Lessons

Lessons

Postby catch » Fri May 24, 2013 8:57 am

"Gods take it!"

Butcher Kym looked in disgust at the gate-latch, his hard, horny fingers running across the iron in disbelief. No, it hadn't been snapped, and no rust came away in his fingers. He couldn't believe it. The contraption had failed, somehow. Damn kids sneaking into his yard to filch early blackberries from his wife's bushes, perhaps. Whatever the reason, his prize bitch-terrier, his darling rat-catcher that kept his butchery free of vermin, was long gone, and she had been in heat. Another round, healthy swear, and Kym slammed the gate shut. The latch clicking into place did little to soothe his nerves, and he glared at the offending gate before stumping away to his work.

To his surprise, and small pleasure, he found his terrier, there, obviously flitting away to a familiar place. She'd eaten quite a few of the smoking summer sausages, but he was pleased to find her, giving her an affectionate pet and a brief peck upon her smooth, wired hair.

He was not so pleased when her belly began to swell.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Rance » Wed May 29, 2013 2:15 am

Pinbone's cheeks were long, jowl-like folds that dangled from the sides of her face like they might plop off her at any moment and pool onto the floor. Her eyes were dark, wide, ever-curious, and mostly stupid -- she looked around through those vacant pits as if she'd always some question to be answered. The ears were strips of chewed-up leather. She was not a prize to be won, a little too old and perhaps too overworked, or never worked hard enough.

But that had not kept certain instincts from being answered. A hound was a hound; a bloodhound, however dirty, saggy, and built more like a lump of sloppy mud than a lean hunting-beast, could still produce.

"And produce she will," said Dame de Lanz, shaking a sugar-tin at her husband. "She has got those eyes to her, Crisk. Look at her loins. It's as though someone's given her a good--"

"I am trying to enjoy my breakfast," the old professor said. "Trying being the key ingredient of that sentence."

"Where do you think those eggs on your plate came from?"

"A chicken," he said. "Not my Pinbone."

"But something's going to come from that ugly beast. You give it a few weeks." She clapped the sugar-tin down on the wooden table and scooped a few extra helpings of sugar into his morning tea, just to spite him. "That's a carrying look she's got, all tired-eyed and dreamy. Thinking of babies. A litter of pups."

Crisken de Lanz raised his eyebrows at his wife, then sipped at his tea and said, "It's too sweet."

"Pinbone's going to burst," his wife said.

"Could you have possibly undercooked these eggs anymore," he said.

"I'm surprised her old bitch-hips could handle that kind of work at all."

Crisken patted the hard ribs of the bloodhound lounging on the floor next to him, pooching out his lips as if he were speaking to an infant. "Don't listen to her, Pinbone. Don't you listen to that old windbag. She's talking old wives' tales. Just old wives' tales."

It took Crisken de Lanz three weeks exactly -- twenty-one days, forty-two barely-cooked morning eggs, and one-hundred-and-six scoops of sugar in his twenty-one morning teas -- to realize he did not know a thing about pregnant women, even if the one in his life that gave him peace and happiness wasn't a human at all. But she was swelling. And Dame de Lanz, for once in her long marriage to the over-learned professor of Jernoan literature, had been more right than her husband ever wanted to admit.
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Father's Day

Postby catch » Mon Jun 17, 2013 8:25 am

Jonn Haytham gave one, last swipe of his soap-thick rag across the wet, squirming back, and his face was a little livelier than the face of his neighbor's, Butcher Kym's. After all, he was used to this sort of thing, and poor Kym wasn't, being pressed to midwifery in a way he hadn't had to for his sons and daughter.

"A fine litter," Jonn said, and he pats the back of the pup he held. "Especially this fellow. That's what was wrong, Mister Kym. She just had this bull jammed in there. Happens, sometimes, if the Dog's bigger than the bitch."

Kym looked at him, gloomily, and Jonn knew again that his hobby didn't interest Kym in the least. He was used to it, by now, and throttled his enthusiasm. After all, Kym was a working man, not the eccentric son of a rich family. He saw in terms of gains and losses. But for all his gruffness, he passed his palm over his terrier, his face a concern for her heaving body and closed eyes. No doubt, the birth had been hard, but Kym's nerves had been worked harder.

