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The thing about erosion is that it aches.
First the ground, the sandy soil beneath the foreign spaceship that lands one unassuming afternoon. Then it is the stretches of land as armed guards in black spill out onto the plains, heralding giant machinery and the skeletons of settlement.
The other tricky thing about erosion is that it is immutable.
If Boothill remembers anything from the teachings of Aeragan-Epharshel, it is that the one thing that cannot be taken is the earth and yet the shipfolk try still, even if it has never been given to them.
Boothill remembers the first day he ever laid eyes on her; his dear daughter. He remembers down to the very taste of the wind and the sweet smell of grass that very night.
It goes like this: Boothill wakes up every day to the call of the rooster at Nick and Graey’s home; its name means ‘loud red thing’ in his language. The sun is yet to crest the three sisters horizon and he exists in his lonesome in that shift between twilight and dawn. Passerine-song follows, warbling throats and the blanket of flapping wings over the roof.
The house is already alive with the tender creaks of wood by the time Boothill’s ready for the day, the hum of the woodfire stove and the jingle of windchimes. Nick and Graey are sharing coffee on the porch when he flies down the stairs.
“Good mornin’, sugar,” Graey says, lifting her cup in greeting.
“Mornin’,” Boothill replies, plucking a warm piece of bread from the table.
Next to the plate of bread is a small spread of stewed beans, tangy salt-cured venison, and a bowl of wild berries. It is the taste of these simple things that Boothill never thought to savour until it was much too late.
He pulls a chair over to break his fast with his elders, wetting his mouthful of bread with hot coffee. The sun kisses the land and the air is green with the smell of grain that the people in black have yet to steal.
They have taken most of Boothill’s people’s crops, harvesting so much that the spirits of grain would leave the plains barren for good, or they’d burn his fields so that naught may remain but charred soil. They take and they sell, but they do not partake in gratitude for the land’s gifts. They sell what cannot be bought.
Boothill never used to linger on the tapestry of colours that bleed into the sky as the sun crawls over the plains of his home, but today shows a rare shade of pink that he has learned to miss like a stolen limb ever since the pollution started to obscure the once-vibrant sunrises overlooking his home. Most times now it’s a hazy orange-green.
The shipfolk have taken the ores with their noisy excavators, every day like relentless clockwork. What is in the ground should remain in the ground; they are prying it from the land’s weeping hands.
They take the women, the children. The language, until there is no translator left to sound.
Boothill listens to Graey complain about her achy knees, promising that he’d go out for quarry for next week’s meals in her stead. His people use every single part of the animal, not a single appendage left to waste. It has given its life to feed his family, they must cherish it.
This is something that he has come to resent in the greedy settlers who discard pile upon pile of animal carcass into their waters without a care for the creature’s sacrifice. They do not honour their prey.
“Yer gonna needa go down the stream ta have a look fer sheep,” Nick informs him as Boothill gets up from his chair, “two’ve snuck away last night. Buncha rascals I tell ya.”
That will be the perfect time for him to have a wander down to his new home as well. He’s been fixing up the old worn cabin that sits just shy of the riverbend with the intention for it to be his permanent dwelling once the lights turn on and the toilet doesn’t shoot out mysteriously green liquid.
“Sure the beasts haven’t gotten to ‘em already?” Boothill teases, grabbing his hat.
“Real question’s if they’ve gotten to the beasts,” Graey says, “cheeky lil’ buggers, the lot of ‘em.”
“Rightio then,” he chuckles through his last mouthful of bread, bending down to kiss her cheek. “See y’all in the evenin’.”
She swats him away, citing his oily lips. Boothill does not neglect his unfinished coffee, bringing the cup with him to the soil bed beside the porch stairs. Nick and Graey watch silently as he bends down to the earth, pouring the remnants of the beverage into the dirt with a greeting to the budding late-summer shrubs.
“I left a pouch for ya, at the stable,” Nick tells him as he leaves, and Boothill gives him a mirthful salute of gratitude.
