“I see,” Marla says, closing her eyes.
The junk man walks (floats?) to the sleeping girl. He tries to wipe the drunkenness away from his face. The whiskey stink pours from him in a cloud, and, suddenly, he feels ashamed. He lays his hand on her forehead, sliding his fingers onto her cheek as though she was still a little child. In his heart, she is always a little child. She feels hot and dry. “She’s sick,” he says.
“It’ll pass,” the egg woman says firmly.
“You don’t know that,” the Constable says. “And you don’t know what’ll happen next. Us three’ve been protecting her all these years. And now . . .” He raises his eyes to the ceiling. “The thought of government soldiers marching into my town is a thing that has kept me up at night ever since the two of you pulled me into this business. In any case, this is where they’ll come first, so this is where she needs not to be. Get her back to the farm. And maybe get her out of town.”
The junk man curls his arms around the sleeping girl. Her body feels lighter than it should, as though she had been filled up with helium. He pulls her to his chest and cradles her like he did when she was a baby. “Little Sparrow,” he croons. “My precious little bird.” Though he is unsteady, he doesn’t drop her. Marla gives him a look—hard and exasperated and forgiving all at once. She follows him out the door.
Outside, as they laid the girl and her butterfly in the cart, Marla reaches into her basket and hands three eggs to the Constable. He tries to decline.
“I couldn’t possibly. Three? Not during a food shortage.”
“You’ll eat them and you’ll be grateful for it. One’s for strength and one’s for luck.” She nods and turns down the road. The Constable stares at his three eggs.
“What’s the third one for?” he calls after her.
“Lunacy,” the egg woman says without turning around. “It might be our only hope.”
18. Then.
At first, the junk man didn’t notice anything strange about the recently dead baby. Besides, of course, its de-corpsification.
That, he allowed, was odd. And was a thing best not thought about.
In any case, he was the last person to get judgmental or holier than thou. Live and let live, that was his philosophy, his heart giving a little thrill at the word live.
Live, live, live. He nearly sang it.
And besides, despite the fact that he had seen it with his own eyes, he had difficulty accepting the whole business as fact. Not really. She was too alive, too . . . wonderful. It was as though she was only dead in theory. A clever trick by a clever girl.
Without meaning to, he leaned in and kissed the wobbly, delicate top of her tiny head. She smelled so good, it made him weak inside. And yet strong too. As though he had the strength to do bare-handed battle with legions of soldiers-of-fortune just to protect her. He wanted to do harm to any who might try to harm her. He wanted to find the individuals responsible for throwing a baby—a baby, for god’s sake!—onto a rubbish heap. As though she were, well, rubbish.
The very idea!
It enraged him just thinking about it. He wanted to tear out their hearts and rip off their heads and spit upon their graves. He wanted their reputations slandered, their good deeds questioned, their names forgotten by history. He wanted their corpses thrown on rubbish heaps. Let them see how they liked it! Actually, no. He enjoyed rubbish heaps as a general rule. Best not pollute them.
The child whimpered. She was so hungry.
“Soon, my sweet,” the junk man said. “Soon my little sparrow. You will eat and eat until your blood runs sweet. Sweet in the mouth, sweet in the eyes, sweet in your tiny heart.”
(Where was this coming from? Poetry? Crooning? Great heavens. He had never been a sentimental man. What other strange magic did this child possess?)
He wasn’t sure what infants ate when there wasn’t a mother to do the job. Milk seemed a reasonable option, but milk from a cow or milk from a goat? Or perhaps a sheep? He had no idea. But the child was hungry, and she must be fed. He worried about her crying—what if someone alerted the authorities? What if someone handed her off to the same soldiers who threw her away? His fear was hot and cold at once. He curled his arm around his precious bundle and walked faster.
He didn’t know what family she originally belonged to—most of the pregnant women had been rounded up and stored in an asylum until their due dates came. He could ask around, but not many people in town wanted to talk to the junk man—or anyone, really—about such things. You never did know who might be a spy for the government. He skirted the main road and went along the back byways. He shot furtive glances at people who did not glance back. If they heard the child crying, they did not show it.
In her little carrier under his shirt, she squawked and kicked and sucked, just like a normal baby. So he sang as he walked, bowing his arms out slightly as he pushed his cart down the ragged road through town.
And out of
