The Shattered

Chapter 4: get out of town

I woke up to the smell of soup. That couldn't be right. First of all, my mom had no idea how to cook, second of all, all meals were cooked for us by the designated cooks, and third of all, meals were to be eaten in the clearing. I oozed out of bed, and dragged myself to the bathroom. I examined my face in the small mirror that our family shared, and was disappointed to find dark circles underneath my eyes, despite the extra sleep that I'd had lately. I felt strangely tired too.
I grabbed my robe off of the bathroom door, and threw it on as I walked into the main room. A dark figure was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of something that looked strangely like soup. Our family only had a stove because Anna was practically already a cook, so she needed a stove to try and make new recipes for the village. My mom and I never touched it, because mom could burn water and I had inherited her horrible cooking. Anna, on the other hand, was a genius with a spatula and a pot.
"Anna?" I asked, hoping that mom wasn't trying to cook dinner for me.
"Yeah?" She replied, looking up from the pot that she was stirring.
"Thank god. It's not mom trying to cook something." I joked, breathing out in a fake sigh of relief. Anna rolled her eyes at my joke.
"That would be a real nightmare." She replied, smiling over whatever she was cooking. "I was given the night off, and I decided to experiment with a new recipe that I've been thinking about. Since you didn't get much at dinner tonight, you could play judge and see if my new recipe is any good."
I grinned at her. She always had my back, especially when it came to food.
"That would be great. I'd love to." She wiped her brow in mock relief.
"Good, because otherwise I'd have to eat it all on my own. Wouldn't that be a nightmare?" I laughed and moved towards the table, sitting down on one of the small wooden chairs that encircled our dining room table. Ethan worked with wood, and he had given them to my mom as a birthday present one year. I turned and watched Anna pour the steaming substance into two porcelain bowls that we had gotten as a present from Anna's friend, who also happened to be the son of the potter. The whole town thought that he and Anna were planning on getting married soon, and whenever Anna was asked about it she blushed furiously and refused to answer the question.
She brought the bowls over to the table and set one of them down in front of me, along with a wooden spoon that was another present from Ethan. He had been carving since the plane had crashed, killing his mom and flinging his dad almost instantaneously into depression. When his dad had begun to drink, Ethan had taken over the family business of carving to keep the family from being banned. That was what happened when your family didn't do the work that they were supposed to do. They were banished, or the village stopped feeding them until they picked up their jobs and began to be productive.
I picked up my spoon and dipped it into the creamy substance, lifting a thick spoonful to my lips. A savory flavor lit across my tongue, and I closed my eyes and focused on it.
'Oh my god Anna, that's amazing. What is this?" she smiled and stirred her bowl with her spoon.
"It's made of one of those snakes that attacked you. They caught one today and brought it here, hoping that I could make something out of it." I gaped at her, wondering how she could turn that horrendous snake into an amazing stew.
"How did you do that?" I asked her when I finally found my voice.
"I just added a few spices and pounded the meat until it was soft. Then I cut it up into little pieces and put it into a cream substance. I'll have to tell the other cooks how to do it, and tell the hunters that they should hunt those more often. One of those things could feed the entire village for a week."
"If you keep making our food this good, you'll spoil us. You had better slow down." I joked, and she smiled, spooning some of it into her mouth. We finished the meal in near silence, as if talking would scare the soup away.
"Where's mom?" I asked when we were finished.
"She's still away with the hunters. They were hoping to set some traps in the river for the fish. They usually have a populous explosion around this time of year. She said that she would be out late, so we shouldn't worry about her." She picked up her bowl and spoon and stood up. I watched her walk to our sink and rinse off her dishes before grabbing the soap and preparing to wash them. The only reason that we had a sink was because Anna was a cook, and so the council thought that it would be important for her to have running water to wash off the dishes when she used them to make new foods. It also helped that our family had so many connections, and was so well liked. My mom was the only female hunter, and my sister was the most talented to be cook that they had, plus the most popular girl her age. I was the black sheep in my family, because I was the only one who didn't have many connections. Sure, I knew Ethan, who was the one and only craftsman and carver for the village, but beyond that, my connections were very few and far between.