There will be a pouch of pemmican more cranberry than meat and buttery pecans for Boothill to snack on through his day, and he will—with the permission of the plants—pick up some fruits along his journey.
Mundanities like these will eventually become that which Boothill yearns for to no end.
This is where his days would usually diverge. Sometimes, he’d mount his swift stallion and set out for a bounty in town or ride across the plains to the next one over. Sometimes he’d meet his friends to go shooting or head over to his siblings’ homes for tea. Other times, he’d help Nick and Graey with chores, pick up some work for the town, patrol the areas to keep the shipfolk away.
That particular day passes like any other as he goes down to the marshes to tend to the land and fetch the sheep; but a father remembers.
He is lying under the canopy of a juniper tree that very night, unfathomable dome of glittering stars enclosing him over the earth, Aeragan-Epharshel’s three moons high in the sky. He hears the distant grazing of his horse, the occasional bleating of the pair of sheep tied to a nearby wooden post. The crickets in the branches above him chirp in a familiar chorus.
His homeland is so alive, imbued with an animacy so sublime he tastes it in the back of his throat. Many years in the future, when he is warping through space and time itself, the murmured rustle of sweetgrass will be to him an open wound.
He hears it then.
Boothill shoots up from the bed of his land, head whipping around wildly to locate the source of the peculiar noise. He thinks it a yowling cat at first. Nick and Graey would tell him to ignore it, that nothing good could be calling for him this far into the still night.
But the wailing doesn’t stop.
He clambers up, brushes his pants of sandy soil, and mounts his steed. Boothill has earned his keep as a skilled hunter, his instincts are sharp and he knows his way around danger. He trusts the wind to take him to-and-fro, trusts himself to follow the guidance of his eyes and ears rooted in the earth.
The sounds are coming from his dilapidated cabin.
He taps the stirrups against his horse’s belly and the stallion takes him to the riverbend, and he dismounts as his animal companion slows to a stop. The sound is louder now, and he’s quite sure it’s a baby’s cry.
Boothill finds the answer nestled in an ash-woven cradleboard on the cabin’s porch steps.
The little babe is plump and pink-cheeked, her deep honey skin glowing under the oil lamp Boothill lights up to see her better. She screeches, so piercing that Boothill winces away. He looks around, panicked, for her guardian. The night is quiet.
He takes her with clumsy hands then, straps her cradleboard to his back, and rides home on his horse with the troublesome sheep in tow.
Nick and Graey raise their eyebrows when he shows up like that, a little frazzled given that the little thing had not ceased her crying the entire ride back. She must’ve been left there between him coming to inspect the riverbend house and going out to find the sheep.
Boothill’s sister and her wife are there too, finishing up a hearty spread of tea, and they laugh at the state of him. He asks them what to do and the answer is not exactly what a bounty-hunting cowboy wants to hear.
“She’s yers now,” his sister says nonchalantly, “yer gonna understand what it takes ta feed and raise a babe.”
Nick snorts, “she’ll need a name. And yer gonna needa kiss goodbye ta sleep.”
Boothill looks down at the snotty infant then, having quietened the moment he took her out of her bed to hold her. She just stares up at him, cooing, and he swears that he sees the same stars from earlier in the night in her eyes.
He never intended for her to become his ‘daughter’, not even after taking her in and learning to change her diaper, feeding her and putting her to sleep. And yet his townsfolk would teasingly call him her ‘papa’ until it just stuck; much to his dismay.
He went out less, slept less, relegated much more of security work to his friends or siblings who were still left there. He’d jolt awake worrying that she’s been too quiet for too long and put his finger under her nose to make sure she’s breathing. He does not yet know in these moments what it means to have limbs but not feel with them.
He never regretted a single moment spent with the adorable little thing, though.
He spends more time with Nick and Graey at their home. He would sit helping them shuck corn, repair the fences, feed the animals, and Juniper would be lisping or cooing on his lap or watching from nearby.
