From "A Matter of Survival"

Photo by Artin Bakhan on Unsplash

The sky is a vast, red tent; the sun, a bare bulb hanging low on its eastern pole.

Surya wraps the scarf around her neck, tucks the ends into her jacket and pulls the top layer over her nose.

Cut from an old sari, the cotton smells of mothballs and the leather trunk from which her mother had tenderly lifted it last night. She had held it up to the light, then laid it across the bed, her hands smoothing the cerulean folds, slightly yellowed with time.

Surya should have covered her face with it before she stepped outside. How often had her mother warned her—her voice a cracked whisper, her chest heaving from the dust caking the insides of her lungs?

But she wanted to see the sun. Needed to feel its warmth on her skin.

It doesn’t matter that the light hardly seems to come from the sun at all. That everything, stretching towards the fugitive horizon, is covered by a scarlet haze.

This is better than the cold night, its starless depths muddied by the rolling clouds of dust that scatter the lights of the city looming above their settlement.

This, at least, feels like something … Something that laps at the tips of her fingers as she raises them to the sky and runs down her arms, pooling in her chest, where it rests—warm and pulsing.

Surya turns at the sound of footsteps, though she doesn’t have to. An unfortunate fall from a mango tree when he was a child left Jacob with a slightly crooked leg and a persistent limp that worsens during the rainy season.

Her eyes drift up from the rubber boots, past the cargo pants and jacket—stiff and rust-red at the seams where dust had worked itself into the stitching—and settle on his face.

“How much time I tell you bring yuh clothes fuh me wash?”

He smiles faintly, raises a hand as if to scratch his ear, and lets it fall back to his side where it fiddles with the tabs on his pants.

“And where yuh mask deh?”

A flash of panic crosses Jacob’s face. He pulls a balaclava from his pocket and tugs it over his head.

Surya rolls her eyes and turns towards the oil palms standing in endless formation, their tall crowns obscured by distance and haze.

“Man again…” she mutters, choosing not to dwell on the fact that she, too, had walked out into the morning unprotected.

She tightens the scarf, adjusts the straps of her haversack, and steps onto the access road without so much as a glance at Jacob, who falls in beside her.