"They'll all be fine, big things, once they've grown," Jonn said, soothingly, putting the large one in among his fellows, where he immediately began bullying his way to a prime teat. "You'll see."

"They ain't gonna grown," Kym said, and Jonn, gentle-hearted fellow that he was, winced.

Talk in terms he knows.

"Now, be reasonable, Kym," Jonn said, doing his best to be gentle, to stave off the sinking feeling he got looking at the butcher's resolute face. "Think of this day and age. It pays to have a nice, big dog about. Even if you feel secure, I can guarantee that someone will pay top coin for fierce-looking dog. They're half mastiff, looks like -"

"Thank y'for comin'," Kym said, squeezing the finality of that statement in as Jonn stopped to take a breath. He straightened, and stuck his thick hand out, and Jonn had to take it, though he made no effort to hide his frown.

It wasn't lost on Kym. "Look what they done to my little girl," Kym choked, unable to hide his raw emotion, crooking a finger down at the exhausted dog. "She ain' gonna be able t'feed 'em, and me an' mine ain't goin' without just to cover the cost of raisin' those - those monsters. But thank y', Mister Haytham, for comin' down. I woulda lost her without you. Let me get you some -"

"You know I don't charge, Kym," Jonn said, now his turn to cut Kym off. He couldn't look down at the dog and her litter, and so he didn't, giving Kym his handshake, packing his bag, and making his way out.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Rance » Tue Jun 18, 2013 5:51 am

He did not want eggs. Not today.

de Lanz jabbed at the summer-warmed earth with a rusted spade. Each strike got harder, heavier, less effective. Once, he struck a stone and he could feel the vibrations rattling up through the splintered handle and humming through his bones. His earth was not made for being broken, not for vines or any other sort of crops. Not for graves, either.

Pinbone was a cold lump. He'd wrapped her in one of Dame's old dresses ("You'd fit a dead dog into my things, Crisken? That's what you'd do with it, would you?") and dragged the still-warm corpse across the rough yards, until finally, he came to this spot, not too far from a gnarled tree she'd often shaded herself under.

It was with no ceremony that the old professor nudged the dog's dress-wrapped body into the hole. He shoveled the crumbling dirt back atop her. Nostrils flared. Eyes were damp, heavy, but refused, refused to betray his silence. Only when the deceased bloodhound was covered did he begin to beat at the dirt with long, swinging hacks of the shovel, flattening it, crushing it down. He feared he was busting her lifeless ribs to powder, knocking her wrinkled snout deeper and deeper into the peat.

When he was back inside, he drank a bit of tea, tried to read, but all he could hear were the whooping, moaning mewls of senseless pups. Seven of them.

Seven little Pinbones, larger than he thought they ought to be--

--large enough, in their birth, to kill his favorite companion.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Cherny » Sat Jun 22, 2013 5:15 am

He'd picked a spot in the woods, a little way distant from the ramshackle hut - a patch where the canopy isn't as dense overhead, where a patch of grass has established itself among the leaf-litter. It's a pleasant little glade, and the midmorning sun forms shifting patterns as it filters through the breeze-stirred leaves overhead.

The mill-boy carries his rusty mattock over one shoulder and a battered old shovel over the other as he trudges between the trees. The millpond crows, curious and ever-hopeful, flap and cackle from branch to branch overhead, following his progress with bead-bright eyes, but he pays them little mind; this only intrigues them further, as their boy is usually quick to lift his face to them, to wave or offer a hoarse call in greeting. Today he is silent, solemn, gaze fixed on the ground.

The hole he digs alone, in the middle of the grass. He sheds his patch-coat before too long to toil in his shirtsleeves, the work slow and arduous without Many-Fights' broad paws to scrape away the loose dirt; he must alternate between mattock and shovel, pausing now and then to swipe a sleeve across his brow, face shining with the effort and hair clumping into coal-black tufts. First knee-deep, then waist-deep, until eventually he deems the hole to be sufficient, and clambers out with muddied knees and hands.

The mattock he takes with him as he begins the walk back to his shack; the shovel will still be needed where it is, and the coat can stay there as well for the moment. He's barely a half-dozen paces away before the crows glide down from the trees to scratch and peck for worms and suchlike morsels in the pile of loose earth he's excavated. They're still there, croaking and bickering, when he returns a few minutes later hugging a burlap sack against his chest. Its contents a soft, heavy burden in his arms, and he shoos the black birds back from the hole with a curt flick of his hand as he gently sets the sack down on the grassy ground.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Rance » Sat Jun 22, 2013 7:28 pm

He had left there his shovel and his coat. She knew it by the stitches, by the way it lay. He had chiseled a gaping maw in the earth. She'd come only after hearing for too long the strike of tools ringing against the stony ground.

