Free Day Boy by Trent Jamieson Page B

and die.
    Maybe all stories end that way.
    Mick sniffs, spits at his feet. ‘You all right boys?’
    We don’t say nothing; he can see we’re all, right.
    He pushes the dog aside with a boot. Then makes gentle work with the shovel. A hiss
of breath comes out of him when he uncovers them.
    ‘Is that a babe?’ Grove says. ‘Is that a woman holding a babe all dead in that earth?’
    ‘You boys go on home,’ Mick says.
    But we don’t move.
    ‘I said go.’ There’s a hardness to his voice, but he gentles it quick. ‘You’ve work
to do for your Masters. And I’ve work to do here. Stop on by the hall and send Jane
out to me. Tell her to bring her gear. She’ll know what I mean.’
    We hover there, looking at his work.
    ‘Don’t try my patience!’
    And we’re on our bikes and riding.
    Dain wakes me that night. ‘I heard what you did, and what you found,’ he says. ‘You
should have told me.’
    I shrug, sleepy-eyed.
    ‘The world scars you ten times more if you hold such things inside. If you don’t
share them.’
    Says the man who doesn’t give away a thing.
    ‘We found a shallow grave,’ I say. And all the time I’m thinking that we wouldn’t
have if it weren’t for Dougie busting up Grove’s bike. And I’m thinking I’d like
to bust up Dougie right now. But I know how that ends.
    ‘You found a mother and child,’ Dain says. ‘You found their corpses. It is a terrible
thing.’
    ‘Will you find who did it?’
    Dain shakes his head. ‘They’re long gone. Not even the auditors could find them now.’
    ‘So they’re not here?’
    ‘No, murderers of this sort fear our kind too much to linger.’ Dain lowers himself
onto the end of the bed. ‘But not enough to stop them from doing this. A mother and
a babe, and the mother scarcely more than a child herself. This is a dark place made
darker by monsters and fools.’
    Dain touches my hair, quick and light. ‘But we are still a part of it.’ He sighs.
‘I better get back to my book.’
    Feels Dain’s been writing that book since forever. I asked him once if it were about
those last days, when words were powerful.
    He just laughed. ‘Words were powerful, yes. Lightning quick. And judgments flickered
across the earth. In those last days we had screens that we drowned in. They led
everywhere, but mostly we only saw our own reflection in them. And then the dreams
changed, and then they stopped being dreams.
    ‘Mark, I sometimes wonder…if that isn’t true. If I just never woke. But then why
would I dream of you?’
    Well—why wouldn’t he?
    Two days later there’s visitors that come from Hadentown in a cart horse-drawn. Two
men: thin, armed with knives. They come at noon, to Town Hall. Mick’s waiting and
he guides them inside. They leave almost at once—their faces dark and heavy. Two
small coffins set on the back. One of the men doesn’t bother hiding his tears, and
it’s a hard thing to see.
    I’m there gawping with Dougie: the fella knows where the action is. Called me to
it, from my work at the Sewills’.
    Mick glares at us. ‘You two, move on.’
    We do—if a trifle slow.
    ‘There was a woman missing from Hadentown. Woman and a baby,’ Dougie tells me, because
Dougie knows most of anything, and when he’s in a good mood, he’s fine company. Likes
to gossip as much as destroy bikes or lay his fists upon you.
    ‘What’s it all mean?’ I say.
    Dougie looks at me. ‘Means there’s a murderer about. Or there was.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe
it doesn’t mean anything but the world’s a damn awful cruel place.’

    Dain’s not from here. He wasn’t born to this town. I don’t know where he came from,
some other place of the before here nows. But he was tenured to the university in
the City in the Shadow of the Mountain. I’ve asked him why he isn’t working there
still.
    And he said the place was a poison and a joy. But the poison was worse. So he left,
was assigned, or banished (depending on his mood), to Midfield. His