Project Purple

42 - The Sayer

It was the first early morning of autumn, and she stood along the bank of the stream, staring at a thin layer of ice that had formed on the water.

Winter would come early.

Renee liked the ice. She had a thing about water, though-H20 had always made her gag.

Her family had been too poor to buy bottled water, so she drank out of the tap. Maybe it was the foul minerals, or the chlorine, but she would drink only capfuls of water, making grotesque expressions.

"Water is tasteless," they had jibed her. But she knew better than that. It didn't matter whether it was distilled, or spring, or filtered-She still had to put a slice of lemon in her water glass, along with ice cubes, and then she could get it down.

"You'll dehydrate," they had said.

Renee was skeptical about that claim, too, and could point to studies that actually said water was bad for you.

The contentious relationship with water just escalated; she never entered swimming pools, and because swim lessons had always been optional in school, Renee took some pride in boasting a total ignorance of any swim stroke. She saw the Atlantic Ocean with her family once, and it was once too often. A landlubber she would remain.

Now the ice was coming. Renee-the self-claimed Canadian, the only real Non-American among them-felt closer to understanding their ordeal than any of the other besieged colonials.

"They want to impose the structure onto us; they feel that's what we lack-that we're like unruly children, refusing to adopt the mindset. And if they have to keep us here through the ice, they will."

"Come here," was all he said, reaching for her naked body.

The Buckskinner reeked of menace, and she found that reassuring, running a hand along his bare chest.

Renee had done what needed doing; one would have to be an idiot not to deduce that the bird circling the colony was surveillance. And it followed them through the woods, waiting above-waiting for the correction. All the Badger had to do was stand there and take it; the poor little guy would've been black and blue, but stonings didn't have to end in execution, surely.

What he did had confused her. It also haunted her. But it made her stronger.

Renee was a survivor. And as the Preacher, in his ghastly guilt, emasculated himself in hut #7, slowly bleeding to death in his feathered, cutained bed, she had been fucking her brains out with the Buckskinner, next door in hut #8-in the feathery bed of the Governor, who, for two days running, had yet to return with his new friend, the skinny-armed Pickleherring.

Renee didn't wish violence upon anyone if it could be averted; they were, after all, family-of sorts. She possessed, however, a practical head, and if Wallace's absence turned out to be permanent (as was his servant's) she had might as well lay claim to the roomy accomodation before the others did.

He reached for her again, and she drew back, "I'm not your whore."

His eyes twinkled, "You're a dancer... A good one, too."

"An unlucky dancer."

"A good, unlucky dancer."

With that warning, she consented, and let him mount her again.

Outwardly, Renee had lost nothing of her serene confidence. But from the day of the Badger's death, something changed within her, and her eyes bore traces of the profound weight of her thoughts. She felt as if she were being sucked into a vortex, which was speeding up, faster and faster, like an amusement park ride; the faster she whirled, however, the more exhilarated she felt.