Free The 14th Day by K.C. Frederick

Lorraine, will want to know what she said about the future and Ila will tell her she saw many large houses. This will thrill Zita, who’s been talking about nothing else lately but her older sister who, like the two of them, is a stranger in this country. The sister, it seems, took a night course in real estate and within a very few years has managed to become quite successful. “We can do that too,” Zita has said, showing Ila the picture of her sister’s new house hundreds of miles to the west. “We don’t have to work forever at these jobs.” It wasn’t so much the house that got Ila’s attention, it was the barren mountains on the horizon, the desert landscape beyond, which had a strange appeal. What would it be like to live there, she wondered, where, as Zita said, your fingers were always smooth and dry?
    Thinking of Zita as she starts her car, Ila smiles, warmed by the thought of her friend’s optimism. She’s confident that she can find that kind of success if she wants to. She can almost convince herself she’s on her way to those real estate classes now. Yet at the very time she’s thinking about her friend she’s remembering Stipa, who was brought back so powerfully by Miss Lorraine.
    Stipa was always dressed conservatively, which made older people like him, especially people at the bank where he worked, and he voted unashamedly for the Heritage party, as most of the leading bankers did. But when he had political discussions with Ila, whose loyalties were with the Progressives, his defense of Heritage was hardly that of a zealot. “No,” he’d say, “they weren’t ordained by God to save us from chaos—they’re hardly saviors.” He’d laugh quietly. “I vote for them knowing they’re scoundrels because they reflect all our qualities, good and bad. The same legislators who find it perfectly valid to make improvements on their summer homes with public funds, the ones who appoint their in-laws to fat jobs, can sometimes surprise us with their bravery and odd moments of integrity. This is just like our people: all through our history we’ve had enlightened lawgivers who sprang up in the wake of tyrants, mad kings competing with saints for the souls of their people, warriors who became monks and holy women who faced down barbarian invaders. I find it refreshing when a group doesn’t claim purity.”
    And, she was quick to ask, speaking of those who saw themselves as saviors, what about the men in gray? To which he’d answer that the country had seen their like before and it could survive them.
    Stipa, Stipa, she wants to say, all the while you posed as a cynic and you were the most idealistic of all.
    Already Ila is back in the university town, amid familiar scenes. Passing the thickly shaded campus, she feels again the excitement that’s come to her recently, she recognizes that her life is now being lived in this other country, where there’s no Heritage party, no men in gray and no Stipa. There’s a sadness that comes with this realization but she left Miss Lorraine’s feeling that the future is hers to shape. Ila is determined she isn’t going to wait for things to happen, she knows she’s going to act. There’s no question, something’s going to happen and Ila accepts the consequences. The thought excites her, she feels exactly as she did when she awakened from her dream of the ocean. That was only a foretaste, she realizes. There’s a real ocean and there’s no reason she can’t go there.

Jory sits among the plants and tools in the back of the truck. From here he can see Carl’s broad shoulders, sunburned neck and prominent ears framed within the cab’s window; without even looking at him, the big man is able to communicate his disapproval. Jory turns away with a flush of resentment: Carl is a fool, a small-minded man who probably couldn’t find