Sand Red

31

'Yul, find a bone needle,' I said almost as soon as we'd dismounted. Aida needed stitching. She held her forearm in a death grip and her face was pale and contorted from the pain.

Syenin sat her down quickly and Yul scrabbled to find a bone needle in the sack. I held my hand out for it, but he rushed past and to Aida, as though he were going to do it himself.

'No, no,' Aida said. 'Give it to him.' She weakly nodded towards me. We had been extensively trained in medical care at the Dong camp, as she knew. Yul turned to me and handed me the needle wordlessly.

'Do it cleanly.'

I looked around for the sack. 'Not like this, boil it first. Put a bit of cloth in with it.' I tore out a few strands of my hair, wincing. This, too. Syenin, set up a fire, will you?'

Yul took the needle from me and began frantically preparing the fire before Syenin could move.

I waited noiselessly, in pain. I was a fish that had torn itself from a hook. Alive and hurt.

When the water came to a boil, Yul put out the fire and we waited for long, drawn out minutes, for the covered water to cool. When it had cooled sufficiently enough to be touched, I dipped my hand in the still hot water and retrieved both needle and rag quickly. I wrung the rag out, my hands complaining from the heat, and then quickly crawled over to Aida. I looked her in the eye for a moment. 'Ready?' She nodded almost imperceptibly and gave a great yowl as she wrenched her palm from the wound. Dried blood coated her forearm and the place was horribly disfigured, swollen as the skin tried to close, but the damaged vein would not let it.

'It's going to hurt, but it has to be done. Okay?'

Her eyes were squeezed shut.'Just start,' she pleaded.

I hated to see the pain she was in. I could almost share it, and my own arm throbbed in empathy. I steeled myself and gently, wearing the rag on my finger, I softly felt around the wound for the vein. I flinched as she shrieked and my hand slipped a little, but I caught myself and I kept on.

The vein was slippery and thin when I felt it and I kept my finger on the spot carefully, lest I should lose it, as I readied the needle with my hair through it. I fought to steady my hands as I put in the first stitch. She howled and her arm moved and she shrieked again and then stopped suddenly and tried her hardest to hold still. I readied myself for the next stitch, and number by number, I stitched the vein in completely with the hair from my head and then moved on to the skin outside. I had to stitch this with the utmost care so I did not puncture the vein.

It took far longer to close the skin than the vein because of this and I sat back and panted from the effort of bending over her when it was done.

Aida cried. She sniffled and lay down groaning onto the yellow muck and curled up, cradling her newly stitched arm.

'We should rest here,' Syenin said, looking at us. We were all tired.

'Aye,' I voiced agreement. 'And bandage that.'

Syenin set to work on it and I went over to Yul's side. 'The device?'

He looked around at me. 'Here.' He produced a little black screened rectangle, the likes of which we had heard of from our earliest childhood. A cellphone. I took it in my hands and turned it over in awe.

'How does it work?'

'I don't know yet,' he said disinterestedly. He was watching Aida being bandaged.

I thumbed the glittering obsidian screen the way devices were supposed to work. Nothing happened.

'Maybe it's out of power,' I said uncertainly, remembering how batteries grew discharged by themselves if you left them doing nothing for too long.

Yul didn't answer. He took the device out of my hands and went over to Aida's side.

He lay down beside her, looking at her back with a pained expression on his face. I looked away and helped Syenin as best I could clear the things away.

When we were packed, I lay down a little distance from Yul with Syenin's help. Syenin lay beside me and I stared up at the thousand stars that lit the sky.

'What are we going to do with the car?' Syenin asked.

'Sell it to the next camp. We don't have the fuel to maintain it.'

'I'm so hungry.'

I was so hungry I could swear my very bones were getting thinner. 'We'll hunt tomorrow.'

'Should have taken a Red along to eat.'

I said nothing and he was quiet for a while and then-

'I keep thinking about when I will die.'

I turned my attention back to him, a little irritated. I wasn't interested in talking just now. 'Someday, someone will kill you and then they'll eat you and just like that, you'll die. All of us will.'

'They won't eat me if I'm a Forager.'

I snorted.

'Don't laugh. I'm serious. If I die a Forager, I won't be eaten.'

'It doesn't matter what happens to your body. You won't be in it.'

'Where do we go when we're dead?'

'How would I know?'

'It bothers me. That someone that fought to live for decades and learned so much and knew other people, can just be gone.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'It just bothers me.'

'I'm going to sleep.'

He said nothing.

I didn't sleep. I turned back to the stars and thought about what he had said. I could die tomorrow and I would be erased permanently from the world. I really could die tomorrow, or within the week, or live another fifty years.

The stars blazed down on me and I watched them move steadily, bringing dawn closer and closer, but also bringing another night closer. It was frightening how time could not be stopped. It was wild that an ant like me, that existed on the whims of random events, could comprehend the enormity of the physics I existed in.

Between thinking about Syenin's worries and the unstoppable march of time, I dozed off.