I got up and followed Anna's example, rinsing my bowl at the sink, and then putting a drizzle of soap onto it and scrubbing it until it was clean. I set it on the counter and walked back to my room, flopping down onto my bed. There wasn't very much to do at my house, so we had to entertain ourselves. We had a few books around the house, but books were expensive and very hard to come by in our village, and so we weren't really in the habit of reading them often. We had a town library, but it was fairly small and pretty much everyone had already read all of the books that it had to offer. I wasn't the kind of person that enjoyed reading a book twice or three times, so as soon as I had read all of the books, my reading days ended. Boredom was something that was prevented by the jobs that you got when you turned eighteen, and so I still had three years to go. Ethan was going to get his official job in three months, but since he already did the carving and wood work for his dad, he kind of had his job. I desperately wanted to be a hunter, like my mom, but I wasn't sure that I was going to get that job. My mom was the only female hunter that had been chosen in the ten years that we had been on the island, and even though I was her daughter, jobs didn't work like that. Every month, the captains of each job would meet, look at all of the kids that were turning nineteen that month, and they would work it out as to who would get which workers. Mom had been picked by default, since she was already over nineteen when we had crashed and she had proven herself worthy. She wasn't the captain of the hunters though, and so I didn't think that I was going to make the cut.
The captain of the hunters was named John, and he was a huge man with broad shoulders and a dark complexion. He was the only one of the hunters that was better at what he did than my mom, and so he got the leadership role over her. Everyone considered her second in command, and he brought her along to the selection meetings, but I still didn't think that I was going to get that job. That was three years off, and I wasn't worried about it. I had plenty of time to prove that I was worthy of the position.
I was pulled out of the dream world by a tapping at my window. I looked up into the darkening light and saw Ethan's face staring down at me. I smiled and held up a finger and then pointed in the direction of the front door, telling him that I would be out in a minute. His face disappeared, and I leapt out of bed, grabbing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt to exchange for the robe that I was currently wearing. I dressed and then bounded to the bathroom, splashing water on my face and grabbing a hair tie to pull my hair up with. I ran through the main room, hugging Anna and telling her that I would be back before ten, and ran out the door, shutting it behind me.
Ethan was lounging on the steps, but he wasn't alone like I had originally believed. His friend Carter was on the walkway, rocking from his toes to his heels and back again. Carter wasn't one of my favorite people, but he wasn't bad either. He didn't talk much, and a lot of people found him intimidating. He wasn't very tall, just five foot five, but he was strange. He didn't show up to public events, he would eat in the small grove of trees by the clearing, and he didn't talk to many of the kids his age. He was a year younger than Ethan, but he was a genius and was in a lot of Ethan's classes, and Ethan wasn't stupid. I on the other hand, couldn't stand school. I knew all of the things that they were trying to teach us, but I didn't like the format of school. Being in a classroom instead of outside made my skin crawl, and we didn't exactly have exciting teachers, either.
"Hey Carter." I said, but it was flat, and he just nodded in response. Ethan got up off of the steps and brushed himself off.
"You up for some hunting?" he asked me. Ethan and I did this on occasion. We would stay out all night hunting small game, and since my sister was a cook, we could give her the meat and she would find a way to incorporate it into the meals that we had the next day. No one ever knew, and that was a good thing considering that it was against the rules to be out past ten. We usually did it alone though, and so Carter's presence confirmed that Ethan had taken the snake attack hard. That was the way that Ethan worked, he was always protective of me, and if something ever happened, even something as small as falling down and skinning my knee, he would take it personally, as though it were his fault.
"I'm ready to hunt, but I have to grab my bow and tell Anna that she'll have to make an excuse to mom for me." I grinned and walked back inside, grabbing my bow and arrows off of the hook just inside of the door.
"I'm going to be out with Ethan all night. You're going to have to make something up to tell mom for me." I commented in Anna's general direction.
"Stay safe." She replied, hovering over her cooking journal. She kept a journal of all of the recipes that she's made, just so that she doesn't forget anything. I ran back out the door, closing it quietly behind me. Ethan smiled as I slipped my arrows over my shoulders.
"And we're off." He said, spinning and running into the forest behind my house, I followed close behind, and Carter brought up the rear.