Free Tide King by Jen Michalski Page A

tag.”
    Johnson nodded, looking at his hands. Every day he looked at his leg, trying to find something different about it. A stray hair, a scar. He tried to remember the moles on his leg before, whether they had changed positions.
    â€œDoes that make sense to you, Calvin?” The doctor tapped his pencil on his papers.
    He supposed it had to be true. How else to explain he was alive? There were no such things as witch doctors, metalanthium lamps. He watched the doctor scribble a few notes in his chart.
    â€œLet’s say you were in a coma.” The doctor said. “And that you have recovered. Do you have any questions?”
    Johnson shook his head. He was prepared to go back and, if he was to come back here, actually have a real injury. But then Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces the last week of April. Instead of being shipped back to the First Infantry Division, he was sent home on furlough to await reassignment to the Pacific.

1807
    She dreamed of dirt. It was the longest dream, all of dirt, the feeling of worms around her, the footfalls of birds above her, sticking their beaks in the ground and wrenching the worms from her. She hoped, in her hysteria, that the birds would wrench her from the ground. Her heart leaked cold all over her chest, and then it stopped, clenching like a fist and turning into itself. It began to pulse warm, and she could feel her toes and her fingers. When a worm crawled near her eye and was plucked from the dirt by a bird, she could see light through the hole it left behind. Her eyes moved to where she thought her hands would be, and she spread her fingers, feeling the cool, muddy earth around them. She moved them back and forth, a little at first, and then in wider arcs as the ground around them collapsed and the ground around her legs as well and suddenly she was able to sit up. She opened her eyes, expecting Matka to be beside her on the straw bed, her lalka under her armpit. But she was on the ground outside the bone house.
    She wondered whether Matka had gone to town. There was so much she did not remember between going to sleep and waking up. She wondered whether she had a fever, whether Matka had buried her to quell her temperature. Perhaps she had needed more ingredients for a tincture and would be gone only a little while. Ela vaguely remembered soldiers, rabbits, Bolek. Her mouth was dry, coated with a chalky, flaky substance. She drew it out with her finger but could not quite identify it. She stood up in the hole and was surprised to find not one lalka beside her but two. The second had blonde hair and blue eyes. She shook them carefully free of dirt and then found her way through the woods to wash herself.
    By the creek, she laid her dress on an exposed rock, splashing water on it and rubbing. She dipped her naked body in the water, cool and clear and lifting the dirt off her, little cloudy rings spreading into the creek like the haze of her dreams. One stain, a reddish whorl on her chest, did not wash away. It was round and scarred, just over her heart. She knew it was not something she’d had before, and she wondered whether her heart had been stolen. She pressed her fingers in her ears and held her breath. Her heart beat in her veins, as always. She traced the depression in her skin.
    â€œMatka?” She called into the trees. Branches stood erect. They seemed to ignore her. Even the birds were quiet. She strained to hear leaves under feet, her mother’s hum, the splash of water against the sides of the well bucket. “Matka?”
    But she was all alone. She wrung out the dress to dry and sat on the bank, letting the sun warm her skin.

    At the front of the bone house, a skeleton of bones, clean, white in a rust-dirt blanket, lay near the hill’s edge. She approached it slowly, feeling her throat close, her heart hum dully against her chest. Inside the skeleton’s hand was a flower, white with a root, curled over from the bend of the