Remnant Population

It made no sense. When the tears finally ran out, she wiped her face with a rag — it had been a scrap of fabric from the center, carried home without noticing — and peered into the street. Nothing. Yesterday and the day before and the day before that, nothing, and nothing would be there tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. She lived in the center of nothing, in a moment always suspended between the eternity behind and the eternity before. It had never bothered her, and now it did. Slowly, as slowly as the retreat of pain from a serious injury, the loneliness wore itself out. The fear remained. Something had killed all those people, and would kill her if it found her. She had been ready enough to die alone on this world, when she chose to stay. But she had believed age would kill her, or accident. Not malice.

She felt fragile, exposed, helpless. There were a few weapons in the storehouses, but she knew they would not save her. No one could be alert all the time; she was human, she had to eat and sleep and use the toilet. One person alone, even with the help of all the machines, was not a human presence. If those things found her, they could kill her easily. She had no doubt they would, as quickly as they had killed dozens of people younger and stronger.

But the fear wore itself out too, more slowly than loneliness. Days at a time she managed to forget — not trying, but simply immersed in the irregular routines of her life. They had not found her yet. They had not killed her yet. And she still enjoyed things, and still wanted things.

She retrieved the beads she had dropped from under the sewing tables, and strung them again. She made and painted more beads, added the slimerod cores she had dried, the seed pods of this plant, tufts of long hair from cows’ tails caught in brush… she wasn’t sure what she was making, only that she liked the patterns of chunky things and thin ones, color and texture and line. When she put the construction on her body, she realized it needed a bit more here — another length of beads — and something else there to balance the weight and keep it from slipping off her shoulders. She looked in the mirror. Odd how seldom she’d done that, not since before the other landing. She had not wanted to see her expression; she had been afraid that she might frighten herself. But now the figure in the mirror hardly looked human. She stared. She felt the same — mostly the same — and in the mirror her own face scowled at her, the familiar scowl with which she had always greeted her mirror-self. Her eyebrows were thinner and whiter; her white hair a tousled bush of silver. But the inner self that had been so intent on stringing beads and feathers and wool and cows’ hair and seedpods, that had been so sure where to lace this string to that, and how to hang the tassels — that self had not imagined how she would look in anything but the old drab workshirts and skirts and bonnets of earlier years.

Indecent, the old voice said. Amazing, the new voice said, with approval. Her body was old, wrinkled, sagging, splotched with the wear-marks of nearly eighty years… but hanging on it in weblike patterns were the brilliant colors and textures of her creation. When she shifted her weight from her sore hip, the whole mass swayed, as if she were the breeze. The big beads across the back rolled in the hollow of her back, comforting. The plant fibers she’d used across her shoulders scratched itches she always found it hard to reach.