Juniper, because the trees are abundant on the land and he hopes she will embody the healing fortitude of her namesake.
She’d be there when they take the canoes out for wild rice. Graey sings with the baby swaddled to her chest, and Boothill uses the oar to brush in the precious grains. She won’t care for Graey’s lessons about how wild rice is the seed of these tall bodies of grass because the colourful beads bouncing against her cheek on their way into the canoe are much more entertaining.
She’d be there when there’s a gathering, watching with precious eyes as Boothill sings with his kin in front of warm fires under the three moons’ protection. She’d fall asleep against his chest and her little sighs are as musical as his own singing.
In many, many years from this moment, just one fleeting thought about the bellyache of this same music would cleave his chest into two. One half would throb with longing and the other with that anger he knows all too well; heightened by his robotic modifications.
For now, he watches his daughter sleep, and the world seems to slow to the rhythm of her breath.
⋆˖°.𖤓𐚁.°☽˚˖⋆
The first of his siblings to die was the youngest; to disease.
Her baby was born on a cold winter day, and something was wrong. Boothill was home with little Juniper when it happened, rocking her through a bout of teething.
Parturition is the most vulnerable time for a mother and baby, it is when the child’s soul must pass into the waking world. Boothill was told that they surrounded her with lanky machines and hooked her up to all sorts of devices to monitor her condition; he doesn’t think their doctors knew a thing about midwifery apart from what their egos told them they could do.
She passed slowly. They refused to tend to her until it was too late, and then they took her baby because the father was one of them. Boothill still does not know to this day what her baby was called.
He had held his daughter especially close that same night when he put her to bed with a lullaby. Stayed watching her even sleeping breaths for longer, too.
The second and third happened at the same time, his older brother and sister who were killed in a raid. Their bodies were strung up to be made examples of and the sight of their chopped hair from where Boothill stood atop the cliff that overlooked the settlement town made him go blind with rage. He never did get to bury them.
The last was his youngest brother. He was sent to ‘prison’ without the honour of any trial and Boothill never saw him again.
On some days the grief would settle over him like an unrelenting thicket of snow, heavy on his shoulders; the utter impossibility of return.
He’d be in his cabin, Juniper in her pyjamas with her toy guitar. She’d be slapping the wood he’d carved himself to imitate what he does with his own instrument. He’d watch her in these moments and he would think of his siblings, his friends.
None of them should be dead. None of them had to die; not on their homeland, not like that.
And on days like these, his beautiful little girl would waddle over on her hands and knees, practically adept at that mode of travel now. She’d hand him a woven toy and he’d feel the breath return to his throat. He’d pick her up, perch her on his arm and open the screen door before stepping outside into the chilly night.
“Hear that, baby?” he says to her, “the land’s already sleepin’, we should hit the hay soon, hm?”
She’d coo, of course, or laugh. He’d laugh, too, bubbling up from the recesses of his throat to remind him that he is still capable of simple joy.
Too often these days he can only use his voice to mourn.
“Papa loves you, Junie,” says Boothill, kissing her hair when she yawns, “can you say ‘papa’?”
He’d loathe to be caught this way by anyone in town, but he knows that she is his. His baby, his daughter.
She giggles, “aah.”
Boothill smiles.
And sometimes he feels an anger so deep it bites into his bones; like the unforgiving cold of grassland winters.
He’d wake up to prepare a bath for Juniper at the big house to find that the power’s been cut yet again. Boothill storms downstairs to find Nick and Graey already starting to boil water with what’s left of the firewood.
“Those sons of bitches needa learn who—”
The call of his name makes his fingers freeze mid-air as he is reaching for the gun stored safely inside the living room cupboard.
The name that his folks gave him meant ‘loaded gun’. He had a name that belonged to himself back then, just as Aeragan-Epharshel had another name that he’d called the land by; it meant ‘the people’. That is for where he was, though, there were so many more across the plains. Entire languages and entire peoples who were baptised in the soil of this shared homeland.
“Don’t,” Nick warns. “June is upstairs.”
