Story: Tourmaline (part two)

Tourmaline

(part two)

He felt, for the first time with Palma, unconciliating. She had left him here with dehydrated cheese, tins labeled meat product, raisins, and sour, spoiled fruit drink. He was tipping in the window and breaking icicles for water, hoping they were dusted with corpses and ruin, that he would gain super immunity…

But it was not so much to say, “I’ve brought you your name.” Palma might have done this small kindness at once.

“Let me tell you who they were,” he said. “I can.”

“Tell me! I may never see you again.”

He opened his mouth…and then thought, she doesn’t mean it like that. “Who will I be?”

She pulled an enameled sleeve from the cuff of her boot, and slid out a card.

“Give that sleeve back. You can’t be found with criminal devices. As of this moment you are pinging.”

Anton saw his face, a seal in red stamped over it; a signature, his own. Another signature, the name of an official safe to be checked. He eyed it all once more.

His new identity was his present, born identity: Anton Leonhardt. He threw his card on the floor.

Palma said, in a calm, unseeing way, “The word is an easy one. Tourmaline.”

He spelled this in his head, finding tour and mal. Backwards, lam and rout. He didn’t ask if they hated him. He picked up the card.

“Good, Anton. I’m leaving. Be in touch.”

His other instruction was to have supper at one of the kitchens, to find a place at a common table, if any supper were being served that day. “Finish by sunset.”

They were touching, all of them, twisting shoulders to avoid intimacy. The queue ran so far along the street, he doubted he could respect Palma’s curfew. He doubted he would be fed at all. Here were three who’d given up, in an alcove bundled under a shared blanket. This business, like all he knew of along the waterfront, was shuttered, its windows filled by sheets of something black—that might be cardboard, or might be a two-way screen.

Looters were shot relentlessly. A mile overhead, snipers might lie on their bellies in their slow-moving balloons. The balloons were painted in a pattern of clouds. There was not a scrap of glass on the street. There was no ash, no paper. No graffitied symbol of defiance, no unlocked door.

To bide the time, Anton began a story: The character thinks of approaches. I have tourmaline to sell, sir. I have had tourmaline stolen from me, ma’am. I remember tourmaline from the old days, child. The character has learned to compensate at times he must do without tourmaline, the thing wanted and not wanted. Today, the character would rather eat.

2

Tourmaline

Tourmaline (part three)

(2016, Stephanie Foster)