Folio Two, Page Forty-Nine (svegra mos droskron tal-tusjga)

While I showered my fear away, Senet sat just outside the water jets and told a story from his childhood about a carnivorous animal called a jaiska (with six legs to walk and six long fingers to grip the city wall and six sharp teeth to gobble up young children) that saw its reflection and wanted to become one of our people. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the ivy wall tiles. People outside Narahja don’t understand the open showers, and people outside the entirety of Tveshë don’t understand communally-used showers altogether. Senet probably came from one of those places where they pretended nudity didn’t exist.

“Did your mother tell any stories when she visited?”

I shook my head. As far as I could remember, she had mostly shared her passion for opera and the theater with me, but I always suspected that she had done more and I just couldn’t remember it.

“She brought me home an old-fashioned storybook once about a boy and a wishing tree.” It hadn’t contained music, so I had ripped it up. She never brought paper books home again. “But I watched a lot of shows on the television. We’d sometimes view them at the same time during a call. She hated Mercy and Justice, so we usually did Blossom Brook.”

Mercy and Justice is one of those programs that dates me. At the time, I loved watching the protagonists — a mother, her son, and the girl next door — fight crime from the basement of their apartment building. Everyone from the High Wilds was depicted as a shrewd, money-grubbing lawbreaker and every tradition-respecting Ameisi person — from Narahja or elsewhere — showed an unrealistic amount of altruism and intelligence. People would never permit their children to watch something so racist now, or so I understand from the radio dramas. Blossom Brook (which had existed for over thirty years by the time I was fifteen, so perhaps you’ve heard of it) followed a group of kids who fought imaginary creatures and absolved the unfinished business of ghosts. The Karatha always came at the end to take the children away, but some new group would take over. Some of the episodes gave my classmates nightmares.

I turned off the water and reached for the towel. Senet turned around, and I suppressed the urge to giggle. He probably showered in the middle of the night. “Do you miss watching programming with her?”

“I liked playing music for her more. She was always so sad and tired. It made her smile sometimes.”

“Do you know why she was sad?”

“She never told me.”

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