At the reminder of the little girl, Boothill’s arms drop to his side. He throws a look at the gun in its buffalo-hide holster; a rare material now after the shipfolk arrived and wiped out the population for sport.
“Go wake her up,” Graey says, “we’ll just hafta bundle her up today.”
With gritted teeth, Boothill turns around and storms up the stairs. He feels the anger in his rib bones, shifting with each swell of his lungs. He feels it in the tips of his shoulder blades when he moves to swing open the door. In his collarbones, too.
But he breathes easier when he lays eyes on the precious girl blinking at him from her cradleboard.
She’s always been quiet when she first wakes up, as if taking in the magic of the dawning world before she decides to use the fearsome force of her little lungs.
She’s already grown out of her first cradleboard, and Boothill still recalls the splinters embedded in his hands as he clumsily whittled a new, more spacious one from the wood of a pine tree; he’s never been as good as his parents with the splitter. He thinks it soothes her, though, the softness of cattail and the perfume of the fragrant bitterbrush lining under her. There was a word for those things, it meant ‘we wrap the baby in it.’
He’d whittle a hundred more pines if it made her sleep so happily.
A few years from now, Boothill will sometimes think he hears her soft babbles in that moment between his slumber and the waking world, wherever he is in the universe.
When he comes into her view, her little face lights up. Boothill instantly releases a sigh.
“Hey sweetpea,” he says, reaching down to unfasten her. “Did’ya sleep good?”
He smiles sweetly when she stretches with a yawn once free from her swaddle of woodland materials.
She’s always looked so adorable swathed in the gifts of the land, whether that is the deerskin moccasin that Graey made for her little feet, or when her cheruby face is stained purple from fresh-picked blackberries.
“Oh I know,” he says, “still sleepy ain’tcha?”
And he is able to forget the raging forest fire in the nervures of his flesh for those moments as his affections for his baby daughter takes over. He pushes the anger back, far enough so that he may be present with his Juniper and watch her grow.
“You gonna call me ‘papa’ today?” he murmurs into her soft hair.
“Awa!” she supplies.
“Didn’t think so,” he chuckles, hauling her downstairs.
⋆˖°.𖤓𐚁.°☽˚˖⋆
“I don’t care about your damned parties, we live in a civilization here, got it?”
This again.
“Then as civilized people, we must be gracious enough to share,” Nick’s even voice replies to the merchant.
Ceremonial tea leaves.
It’s funny, isn’t it? A leaf grows from the branches of a plant, and the branches are the limbs of the plant whose roots stretch unbridled beneath the planet’s surface. They are not bound, and yet here Boothill stands, watching Nick be denied the gift of a singular bundle of tea leaves by a settler.
“Don’t you get smart with me,” the merchant sneers.
This is a new dreadful routine.
By virtue of the shipfolks’ encroachment, the highlands where Boothill’s people grew tea plants have been unreachable. There is nothing there, no mandate upon it, but as soon as anyone from town tries to go up the hills, they are shot at or taken by the nearby settlers.
And so, Nick has been reduced to asking for the gifts of the earth from the people who are ripping them from the land.
“If only—”
“Get out of here, old man.”
“I’m afraid that that would not be conducive to my task here today. I’m here ta fetch tea leaves.”
“Ha! Don’t make me say it twice.”
“It is—”
“You—”
“Hands off,” Boothill warns, stepping between Nick and the merchant. “I’ll pay for it.”
He’s a small man whose hairline possesses the reflective force of a mirror, the orange hairs of his mustache curled at the tips.
The man gives him a once over, “as if the likes of you could—”
Boothill shoves a wad of cash onto his chest and the merchant could barely scramble to grab it before it falls to the floor.
He ignores the derogatory curses thrown his way as he struts off, beckoning Nick away with the sad wad of tea leaves. They don’t even care for the things they steal.
“I’m sorry son, y’know I can’t use all this fer tonight,” Nick says.
