the best I can,” I tell the horse. Bandit ignores me and keeps drinking. Watching him drink the unboiled water, I hope horses can’t get the Worm.

Pulling off the backpack, I dig around for Eric’s papers. I thought earlier, while I was fishing, that maybe some of these papers were letters that he exchanged with Good Prince Billy. For years when Randy the Vandal would return from trading, he’d bring letters to Eric. I knew they were from several people in different communities, but I never asked him about it and he never said anything. He’d just sit in the cabin by the stove and read them and then sit and stare at the wall so intensely, I could hear his mind grinding away, thinking. I never thought to ask him about it. Maybe there’s some information here, in these letters, that can help us.

The first couple letters are from people I don’t know. Some guy named Burt and a woman, Jenni. The letters are filled with news about crops that work and don’t work, troubles in their community, an interesting attempt to form a court, but nothing that could help us. The third letter is from Good Prince Billy. She signs it “Good Prince.” I wish there was a date on it, something to give me an idea of how old it is, but there isn’t. She talks about her community. Lots of names I don’t recognize. Some speculation about various other groups that I don’t know. A passing mention of the Gearheads. All in all, pretty disappointing.

The next page is folded. I can tell it’s old because the paper is yellow and brittle at the edges. The letter makes me hopeful because I’m looking for information about the Worm and the older the letter, the more likely it is that they will be talking about it. When I open it, I’m stunned.