When he returned, the seamstress was there, her broad palm capping the top of the shovel's handle, her gaze following him as he approached with the burdensome bag in his arms. Her eyes were swallowed by the black half-moons of unsleep beneath them. A night spent penning elaborate letters had kept her from her from rest.

She did not know what was wrapped in that burlap. Not yet. But with her skirt snapping in the wind and her other hand shifting to the handle of the shovel, she took the tool out of the lump of displaced earth and held it like a weapon. She was a graveside sentinel, ready to do the other half of the work he'd already done, to replace what he had excavated. She felt unsteady outside of the mill-boy's presence -- often selfish and petulant, an opinionated lump of a girl who questioned everything and regularly bred annoyance in those around her. But near Cherny, while those qualities were often given credence, they were not regularly manifested; she could unstrap her Jerno convictions -- her foreign idiosyncrasies -- for moments like these, and stare into a hole with the wonder of what might fill it.

She did not ask what he was burying. She did not need to.

It could have been a treasure.

It could have been the pieces of a corpse.

She would still stand in the same place, watching her brother. She tightened her fists around the shovel, inclined her head to him, and gave him that tight-lipped smile, that quiet show of support and unspoken comfort.

"Hello, Cherny," she said.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Cherny » Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:01 pm

The sack still holds the smell of freshwater to it, a green, wet scent for all that the cloth itself is dry. His steps slow a little as he notes the figure in the little glade, but recognition follows, and there's a nod in reply to her smile, not quite able to muster one of his own. A distance to his gaze, an echo of the days after he was saved from dancing into the woods; weariness in his features as it is in hers, though for quite different reasons.

In silent explanation he tugs open the mouth of the sack for the seamstress to see, to inspect for herself; no words of his own for this sight: maybe a dozen plump little bodies, blunt muzzles, stubby limbs; eyes never to open, ears still folded over; large despite being only newborns, broad of skull and paw, destined to be powerful great hounds. Except here they are in a sack, cold and stiff, nothing but a damp hole in the ground awaiting them.

When he speaks his voice is dull, flat, and he sniffs futilely through his clogged nose.

"M-many-Fights f-found them in th-the river."
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Re: Lessons

Postby Rance » Sun Jun 23, 2013 3:23 pm

Cat-Talon had said, I be mad 'cause someone went an' drownded all th' puppies.

Water-bloated little corpses that would be sure to sink before they might float, the buoyancy of their nubile muscles all but depleted after their bodies had taken on too much, too much; they were hairy sponges, their clumps of fur matted by mud, their lifeless snouts open in dead barks of permanent silence. They had tongues like pale worms. They might have been paperweights before they were puppies; they could have been pincushions, or anything else. She did not recoil, but instead let her shoulders hang freely. The shovel's spaded head sunk against the ground.

A burlap bag full of surprises.

M-many-Fights f-found them in th-the river.

"Cherny," was all she said, as if his name might carry with it her sympathy, her quiet apology. But sometimes words could not say nearly so much. They would try, at least, to scrabble against the too-steep edges of profundity, but would always fall back into the pit, offering no solance, no bliss -- not here, where twelve miniscule lives--

eleven children, eleven...

--had been ended likely before they knew the milk of a teat or the soothing rasp of a mother-dog's tongue. She squatted down beside the hole, the blade of the shovel poised between her feet.

"Do -- do you want to say something," she said. "A prayer, a word of passing?"
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Re: Lessons

Postby Cherny » Mon Jun 24, 2013 1:44 am

Do you want to say something?

What was there to be said? It was a horrible thing, but as Myrken Wood goes one of the smaller ones - something that would have passed unremarked and unnoticed had Many-Fights not found those sacks half-floating at the river's edge, inadequately laden with stones meant to drag them to the bottom.

A shrug in reply, indifferent to the idea of saying something. He'd not known them before they'd died - save two, perhaps, who'd survived long enough to be rescued but faded away during the night - so they were just sad little lumps of fur and flesh, to be pitied for what had been denied them.

