Remnant Population

“I like working in the garden,” Ofelia said. She wanted him to go away. She wanted to find out what had just changed in her, somewhere inside, when he said “But you’re leaving.” She looked down. On the ground, on top of the mulch, a slimerod oozed along looking for something to puncture with its one hard part, its little hollow cylinder of shell. Ofelia picked it up by its soft hinder end and watched it lengthen until it was at least ten centimeters long and thin as yarn. Then she flicked it around with a practiced snap of the wrist, and cracked its shell on her other thumb. It made her thumb sting a moment, but it was worth the sting for the look of shocked horror on the young man’s face.

“What was that?” he asked. From his expression, he expected to hear something terrible. Ofelia obliged. “We call it a slimerod,” she said. “And the piercing part is like a medical needle, hollow, so it can suck—” She didn’t have to say more; the young man was backing away already. “Can it go through… shoes?” He was staring now at her bare feet. Ofelia grinned to herself, and made a show of scratching the back of one leg with her other foot.

“It depends on the shoes,” she said. She supposed it might go through a pair of thin cloth shoes with holes in them already. And it didn’t go through human skin (she didn’t know why) but she didn’t say that. Mostly it went through the stems of her plants, not finding what it wanted and leaving wounds the plants spent precious calories mending. But if it made the young man sick enough to go away, she would imply horrors.

“I guess you’ll be glad to leave,” the young man said.

“Excuse me,” Ofelia said. “I have to use the…” she gestured at the shed at the end of the garden. That did it; he flushed an uncomely color and turned away abruptly. She almost giggled. He should have known they had inside conveniences; the first thing the colonists had done was install their waste recycler. But she was glad to see him go. In case he turned back, she walked the rest of the way to the toolshed and went in.

Ofelia had moved before. She knew that it took longer than thirty days to move, if you tried to take things with you. The Company reps had told people they need take nothing; it would all be provided. But forty years is forty years, a lifetime for some, more than that for others. Few of the originals were left; Ofelia was the oldest of these. She had the clearest memory of other places, and she sometimes woke with vivid flashes of that memory. The smell of corn porridge spiced with mezul … a spice that could not be grown here. She remembered the day she had used the last of it, after Humberto died. The way the street looked outside their apartment in Visiazh, with the vendors’ bright awnings over piles of ripe fruits and vegetables, mounds of colorful clothes, racks of pots and pans. She had thought once she could not live without that much color, that much noise and that many people; she had moped a whole year here, miserable until she found the one kind of bright flower that would grow along the edge of the garden. She had little to pack. She had not drawn many clothes from the community store in the past decade. Her old keepsakes had vanished over the years, one after another — most left behind when they became colonists, the rest broken by children, gnawed by insects, dissolved in one or the other of the two big floods or rotted afterwards by fungus. She still had a chipic of Humberto and herself at their wedding, and one of the first two children, and a ribbon she had won in primary school for spelling, now faded a pale pearly gray. That and the fruit dish her mother-in-law had given her, an ugly thing which had survived her intentional carelessness when more beautiful things perished. She could easily be ready in less than thirty days. Except — she leaned her head against the handle of the hoe hanging on the toolshed wall. Somewhere inside, at the moment the young man had said she was leaving, things changed. She felt for that change, as she would have fumbled in the shadowy house for her crochet hook in its bag of yarn. She wasn’t going. Ofelia blinked, suddenly wider awake than she remembered being for a long time. A memory welled up, clear as morning dew that reflected tiny curved pictures of the world around it. Before she married Humberto, before she got involved with that fool Caitano, back when she had just finished primary, she had flourished that spelling ribbon in her father’s face and insisted she was not — absolutely was not — going to quit school and go to work in the local branch of Sims Bancorp cleaning the floors at night.