Over the months, the young bird began to strengthen as it digested the Earth's moon. At that time, Alder searched the rubble for books to educate a small child in things that probably didn't matter anymore. Wars? What's the point of studying wars when you only knew one other person from your world?
But he knew he couldn't leave the child without some sort of education, so he spent a good chunk of his time dredging through the wreckage of their neighborhood.
The best thing he found was a practical mechanics book and an encyclopedia set, missing everything under "O". It was a pretty recent one, too. Sales for the volumes dumped in the toilet with the advent of Wikipedia, so finding a set that was made this century was a godsend. Moments like this, he could believe there was a God.
One of the first things they read over was the entry on "eggs".
It turns out that the sinkhole was likely a breathing pore, and between the inner and outer membranes, there was an air-and-water sack that had been fed by the expansion of the sinkhole. Years later, under the word "sink" they found out that there was likely a drop in oxygen levels around their home to feed that air bladder for the baby bird.
Another was on the size of the moon that the bird had swallowed because the dimensions didn't line up to Alder. Maysie liked learning about their bird, but really couldn't put together the world she once knew and this bleak landscape. Why did the moon matter when the base of the eyes and crown of the head were so close together?
One day it wasn't so barren.
Feathers started sprouting not too long after the bird first ate—not that they could be seen under the silt. The baby mostly slept at this stage, putting too much into growth, leaving less adequate lighting for Alder and Maysie. Eventually there were tall "trees" a bright golden yellow in the light from the bird's eyes, but more consistently silvery in the darkness.
Alder started rebuilding his bank of batteries that he charged by cycling. Maysie watched his endless pedaling and the feathers that swayed with the bird's slow breaths and whatever faint solar wind penetrated the creature's magnetic field.
"Hey Alder," the newly turned five year old plopped down on an old cushion. "Why do you cycle with the bird's feathers?"
Alder slowed down and stared around himself and cursed under his breath. "Do you think that I can use the feathers to power the batteries?"
Maysie was used to him asking her questions like she knew anything. Alder had no one else to troubleshoot with, so she thought long and hard about the feathers vs. his legs. How are they different? "You make a circle with your feet. The feathers wave like you do when you see me too far off."
Last week she had gone a little too far down towards the bird's beak for Alder, and he yelled and waved both arms to catch her attention. The memory made Alder a bit anxious while being proud that such a small kid could point to the motions being different.
"Well, some bikes only pull the chain in one direction, which can work with the waving. Do you want to see?"
Maysie was such a little cheerleader at times like this. "Yes!"
Alder showed her how the pedals turned the cog going forwards, but left only a faint ticking noise when the pedals were unmoving or ran backwards.
Not long after, Maysie helped him rope the pedals to the top of the feathers, as she could easily climb them.
Soon batteries weren't a problem to keep charged. It was now an issue of maintenance.
"Maysie, would you like to go on a trip with me to the house heaps?" Alder had kept the kid from climbing through the wreckage for half a year at this point, due to fearing losing her after having nursed her (and himself) back to health from the several first impacts with the ground.
Maysie didn't have to be asked twice.
They had to climb up on top of the bird's skull to get at most the house-heaps. Due to the more consistent sunlight over the back of the bird's skull, Maysie saw her first flower since their world fell to pieces. It was a clover, a white little tuft in a patch of green.
Maybe three feet away from it was this clear plastic funnel contraption. "What's this?"
"It's a water trap, Maysie. Take out that water bottle I gave you."
She unhooked her empty thermos from her belt loops. Alder opened it and poured the collected water into the pitcher. "It never happens down where we sleep, but water mists up out the baby bird, just like those old Bibles used to say about the bird's shell before rain fell."
"But how does skin make mist?"
" Remember how sweaty you were a few days ago, and you just wiped dirt and oil off your skin with a towel, Maysie? "
" We're drinking sweat?!"
Alder tried not to cringe at the question. What he did to provide for this child were all things his previous life would fight against. But if she didn't gain disgust from people whose history told them that bird sweat was taboo, she'd likely never be grossed out from it. "Nothing near as oily, and since it floats above the soil a fist height, it doesn't carry much in the way of minerals. This sweat is nothing like ours."
Maysie accepted her thermos back and took a swig. Where else would she get water? She ate canned goods that were badly dented and slept with dirt being her bed when they first came to this place. She couldn't afford to be grossed out—this was survival. She heard Alder mutter that so many times that she almost said it out loud herself.
Alder filled a bigger gallon, then left the water trap to refill with the jug set beside it.
Then he stood and looked at the houses. "Today we are looking for Epsom salt. Come on."
He helped her climb in and out of the groaning structures, showed her where to place her feet as they searched for bathrooms.
They hit the jackpot in the 3rd apartment. Not for their salt, but for stockpiles of toiletpaper. "Well, we won't run out of this for years."
Since it was safe enough, Alder showed her how to toss the goods out the nearest window instead of wasting time crawling out with their hands full. "If it was something breakable, you could rig a rope and lower it down slowly. But that takes some self control."
Maysie found it fun to toss toiletpaper rolls, until she tripped over a board that had warped up. They child started crying and threw herself into her protector's arms, but Alder was more focused on the board than Maysie while patting her back. He was relieved that she didn't cry often because this brought on bouts of "I want my mama!"
That broke Alder more than anything. He may have saved the child in the upheaval, but he couldn't wholly heal her and that's one of the hardest things for a provider to accept: things they cannot fix.
He had learned to distract her. That's why they did so many things: learning, making, exploring, anything to not dwell on what was lost. In this case, he had the perfect redirect. "Maysie-May, I think something is under that board."
Not even two seconds later, the child stopped crying and helped him pry up the wood to find that it was a stash of seed packets. "Can we plant them?!"
"Sure. We'll do that by that patch of clover."
That trip, they forgot to continue looking for Epsom Salt. Well, Maysie forgot. This became the toilet paper and seed run for the child. Alder found his salt while he had her poking holes in the dirt for the seeds. He put it aside when he came back to help her.
"Don't we have to water them?" Maysie remembered how they grew grass seeds in cups for kindergarten.
"We would have to collect much more water than we do right now, to do that, Maysie. This time, we are going to let the mist water them, see how well that works, first." He clasped her shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze to tell her she did a good job. "Can you tell me what you have planted?"
"Cabbage, potatoes, corn, pumpkin, cucumber, beans, basil, spinach, tomatoes, strawberries... You said the rice needed too much water and to wait to see how the rest did before we tried it."
" It's been a while since I've grown a garden. I never got the hang of growing rice, but all the rest did well with occasional rains and my watering them, so the misting has a good chance of growing all of this, just like that clover." Alder tried not to think of the next hurdle: pollinating what they grew. It would depress him too much. "Now, let's go down and see about reconditioning some of the old car batteries."
So down they went to boil Epsom salt in water, pour it into the casing's reservoir, and slosh them around for a couple of hours while Alder told stories of his life stuck between his mother's farm and his father's reservation, starting with how he learned to recondition old batteries during cold winters with little else to do.