Free The Pearl Diver by Jeff Talarigo

night watches began not long after she arrived— when Miss Furato, two buildings down from hers, had two fingers on her rotting left hand eaten away by a rat while she slept. This happened even after the prior winter, when they started sewing stones into the corners of the worst-off patients’ blankets, weighing them down, keeping their hands and feet from slipping out from under the blanket while asleep, not so much to protect them from rats as to keep them from being exposed to the below-freezing temperatures. Winter nights knife through the futons, settling like cold, cold tofu. If she stays in the exact place, her body warms up a little, but an inch outside of the fringe of her body’s imprint, ice, freezing her all over again.
    No matter how bad the winters are, she hates summers the most; how the futons get all moldy. She can’t remember a time at Nagashima when they were ever like they were supposed to be. Can’t remember a time when they were like they were after a day hanging out in the sun to dry, beaten to a fluff with a stick, sinking into one at night, her body an inch or two higher off the floor.
    Besides the futons, the bugs are the big problem in spring, summer, and autumn. Of course there are cockroaches and those microscopic ticks that invade a futon and leave you with itchy, painful bites all over your body, but it is the centipedes that trouble her most. Finger-long, with pincers that leave a poisonous bite behind—some of the bites swelling up to the size of a tangerine. And on her night shifts, she keeps an eye out for them as much as for the rats, has whittled one end of the yard-long stick into a sharp point with which to stab the centipedes. Difficult to kill, have to chop them into three separate pieces.
    It is time now to awaken Miss Kato to replace her on night watch. She reaches over, takes the candle from the windowsill, tilts it over her arm, drips the hot wax onto the spot on her forearm, keeping inside the numbness of its borders. The wax hardens and she peels it off, careful not to break the waxy mirror of her spot. She sets the hardened mold on the windowsill, bends over the candle, this time holding her forearm over the flame, playing with the flame, making it stretch, lunge at her arm. She allows the flame to touch the spot, smells the singeing of the skin. How long can she hold it there before she feels something? How deep does this numbness go? Could I burn a hole all the way through my arm and out the other side without feeling anything? she wonders.
    The stench of the burning flesh, not pain, makes her pull her arm away. Her forearm is a mess, the color of the inside of a dried fig. She places the candle back on the windowsill, next to the waxy fossil of her spot, then goes over and rouses Miss Kato awake.
    ARTIFACT Number 0400
A map of the town of Mushiage
    She has lived through four winters at Nagashima and it is her fourth summer here when the first of the two visitors she will ever have arrives. The young woman sitting across from her bears little resemblance to her. If one looks closely enough, there is something in the shape of their mouths, the slightly protruding upper lip, that hints at family. Nothing more.
    The older sister talks in a soft but high-pitched voice. Perhaps constricted by her nervousness, or maybe that is how her voice is. Miss Fuji sits there, knowing that this will be the last time that she will ever see her sister.
    “You’ve ruined my life. You deserve to be with all these freaks here.”
    “There are no freaks here, only people who are sick.”
    “Sick freaks.”
    “How are Mother and Father?”
    “They are no longer any part of you. None of us are. How could you do this to us?”
    “Do what?”
    “Humiliate us. People won’t speak to us. Everywhere I go, people whisper, point. Father and Mother may have to move. We don’t get half of the normal price for our rice. The value of our land has gone down. Like it’s infected.”
    “I’m