"P-people don't pray f-for, for d-dogs." They don't care if dogs are drowned by the sackful, or chained up for days on end, or set at each other's throats in the fighting-pit. Things that'd provoke outrage if done to a man or a woman or a child. People are grieved over when they die, bodies burned by their loved ones to keep them from rising again. "Dogs j-just get b-buried."

He clambers down into the pit, wider than is really needed for what it's to contain, and reaches for the first of the drowned pups. It's a weight in his hand, solid, and he turns it over to inspect its stump of a snout. His thumb brushes lightly over its wrinkled brow, shifting loose skin that might one day have become a furrowed frown, stoic and solemn. He bows his head, lifting the pup to his lips and murmuring a couple of quiet syllables into its folded-over ear, before setting it carefully at his feet in the bottom of the hole.

"H-henryk."

It's the same with the next, and the next; a moment's care, a gentle touch of fingertips to brow or neck or bloated belly, small affections and a soft-stuttered word for each as they're one by one committed to the ground. Eleven-and-one.

"...Lissa... T-toby... Anna... Jack... B-brolly..."

He hesitates only when he comes to the last, one of the larger pups, its hide marked with a saddle of brindled black on tan. Quiet for long moments, its small flap of ear stroke gently between finger and thumb, and when he looks up to the seamstress for help, for guidance, his gaze is red-rimmed and lost.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Rance » Mon Jun 24, 2013 3:13 am

"We are not like other people, Cherny."

He slid down into the hole and gave a touch to each and every one of the lifeless bundles. He spoke their names, such mundane names, as if each had had its own personality and presence. They would have; they could have, of course, but the water and rocks had denied them that opportunity.

Cherny had such a gentleness in his hands -- every deceased pup was a precious stone in his palms, and she thought she could see the regret in his hands and forearms as he stiffly placed them upon the dirt below his feet.

It was with the last pup that he hesitated and looked at her. The rims of his eyes were swollen, resisting, seeking out some kind of strength in her -- a cork, perhaps, for his tears, a reason not to cry. But she gave him none. She only promised, without a single sound to confirm it, that she was there and would remain there, whether for dead puppies or more. With one hand still clutching the shovel, she reached out the other to stroke across his scalp, brushing his dark hair away from his sweaty brow.

"You're a good man," she told him, feeling so much older, yet refusing to use the word boy. Because no children buried corpses, or were even meant to burn them; only men, unyielding and formidable, did such work. "Many-Fights chose the right friend; he -- he could have chosen any other person, any other young fellow to be at his side. But he chose you. And this--" a motion to the grave, "is why. And this," she said, a dirty thumb scrubbing an errant bead of wetness from his eye-corner, "is why.

"Put -- put that little one down, Cherny," she said, holding her thick palm down to him to help him out.

Dogs j-just get b-buried.

"And we will say a prayer. Together."
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Re: Lessons

Postby Cherny » Mon Jun 24, 2013 7:27 am

He's old enough to understand the reasons behind such things - that growing pups need food, that such food has a price, that merely because someone cares for one dog does not mean they wish to care for nine. Particularly not when they are of such grand stock as this, born to grow strong and powerful and hungry. He knows how much Many-Fights eats, parcels of good red meat from the butcher's shop, knows how much that costs.

But that understanding does very little to assuage the misery of seeing a dozen little bodies that should be warm and soft and wriggling with life. Gloria offers that touch and his gaze drops again with a little shake of his head.

"H-he n-needs a, a name. I had n-names for the, the others b-but there, there's t-twelve." He swallows thickly, shaking his head again. "I d-don't, I don't h-have a n-name for, for th-this one."

Twelve pups, but only eleven names. It doesn't match, and the asymmetry of it pries at his thoughts, at the armour he has built around himself in recent weeks. Only eleven names, and yet it would be wrong to bury this last drowned whelp without even a name of its own, it is important to the boy - vital - that the newborn be given some sort of an identity rather than being disposed of, discarded like an unwanted little scrap of flesh and hide. But the impossibility of it - of fitting eleven names to twelve bodies - is too much for him in that moment; overwhelming, and the attempt spills hot tears of frustration down his cheeks as he stands in the bottom of a hole piled with the dead.

