Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,111

Russell, and I gave them to Harry. He just sat looking at them, frowning at them and shaking his head. It was as though he were trying to read an explanation in them for all that had happened to him. Or maybe he was seeing the faces of his children, and Zahra’s face, long gone.

We sat warming ourselves around the fire we had finally dared to start. We had collected wood outside during the last hour of daylight, but we waited until it was dark to try to use it. The wood was wet and wouldn’t burn at first. When we did get a small fire going, it seemed to make more smoke than heat. We hoped no one would see the smoke sliding up and out of the cave, or that if people did see it, they would think it was from one of the many squatter camps in the mountains. In winter, these mountains are cold, wet, uncomfortable places, difficult places in which to live without modern conveniences, but they’re also places where sensible people mind their own business.

I sat with Harry and he went on staring at the prints and shaking his head. Then he began to rock back and forth. His expression in the firelight seemed to crack, to break down, somehow, unable to hold itself together.

I pulled him to me and held him while he cursed and cried in a harsh, strained, whisper. I realized at some point that I was crying too. I think that within ourselves, we both howled, but somehow, we never got much above a whisper, a rasp. I could feel the howling straining to get out of my throat, the screams that came out as small, ragged cries, his and mine. I don’t know how long we sat together, holding one another, going mad inside ourselves, wailing and moaning for the dead and the lost, unable to contain for one more minute 17 months of humiliation and pain.

We wept ourselves to sleep like tired children. The next day Natividad told me she and Travis had done much the same thing. The others, alone or in groups, had found their own comfort in cathartic weeping, deep sleep, or frantic, furtive love-making at the back of the cave. We were together at last, comforting one another, and yet I think each of us was alone, straining toward the others, some part of ourselves still trapped back in the uncertainty and fear, the pain and desolation of Camp Christian. We strained toward some kind of release, some human contact, some way into the normal, human grieving that had been denied us for so long. It amazes me that we were able to behave as sanely as we did.

The next morning Lucio Figueroa and Adela Ortiz awoke tangled together at the back of the cave. They stared at one another first in horror and confusion, then in deep embarrassment, then in resignation. He put his arm around her, pulled one of the blankets we had salvaged around her, and she leaned against him.

Jorge Cho and Diamond Scott awoke in a similar tangle, although they seemed both unsurprised and unembarrassed.

Michael and Noriko awoke together and lay still against one another for a long time, saying nothing, doing nothing. It seemed enough for each of them that at last they could wake up in each other’s arms.

The Mora girls awoke together, their faces still marked with the tears they had shed the night before.

Somehow Aubrey Dovetree and Nina Noyer had found one another during the night, although they had never paid much attention to one another before. Once they were awake, they moved apart in obvious discomfort.

Only Allie awoke alone, huddled in fetal position in her blanket. I had forgotten her. And hadn’t she lost even more than the rest of us?

I put her between Harry and me, and we started a breakfast fire with the wood we had left over from the night. We put together a breakfast of odds and ends, and Harry and I made her eat. I borrowed a comb from Diamond Scott, who had, in her neatness, managed to find one before we left Camp Christian. With it I combed Allie’s hair, then my own. Things like that had begun to matter again, somehow. We all began to try to put ourselves together as respectable human beings again. For so long we had been filthy slaves in filthy rags cultivating filthy habits in the hope of avoiding rape or lashing. I