Prologue
Knowing he wouldn't comprehend the weight of her
words, Greta spoke to her son.
"People I love are going to suffer."
Kneeling near the kitchen table, Arlen worked a mound
of clay against the wooden floor.
Face
taut with concentration, he rolled the gray slab into thin bands.
He pulled off smaller pieces and worked these
as well, setting aside finished pieces to a larger whole.
She wanted him to do more than just hear her voice;
she wanted him to understand.
She was
desperate to share her burden.
But it
was her burden and hers alone to bear.
Involving others would ruin any prospect of ending decades of pain and
the degradation of human life.
If people
had to die to reach this end, it had to play out through its natural
course.
Otherwise, nothing would change.
So she voiced her worries to the only person she
could.
"Mama, we still gonna be together?" Arlen
asked.
He looked up from the floor where
his claywork took shape.
Her son was no
longer a boy.
He hadn't been a boy in so
long, yet he still had a child's mind.
His tangled beard was graying, his scraggly pate thinning.
While he lived with childlike exuberance,
time weighed on her heavily, slowing her movements and shrinking her
bones.
She was an old woman, near her
end.
Innocence shined in Arlen's eyes.
He minded adults and would never purposely
cause anyone grief.
He had such a kind
soul.
Given the choice, she wouldn't
want him to change.
She wouldn't risk
losing who he was for anything.
"We'll always be together," she answered
him.
"I will always be in your
heart."
Soothed by her words, his mind flitted to other
matters.
He picked up a small gray blob
and rolled it in his palm.
"I miss
picking with the others.
I don't mind my
gopher hole, but it ain't the same as the old mine."
Arlen had worked for years as a pile sorter for the
Grendal Coal Company.
Picking coal was a
job fit for a child, sitting atop a tipple pile all day, sorting valuable ore
from the waste rock.
When the company
left Coal Hollow seven years ago, Arlen was twenty years older than the other
pile sorters.
They'd given him the job,
aware he could never advance beyond it.
"You're doing a good thing for your mom, digging
that gopher hole."
Arlen grinned.
The best part of his smile was an aged, yellow ivory.
The rest, empty gaps and decay.
It had been Arlen's idea to open the gopher hole at
their property's edge overlooking Tipple Road.
Townsfolk stopped off the main north-south road through Coal Hollow,
buying coal Arlen had dug from the swallow mine.
High-grade ore ran in thin, twisting veins
just below the topsoil--all he had to do was scratch the surface.
People would procure enough fuel to warm
their homes, allowing Arlen to help support his mom.
There were other places to buy fuel--stores
and other gopher holes aplenty--but people went out of their way to buy from
Arlen.
He pieced together the finished pieces of clay,
realizing the image from his muse.
She could tell his thoughts were skittering off to the
starry skyscape of his mind.
She
continued: "I could point to certain people on the streets of Coal Hollow,
say, 'You will be dead by the first frost.'"
Arlen looked up from his claywork, staring out the
window as the moon rose above the trees, a beacon cutting softly through the
nighttime sky.
"But it has to be.
Has to be, or nothing will change."
Arlen smiled.
Her voice had always soothed him.
"Sometimes death leads to life.
Sometimes there's a greater good."
She thought back to the visit from the two
boys earlier today.
They'd come to her, as
all the town's children did at one point or another, to hear her stories.
Looking those boys in the eye, she told her
tales, setting them on the path to their end.
"Until the day I die, I will damn my ancestors for cursing me with
this supposed gift."
Arlen scooped up his artwork, offering it to her.
She held the gift in shaking hands.
A gray flower more delicate than the clay of
its origin.
Finely articulated petals, a
thin, twisting stem.
Beauty rendered
from a slab of shapeless gray earth.
She smiled.
It
was all the thanks Arlen needed, all the approval he so desperately
sought.
He looked away, staring again at
the rising moon.
No, she would never wish her son to be different, to
be normal.
To be whole.
He was more than the sum of his parts, more
than whole.
And he was a better person
than her.
Better than those who came
before her.