"I, I c-can't - can't b-bury h-h-him w-with, without a, a n-name."
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Re: Lessons

Postby Rance » Mon Jun 24, 2013 12:15 pm

He was at his limit. She saw it, read him like his skin was ink on the pages of an old Jernoan tome. He refused her comforts because he had not yet satisfied himself with his loyalties, his dedications, the necessary ablutions of morality -- if Cherny did not do this, then who might? And if he did not do it right, just right--

--he might as well have not done it at all.

They must all have names; they must not be forgotten.

But he stuttered over the twelfth, as if eleven were all that existed; as if the memories of eleven children, eleven lost to the Fiddler's jaws were somehow chiseled into the boy's mind, and any number beyond or below that threshold was an impossibility, a naught, a complication. She shifted herself to the edge of the hole, and while it could scarcely fit her brother and the miniature corpses, she slipped off clogs and blue-striped stockings to slide down in it with him. Her dark feet cradled the muddy sides of the hole; she stood before Cherny, her skirts a dangling, muddy veil over the little bodies. A curtain from the cruelties of the world.

He would not be filthy without her in this task, the final naming, this last puzzle-piece. She reached out to dance a digit along the crest of the dead pup's brow, like she were somehow drawing the name from it -- divining it. Knowing.

"Many-Sleeps," she whispered, watching her brother. "His name is -- is Many-Sleeps. And he is the largest of them all. He's going to be their -- their protector, Cherny. Do you see," and her fingertip traced down along the bent, spongy spine of the lump of fur in his hands. "In the Afterplace, Many-Sleeps will grow stocky, sturdy, and proud, and no soul will be greater than he.

"Lissa and Toby and Anna and the others, they will grow into vibrant, invincible warriors, but it will be Many-Sleeps who achieves that honor first." She shared this secret in the grave, leaning close so that it was theirs, and theirs alone to know. "Under the watchful eye of Many-Sleeps, his brothers and sisters will never want for wondrous bacon, and each of them will have a boy just like you to play beside. And Many-Sleeps, because he is the largest, he will brood over them until they grow to what they must become."

A pause, a touch to Cherny's chin to raise his wet eyes to hers.

"Ancient spirits, perhaps; ever-vigilant guardians over the souls of children lost far too soon -- eleven for eleven, firm and loyal paws meant to guide the souls of little ones safely through an Afterplace that might be too confusing, too frightening to travel alone. Eleven pairs of unflappable friends," she assured him, and she believed it, with a vibrancy in her gaze that ate away its dull steel and magnified her whispers like prayers to the Nameless.

"Many-Sleeps will never sleep, because he's strong enough to never need it; he will cultivate these hounds, train them, teach them, lead them, as -- as they are meant to guard over eleven lost children. And together, none of them will ever hurt like we do. None -- none of them will ever cry like we do. Many-Sleeps will lick away their tears. Many-Sleeps," she said, sliding her palm across each of Cherny's cheeks to dry them, "has much work to do."

The seamstress cupped her hands underneath Cherny's, that together, they might inter the largest of the lost pups into its spot amid the litter.

"Eleven for eleven," she told Cherny. "A perfect balance. And for all it aches in our hearts, in our guts, it is meant to be."
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Re: Lessons

Postby Cherny » Tue Jun 25, 2013 9:13 am

He is lost, there in a hole in the ground, a hole lined with the dead; lost until Gloria joins him, and offers him a name by which he might be led clear of thoughts that spin in helpless circles, grinding and clashing like ill-aligned mill gears.

His eyes follow the motion of her fingertip over the last pup's form, but his gaze is elsewhere, distant; she weaves a story, spins a future for a dozen little bodies destined only to have dirt shoveled over them, in which they might grow, and thrive. He scarcely dares breathe as she tells their fortune, their destiny as stalwart companions - friends - to the shades of slain children, implacable defenders, protectors. He clings to that vision, nodding slowly as she speaks, accepting her predictions because they draw something good, something worthwhile from what had been a senseless, commonplace barbarism.

When his face lifts to hers the tears have stopped, though his eyes still shine with them; he listens, and though on some level he recognises it to be a fiction - a fairy tale, in which things are just and good and happen for a reason - in this moment he embraces it with a child's faith, clings to it as a desperately-held truth.

Eleven for eleven, and one to watch over them all; that's right, that's balanced, and he can accept it now. With his sister's help he lowers Many-Sleeps, the largest, the guardian of guardians, to join his siblings in the ground.

