moved up to better accommodations. Here they would have to live with nothing worse than cooking smells. Much higher and the air would have been smoky all the time. This was better, they thought—a perfect balance between the green swirling ocean and the dark heights beneath the span.
A black bird swooped in through the tangle of habitations and landed beside the boy. It tilted its head one way and then the other, and finally hopped over and cawed at him. He woke to shining beady eyes just inches from his own. The bird plucked at his hand as if he had food hidden there. The boy sat up, and the bird squawked and flew off. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. The sun was sinking. The whole underside of the span burned orange in the light, and each spar and beam threw off stretching shadows cut out of the air. Down below, fishing boats had tied up around the piers. His eyes moved to the one important spot in the ocean again, but there was nothing to see. He stood and shuffled back home.
If anything seemed peculiar about his home, he didn’t notice it until he had entered the doorway. A little girl stepped out and barred his way. She wasn’t any older than he, but she rose up as if inflating, and ordered him to get out. He couldn’t understand what she was doing in his house. Because he’d been asleep, he experienced the odd sensation that he’d dreamed his whole life before now, and it had evaporated forever the moment he awoke. His father was nowhere in the house, and all the scattered clothing and belongings lying about were things he’d never seen before.
Seized by terror, all he could do was wave his arms and wail wordlessly. The two adults rushed from their fire.
They didn’t know what to make of him any more than their daughter had, but they were not heartless, and it was clear he thought he lived here. The man who’d bought the platform from the boy’s father had indeed noticed him sleeping at the far edge, but because the boy had gone unmentioned, not even looked at, he’d assumed him to be a passing vagrant and nothing to do with the house; now he suspected that the boy had lived here and the man who’d sold them this place had known it. But it was too late to do anything about that—he knew that man would be long gone. The couple communicated to him that he could stay the night; in the morning they would solve his problem. He sat by the door, ragged and sullen. Two small girls now occupied the space that had been his. The one who had confronted him remained awake after her sister and made faces at him. He might have run off that night, and the man and wife would not have minded if they’d awakened in the morning and found him gone, but he lacked the sensibility to forge such a plan, much less set out on his own. He stayed.
In the morning the man took him to a different platform, well across the width of the underspan from his own. A woman lived there with a house full of children. The man and this woman bargained and bickered about him as if he weren’t standing beside them. She said, “Look, I’ve got a full house now, more than I can feed, and half of them can’t steal for spit despite my best efforts to teach ’em. The rest are all what keeps us above the tide. What you want me to do with another, then? What’s he got for me?” She knelt and looked him in the eye. Her breath was foul, her teeth brown and rotten. She clutched his wrists tightly. “What talent do you have, boy?” Her tone implied nothing friendly.
The boy could not think of any talent, and the woman frightened him. He looked away from her.
“Dumb, is it? He can’t even talk? What good is he to me?” She let go his arms and straightened up. “I can’t use him.”
The man said, “What happened to the girl you put out on the beam?”
“How you know about her? Wasn’t one of your girls, anyhow, so you’ve no business asking.”
“She bring anything back for you?”
“Nah. Ran off, she did. Someone cut her loose, took her away. Probably felt sorry for her. Took her off my hands, anyway, and that’s good enough. Could have