INOSCULATION

Chapter Three

The girl felt herself floating in some kind of void. She could hear voices but could not make out what they were saying. Her mind drifted and she opened her eyes, looking down to see leaves. Her heart was pounding and her body shaking with fright. Something terrible had happened. She looked at her hands — they were grimy and covered with blood. Her stomach rumbled and she wanted to cry but she knew that she could not make a sound. Not until she knew that the people talking below her were not the same ones who had been there before. Vaguely, she could remember being told to go hide and be quiet. She'd crawled into the tiny gap between the house and the ground and hidden there, covering her ears against the loud whizzing noises and shouting. It had been very hot, she remembered, but she stayed hidden until everything was silent. Then, she'd crawled out. The people in the house had been laying on the floor and had not moved when she touched them. She tried to speak to them but the words to call them no longer existed in her mind. She shook them to see if that would help and patted her hands in the wetness coming from their bodies in case that might do something. When it did nothing, she left them alone and began looking through other houses to see if there were other people who could help her rouse the ones who were laying in the floor in her house. But all of the people she found were laying down like those two had been and all of them had red stuff leaking out of them in places. The girl padded back to the familiar house and began looking for the place where she had seen food come from. She remembered one of the people would talk to the wall in a certain spot and food would appear. What words they said, though, she couldn't remember.

It was dark now. All of the lights were gone. The girl tried to remember where the wall-place-that-gave-food was. When she could not find it, she wanted to cry. But she had been told to be quiet and to hide. So, she returned to her hiding spot and slept until the light came back and woke her up. She crawled back out in search of the wall-place again, her stomach growling and her head pounding. Inside the house, she noticed that the people who were laying down had not moved at all. And they looked different. The red-stuff was different, too. It was browner now and the people were purple where they touched the floor and white where they did not. When she tried to move them, they wouldn't move at all and they were much colder now. She wondered why that was. She also wondered what it was that made them not move and why she was able to move.

A sudden noise brought the girl out of her thoughts. She went out of the house and looked around for the reason for the sound. It made her think of the same sound that made the others tell her to hide and be quiet. Which is why she was in the tree now. More people were walking around. They weren't the same kind of people that she lived with in the town or in the house and they weren't the same kind of people she'd seen making the whizzing noises with their arm-sticks and bright lights yesterday. Something about the way they were dressed was familiar to her. They didn't hold the arm-sticks and the things they did hold in their hands made happy sounds. She liked these people but she was still scared because they were different. Was she supposed to keep hiding and being quiet? One of the people walked into her house. She worried that he might lay down and not move like the people who lived there. But the girl didn't know what to do to stop that from happening.

Something flashed in her mind. A sound. A man used to make a sound and it made her happy because some animal used to come running when the sound was made. She couldn't remember words but she could remember how to make that sound. Pursing her lips, she blew through them. A sharp, piercing whistle startled her. She shook her head and made the sound again. The man came out of the rear of the house and looked around. She made the sound again and he walked over to the tree. He raised the singing-box in his hand and pointed it towards her. It made sounds that made her happy and she made her sound again. The man moved around to the thing she had used to climb up the tree and climbed up himself. She turned and regarded him calmly. He said some words to her but she did not know them. They sounded familiar but made her stomach hurt and her head ache. Finally, he switched and made different words and she smiled. She didn't know these words either but they didn't make her stomach hurt like the other ones did.