That done, that last seemingly-insurmountable challenge passed, he clambers out of the hole before reaching back to help Gloria join him on the warm summer grass.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Rance » Wed Jun 26, 2013 3:44 pm

Many-Sleeps was put to rest. The guardian of guardians lay nestled amid his brethren so closely that she could not tell the difference from one pup to the next.

Cherny was out of the grave. When he reached for her, she took his hand. Caring nothing for the state of her skirts, she gouged her toes into the graveside, and with his help, crawled out of the hole. She stood there for several moments, looking left and right upon a world that

slaughtered children by nearly a dozen;

drowned pups until their little mouths could make no noise, and their bodies were swollen, cold, water-logged;

and beyond those black trees, past an almost endless sea, where

little girls were given numbers and told to part their knees for the good of the State;

back to here, only several thousand meters away from where they stood, where

condemned women were forced to wear steel bridles and straps, that steels spikes might clutch their tongue to keep them from

talking--

But she did not look toward the trees, or the distance, or Myrkentown; she looked, instead, toward the solution for it all -- the boy standing in front of her, with his mostly-silence and his occasional stutter, with his overlong coat and his pockets full of found treasure. A boy who cried over puppies. He had been worth Jernoah, and a month-and-a-half of rolling sickness in a slaving vessel, so she gave him what she could--

Her palm struck the haft of the shovel, gripping it, and she wrenched it from the mound of wet dirt beside them. She passed the spade to him like it was some holy weapon, the panacea to every problem in the world.

"You first," she said, not with the desire to shuffle the task off to him, but to share it. "Give them some dirt, show them you're not afraid to say goodbye. There -- there's nothing wrong in goodbyes, Cherny. They are never forever. Sixty, seventy long years from now, your children and your grandchildren will be standing here just like we are, thinking the same thing about you."

Her fingers brushed his shoulder. Squeezed. She smiled at him.

And what she didn't say, what she couldn't say, was that she was sure he'd be burying her many years before then.
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Re: Lessons

Postby Cherny » Fri Jul 05, 2013 12:30 pm

A nod for her words, accepting the good sense of them for all that they do little to ease his heart. Not now. Maybe with time, some span of weeks set between himself and this glade, this day.

He accepts the shovel quietly, gripping the handle first with one hand and then both, dark eyes inspecting the worn wood and pitted iron as if unsure as to its purpose. Then to the heap of dirt, already picked clean of worms and grubs by the millpond crows. Then, finally, to the hole, the grave, and the bodies laid neatly at the bottom, awaiting their covering of earth.

Not yet.

A few steps take him to where his coat still lies on the grass, crouching to rummage awkwardly with one hand in the pockets, the other still clutching the shovel. Eventually he finds what he sought - little strips of meat, cooked, fried, refined through a commonplace alchemy to become crackling, savoury morsels of salt and grease; cast carefully into the grave, a gift, a treat the drowned pups never had a chance to scent, to taste. Not in this life, at least.

With that last kindness he straightens, a glance to the seamstress and a self-conscious little quirk of his lips - aware of the heathen foolishness of it, a waste of good meat that the pups could not enjoy - before he turns to the task that remains. The shovel bites with a crunch of iron and dirt, a load of rich forest earth swung out and tipped into the hole, to rain down upon the soft bodies below. He works steadily, imagining himself some machine of levers and rods, made to shift soil from here to there and nothing more; not meant to look into that yawning grave, to think about its contents; certainly not to feel. He sweats in the heat of the summer's day, begrimed shirt sticking to his back, black hair plastered to his brow, but he works; his back, his shoulders protest at the effort, shovelful after shovelful, but he works; his palms chafe against the tool's handle with the tightness of his grip, threatening blisters, but he works.

He refuses to look up from his toil, refuses to meet his sister's gaze for fear she'll insist he stop and let her take over. It's a selfishness, a stubbornness, and one he persists in until the grave is filled, a hole become a low mound of fresh-turned earth.

It's done. It's done, and his shirtsleeve wipes salt water from his cheeks and brow. As an afterthought he stoops for the now-empty sack, tucking it under his arm; at last his eyes seek out the seamstress' own, just as his fingers reach to twine tightly with hers.

"We can g-go now."
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