The Book of Water by Marjorie B. Kellogg Page A

skirts two small inhabited wrecks, people he knows. He sees the elder son of one family pacing the deck with a shotgun, probably anxious about all the shouting and firelight down the beach. N’Doch stays out of sight and cuts inland at the next path through the palm brake.
    He spots the thicket of old vid antennas and satellite dishes sprouting from the
bidonville
, and slows when he reaches the first tents and lean-tos. A runner always looks guilty, he reasons, even if running for help. People in the camp are just stirring, the women mostly, starting their morning duties in the dull, slow way of the unwillingly awakened. Maybe the mob back at the tanker will go straight to their boats when dawn comes. Wait till they see the beach already littered with their day’s catch. But they’ll go out anyway, and maybe this morning, their wives will get to eat some of the breakfast they cook.
    Several campfires are already burning. The starchy hot scent of boiling rice reminds N’Doch that he’s now as hungry as he’s ever been. The girl’s little morsels of bread and cheese were just a tease. He decides he’d better head home. Whatever little food his mama might have, she’s sure to give him some.
    It’s full dawn when he reaches her house, a cinderblock box lined up with a thousand others along a dusty road on the far side of town. The houses are small and dark, having been thrown up several governments ago during a rare moment of social oratory convincing enough to lure foreign aid. The mortar between the cinder blocks is already crumbling and the corrugated plastic roofing is brittle and crackingfrom the heavy, steady dose of UV in the sunlight. But it’s a house and his mama is lucky to have it. She knows this. She’s so aware of it that she hardly ever leaves it for fear some squatter will move in and take possession while she’s out at the market. It’s the only thing she has, the house and her vid set, which is as old as she is but like herself, still functional.
    She’s up and talking to it when N’Doch steps in the open doorway, a tall woman in a once-bright print moving slowly around her one small room, scraping up last night’s cold rice from the bottom of the pot. Surreal color flickers along the cement-gray walls. His mama is shaking her head.
    “I told you yesterday if you let him do that to you, you’d sure be sorry,” she’s scolding. On the pinched old screen, a lovely woman is weeping while an angry man throws crockery around a perfectly appointed room. It looks like no room N’Doch has ever seen.
    “Ma,” he says. He’s sorry now that he has nothing to bring her. But wait. He has. The stone in his pocket.
She
could fence it, maybe. Say she found it somewhere in the rubble.
    His mother clucks her tongue. “Anybody could have told you that, girl.”
    N’Doch tries again. “Ma.” He does not move from the doorway.
    Her eyes are fixed on the vid, reflecting the dancing image and brimming with knowledge and empathy. She turns her long back to N’Doch as she shakes the used tea leaves loose in her cup and pours in boiling water. “Well, don’t just stand there like a lump, boy. Get on in and sit down.”
    N’Doch thinks it’s weird that his mama never calls anyone by their name. A lot of the time he calls her by
her
name, which is Fâtime, mostly to get her attention. He slouches in and drops down at the scarred metal table under the window next to the door. The window’s too high and narrow to see out of, but it’s the only one and it does let in some light and air, to add to the breeze provided by the man-sized hole his father pickaxed through the back wall just before he took off. To cover it, N’Doch salvaged an old Venetian blind as soon as he was old enough to carrysomething that big. He gazes around the room, taking stock. The pocked cement floor is gritty under his feet.
    “You sold the couch?”
    She nods, spooning the cold rice into a plastic tub. Her eyes on the vid, she