Boothill sighs, “I know, Nick, it’s fine. I’ll pop by Sandy’s ta see if she has some stocked up.”
“Some things hafta be given, I tell ya,” the old man explains, “these visitors haven’t learned that yet.”
Bullshit. They arrived in droves with their excavators and their guns. No student brings weapons to their teachers. They never intended to learn, only to take.
“Yeah, well I’d like to remind ‘em of a thin’ or two ‘bout visitin’,” he grumbles. “Buncha no good hornswogglin' bastards.”
They keep creeping closer. Every few months something new crops up, settlements or shops or those damned mines. Boothill thinks they’re just like those insects they’ve brought with them that are felling the very ash trees that have stood for a hundred years more than they have. They’re a lot harder to kill than the pesky bugs, too.
“They’re here to share in the land,” Nick says, “we will teach them how.”
Boothill does not think the likes of them are deserving of any of his people’s land, nor their teachings.
That evening, before the gathering, the power is cut again. Boothill swears colourfully, but he knows what Nick and Graey would say, and his Juniper is right there snacking on mushy squash on her high chair.
He lights up the candles and oil lamps dotted around his home, singing a tune to soothe his daughter lest she learn to fear the outages. He helps her finish the rest of her food before giving her a bath and dressing her in leathers and colourful beads for the oncoming festivities.
“Ya hafta wear it, sweetpea,” Boothill says, “else yer gonna stand out like a sore thumb.”
“Aaaow!” the little thing responds in (what he assumes is) protest.
“Look,” he shakes her venison-leather boot, “ain’t it pretty?”
She reaches for it with her chubby fingers, promptly bringing it to her mouth.
“No, darlin’,” he chides gently, prying it from her iron grip. “This ain’t grub.”
She takes it from him once more and flings it to the floor with an entertained giggle, and Boothill may only sigh in endearment before picking it back up. She points suddenly to the guitar that sits on the dresser.
“Aah!”
“Aw, c’mon sweetheart, we’re gonna be late!”
“Ahh bab ah wah,” she replies in earnest.
She’s only just started to walk recently, but stubbornly refuses to say a single word. Boothill thinks she is an enchantment.
“Alright, just one song,” he says with a defeated shake of his head, bringing the instrument to her.
Boothill tries to pretend—he really does—that he is unaffected by his toddler, but he has never been able to deny her whims. He has partaken in the most thrilling of chases, had his grazes against death’s keen eyes, nursed injuries that had him thinking in the recesses of his mind that it might be the very one to snuff him out. And yet, nothing softens him more than her simple request for music.
He sings two songs in the end, because how could he resist her enthused claps for more?
And as he sits around the bonfire later that night, he feels the gazes of his people on him.
Hope, the sparking tendrils of it.
Boothill listens and sings with Juniper in his lap, his too-big hat on her little head.
“It looks natural on ya,” Nick is always saying to him when they go fishing, “they all feel safer with you ‘round, y’know?”
Boothill never was able to understand this.
His spirit was as unbridled as his beloved winds, and yet his people gravitated towards him and hoped for him to guide them. This is the love he knows, he supposes.
He took such magnitude of communion for granted until the lives of his friends and family were snuffed out under his very nose by the shipfolk in black.
“Aah, wa,” says his daughter.
Music transforms with its orators. There are the old songs about gunslinging bandits and the hunky beasts that roam the grasslands, some about the spirit of fire and grain, some the simple complexity of stars. Now, there is the whisper of defiance in each stomp on the ground; as if to say ‘this here is my homeland, you shall not take it’.
As he watches his people dancing, warbling songs of resistance, as he employs his own mouth in the dutiful task of the words of his language in order to sing for his daughter, Boothill thinks that perhaps he is ready to drink from that cup.
“Aiyaiy, aba,” Juniper continues sagely.
“That’s right sweetcheeks,” he replies. “You singin’ with us?”
“Aaah bababa.”
“Right on,” he affirms. “C’mon now, it goes like this.”
They look at him as if they know. Boothill will wish he lingered for even just a moment longer on their smiles that night.
