By Sandy Smith

Purl rooted through the trash around his door for something to put on his head—a pot or a bucket, something to protect himself from the ashes falling out of the sky. There was a cardboard box that had blown over from somewhere. It was rippled from an earlier damping but had dried crisp and held its shape. He knocked it on the step to dislodge any spiders and put it on his head, then set off to fetch Kelpie from the school.

Purl held his breath when he walked past the street corners where the Bullabulla boys stood smoking pipes and jangling their bracelets, made from the type of chains you used to see in stores selling screwdrivers and screws. Chains for work. These boys knew nothing of work. 

In the old days, Purl would have been triggered by this. Walking by this clutch of spoiled, insolent thugs with their mocking lips and their sculpted hair, he would have felt his face flush and water leak from his armpits as anxiety shot adrenaline into his blood. But times were different now, and he was different too. There were no triggers, only explosions. 

He kept walking, keeping his eyes to himself, holding his breath to keep their weed out of his lungs. 

Kelpie was a small child, deformed by the circumstances of his birth and stunted by the poor food Purl scrounged for them. But his size made him nimble; during the school day, he crawled beneath desks and polished the shoes of the students as they listened to their lessons, keeping his own ears open. After the other children went home, he swept the rough floors, erased slate boards with a wet rag, and sharpened every pencil.

Purl was waiting at the gate when Kelpie finished and came out. Kelpie was ten years younger than Purl, who would be eighteen in the spring. Purl watched his brother run to him, one hand deep in his pocket. His shining face made Purl’s stomach cramp with love.

“Look what I found!” Kelpie withdrew a wad of crumpled paper from his pocket and gave it to Purl to unfold.

Inside lay an ancient apple core, desiccated and furred with linty dust. Purl cocked an eyebrow. “So?”

Kelpie gently took the dried-out core between his thumb and forefinger and shook it next to Purl’s face. They could hear a soft rattle. 

“Hear it? There are seeds inside. I’m going to grow apples.” Kelpie whispered the word apples. 

Purl’s cramp intensified. He felt his insides contracting, his heart dissolving like a salted slug, but he managed to compose himself, to keep his face open and his eyes dry. He wanted to say the seeds were dead. Even if irradiation hadn’t killed whatever germ of life they once possessed, fruit genes were proprietary, programmed to be activated only by the companies that patented them. And all those were long gone. Instead, he used his thumb to flick away a piece of ash that had settled near the corner of Kelpie’s good eye. 

“Where’s your hat?” he asked, putting a hand on his brother’s shoulder to steer him toward the street.

Kelpie’s face darkened. “No-mi took it.”

The teacher’s kid. Purl sighed. The hat was gone for good. He took the box from his head and placed it on Kelpie’s. It fell over his face like a mask.

Kelpie pushed the box up with the heel of his hand and looked at Purl from beneath it. “What about you?”

Purl shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t have much hair left.” Most of his had fallen out, and what was left wasn’t worth protecting. 

They walked home over cracked and sun-bleached asphalt, avoiding corners where Purl knew the Bullas clustered thick as blowflies. Now and then, he scratched with a fingernail at ash that stuck to the sweat on his scarred forehead. 

“Remember,” said Kelpie after a long while, “when Mem made pie?” 

Purl remembered their mother, remembered pie. He gently thumped the box down over Kelpie’s face, rubbed his eyes dry so the child wouldn’t see. 

“Look at you thinking about pie when all you have are seeds.”