of smile you give to your daughter to tell her she’s the most wonderful thing in the world or…
“Sash, dinner!” Legon said in a commanding voice and snapped his fingers.
She turned and scowled at both of them. Legon winced, but Edis, having gotten many of these looks from his wife over the years, kept smiling as if this act would somehow make her feel better. “What, you two aren’t capable of making dinner?” she spat.
“Puddin,’ it’s not tha…,” began Edis, whose smile was beginning to fade.
“Don’t you give me that! Why do I have to cook?”
Legon spoke, “Dad, Sasha is right. Why should she do it?”
“Thank you,” she said.
“We can make dinner. Come on, we do it all the time when we go hunting,” Legon said to Edis.
At this something clicked in Sasha’s head.
“Oh… well… that’s ok, I really don’t mind,” she said in a much calmer and placating voice.
“No Sash, Legon’s right. We’ll cook. I’m sorry, that was pig-headed of me.” Edis gestured for her to sit down.
“No, no I insist. I can do it. You two set the table and sit down, I don’t mind.” She swept over to the counter and began putting on her blue apron.
“Are you sure?” asked Legon one last time.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she said as she began to get out pots and pans. As Legon sat down, Edis mouthed to him, “Good one, son,” and gave him a thumbs up. The fact of the matter was that both Legon and Edis could cook. They were not as good as Sasha or Laura, but they weren’t bad. Sasha didn’t know this, of course, since she had never let them cook on the two occasions when she had gone hunting with them. Legon had thought the for sure that she wouldn’t fall for his trick, but she had, and this bothered him. It meant that there was a lot on Sasha’s mind that she was not telling him.
Chapter Four
“Life is a series of decisions, each moving us along the ropes of fate. How to make the right decision? This is a question that all ask yet few understand. As options are weighed and consequences revealed we see bondage, but in reality we are free. Look up the rope of fate and choose your place, then go to it. Let that guide your decisions today.”
The day after Legon and Sasha had gone over to see Kovos, Legon found himself walking into his house after an uneventful morning. There was almost nothing to do in the shop; it was one of the famine days as far as work went. The only thing that Edis could find to keep himself busy was making sausage, and for that he liked to have Sasha’s help. Legon didn’t mind; he hated to make sausage and it was a great opportunity for Legon and Sasha to switch roles. He would help his mother if she needed it, and Sasha got some time with Edis.
When he got inside, his mother was sitting at the table sorting herbs, or at least he thought that was what she was doing. There were a lot of dried plants on the table and she was sifting through them. She was wearing a brown dress and a white apron. She was sitting on a chair hunched over, her hands moving quickly over the herbs. He was amazed that the little plants didn’t crumble as she picked them up. She looked up at him, smiled and gestured with her head for him to sit down. She was deep in concentration and he knew that she would get to him eventually, so he contented himself with sitting and pulling his shoulders back, feeling the muscles across his broad chest stretch and relax.
“How are you today dear?” she said, not looking up from her work.
“I’m doing good mom. What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get these sorted out. They fell off the wall and got all jumbled up.”
On either side of the fireplace were herbs drying on the walls, and sure enough there was a spot that was missing a patch.
“Do you want me to fix it? I don’t think it would take long,” Legon said, gesturing to the wall.
Laura didn’t see him point as she was still hunched over the herbs. “What dear? What would you fix?” she looked up, confused.
“The wall,” he said flatly. She looked over and shook her head as if she was ridding herself of day dream.
“Sorry. You know I can be a flake when I’m concentrating. Let me finish this and we can have some tea.”
An image of the look on Sasha’s face from two days ago when she had “some tea” rushed through his mind like a herd of stampeding cows.
“Oh… I feel great mom… I don’t need anything. Not thirsty, really. You have stuff to do, so I’ll just…” his mind reached into what seemed to be nothingness, coming up with a reason to avoid tea. “I’ll fix the wall, that’s what needs to be done.” He instantly knew this hadn’t worked. As soon as he said it she looked up at him, and he could see she was trying not to laugh.
“We’re not going to have that kind of tea, just good old mint will do today,” she said with a chuckle in her voice.
Legon sat back and sighed with relief. Soon she was done, and before he knew it she seemed to make mint tea appear out of thin air. As he sipped it he felt the hot liquid flow down his throat to warm his belly. They sat quietly for a bit. His mother broke the silence.
“You’ll be eighteen in a month. How do you feel about that?” Her voice was soft and carried with it all the sincerity in the world. This subject had been playing over and over again in his head for the last few weeks.
“I don’t know how I feel about it. There’s a part of me that is excited about coming of age but… there’s a bigger part that is terrified, you know what I mean?” He looked at her and she nodded a bit. He continued on.
“I just feel… I feel like I’m racing toward something I can’t control and something…” he seemed to have a hard time thinking of the words.
She tried to help him. “Scary?”
“Yeah, but not like the scary you would think. It’s not the excited scary.”
Her face looked concerned. “Legon, what’s wrong?”
He paused, wondering if he should tell her about his tattoo. “It’s better to tell her now than later,” he thought.
“Come and look,” he said.
As he said this he gestured to his back and pulled the back of his shirt down. His mother looked a little frightened now and came around back of him to look. He heard a sharp intake of breath and then he felt her fingers inside the back of his shirt and then he heard the fabric rip. It caught him off guard. His mother would never damage good clothes. She held his shoulders in place when he tried to turn. Her hands were moving across his back, over the tattoo. The movement felt frantic and scared. It felt like she was trying to remove dirt or a smudge off his back. They stopped moving and she walked slowly over to the chair. She sat and held her face in her hands. Her whole body was shuddering, and he could hear her say between sobs, “Not my son… not my son…”
Fear crawled up the back of his neck and he was surprised by a crack in his voice. “Mom what’s wrong? What’s going on?” She looked up at him. There was a pleading look in her tear-stained face, a look that said, ‘Don’t make me, please don’t make me.’
Her voice was rough. “I think it’s time I told you how you came to us.”
His forehead scrunched. “Mom, I know how I got here. Dad found me while he was hunting. They came across a camp site that had been raided; they figured that I was left behind by mistake when people fled from the
