who was practically an idiot. He was the sort of man who preferred to be blown from place to place by the winds of fortune. Wherever he went he’d always found someone to take care of him, exactly as the boy’s mother had done. He had pretended to go off in search of work every morning, and she must have known he wasn’t really doing anything more than finding someplace to drink up her coin, but she never said anything to him, because he was handsome and solicitous, always showing her kindness, always promising to do better the next time, although he never did. He was handsome enough still to think he could find such a situation again, provided he didn’t bring any baggage along. He was looking over the wall of his house at his son as he thought this.
The silent boy sat near the edge of the platform with his feet dangling as he stared across the underside of the bridge, down and down to the water. He focused upon the spot where his mother’s body had vanished. He could remember every detail of how her form, wrapped in a sheet, had been carried three platforms away, where the inhabitant had assembled a chute for the disposal of the deceased; how his father had paid the inhabitant a few coins and then carried her to the edge of the chute and callously slid her off.
In his interior world the boy imagined that she had turned into a merwoman or a siren, or even a fish. He assumed that this was the natural order of things and that one day the same would happen to him, although he didn’t like the idea of becoming a fish and being caught and eaten by someone living up here, which is what happened to fish every day—he might even be caught and brought up to be eaten by himself. After all, who could say with certainty that the flow of time didn’t allow such things to happen? Who could be certain time didn’t fold over upon itself or weave back and forth like an Ondiont snake on the surface of the ocean? Certainly not he with his swirled thoughts. He didn’t want to eat his mother, and so he made up his mind that she was not a fish but a sea creature, definitely a merwoman living now in a city on the bottom of the ocean. It was a city that looked like the one where his mother had taken him to beg, up above. It had towers and spires of stone and glazed tile, bright pennants and lamps, and happy people—of course, they would all have fish bodies.
Time passed, and he lay down under the weight of this dream and dozed.
All the while he dreamed of his mother’s transformed life, his father was busy gathering up a few belongings from the house. He paused to watch the boy sleeping, curled up at the edge of the platform. If he felt anything at all for his child, perhaps he felt it then; but it wasn’t strong enough to move him to action—at least not to action in the boy’s favor.
The poles of a ladder clacked against the side of the platform from a level below, directing the father’s attentions toward the group who appeared one after the other at the top—a father and mother and two daughters. They were better dressed than he, in clothes that might have been castoffs from the richer people on the surface. They approached him, and he welcomed them, let them inspect the house, turn over the pallets, stir the ashes in the tiny hearth. There were pots, a skillet. He was leaving all that behind. Close up, the family stank the way fish did after floating for a few days. If they noticed the sleeping boy out at the far edge of the platform they said nothing, and finally they gave the father his money, enough to keep him lubricated until he’d left this span far behind. He clasped hands with the father, then threw his pack over his shoulder and climbed up the ladder to the next level, and on from there, until the gloom of the place swallowed him up as if he’d never been.
The new family spent the day carrying belongings up from the water’s edge where they’d been living, and where everything smelled like brine and rot. They carried the smell with them but it would go away, now they had