Boothill brings his sleepy daughter back to Nick and Graey’s because it is a closer walk and he does not intend to be asleep tonight. The power is still out but he gets her changed and settled in for bed without it.
He strokes her toddler cheek in her easeful rest, and he brushes his long hair aside so that he could bend down and press a tender kiss to her sleeping hair. Boothill will never forget this sight for as long as he lives. It will almost feel like punishment.
He sneaks out past his passed out friends in their sleeping bags, walking with conviction towards the living room cupboard.
He hears the call of his name. He will not realize until dawn that this is the last time he will ever hear his own name.
“I’m goin’ fer a lil’ gander,” he says airily.
Graey fixes him with a knowing look.
“June’s knackered out,” he adds, “she’ll sleep through the night and I’ll be back before ya know it.”
She sighs, gathering the ends of her dress before she settles down on a rickety chair around the dining table. She sets the candle down, and Boothill knows to follow. Her calculating eyes are fixed on him as he pulls out another creaky old chair.
“D’ya remember the bird that used to hang ‘round that big juniper tree out there?”
“Yeah, five-eyes,” Boothill says.
They were iridescent, like the colour of green leaves when they were perched on a branch but as blue as the sky when they were soaring above. They were always easily-spotted at night, though, when the five eyes on their heads would glow, like the stars had fallen onto the branches of the tree.
“You remember the story I used to tell y’all ‘bout ‘em?”
The birds came to the land from the sky, when the spirit of the clouds warred with the spirit of snow upon the winter ground. The sky spirit had flung a thousand knives to the earth at once, striking the winter spirit and pinning the deity to the ground and in turn gifting spring back to the land. The knives turned into birds. Blade-bird, they’d call them in their language.
These birds were carnivorous, and they usually hunted small quarry until the buffaloes began to encroach on their space some hundred years ago. And so they learned to hunt buffaloes instead, these mighty beasts that could fling one singular bird to the ground with one turn of its curly horn.
“One bird against a giant beast almost always ends up dead,” Graey says, “but together, the hoard of ‘em swooping in the same motion, the sonorous flood of their wings towards one sure enemy—that is when it matters. Small lil’ things, their own shrieks of defiance.”
His people called it the waltz of the blade-bird, the way they danced through the sky, swarming and turning as if they were one entity. They’d fly in one mass towards a buffalo, their sharp beaks piercing its skin and felling the mighty creature. And then they reveled in their following feast.
But as the settlers moved into the land and the quarry ran off and the buffaloes were driven to near-extinction, so were the birds.
There existed a reciprocity in the creatures and the grassland, the very roots of being that grew and tangled over years and years of co-existence. The hardy buffaloes decreased in number when swarms of blade-birds fed on them, allowing for their grazing grounds to regrow fast enough and thus feed and shelter more and more little creatures.
Ripping one root out always meant damaging another.
“They will try to bury us,” Graey tells him with finality, “but we will endure, together.”
Boothill smiles, reaching out and rubbing the back of her hand. Her winkled skin is warm. He will wish that he held her hand for even a mere second longer in the coming morning.
Her eyes follow him as he gets up quietly, fastening his gun to his waist.
He tips his hat, “I’ll be back.”
She nods, and Boothill leaves.
He dismounts his steed some ways away from the yawning metal creature, the hum of ore belts and hissing pipes the only sound he can hear so close to the spaceship. There are no settlers around as he walks the rest of the way, but he does not hear much else of life either, no chirping crickets or whistling grass.
Under the cover of night and the absence of nocturnal birdsong, Boothill sneaks in.
The spaceship is cold.
His footsteps echo in the cavernous hallways but does not alert any personnel to his presence. He hardly saw any on his way in.
He realises why too late.
“You are permitted to use military force and bring civilization to this world.”
A bomb sounds a lot like a gunshot, except echoing and so, so much heavier. The first one that drops Boothill cannot see, but he hears it so damningly he feels it between the marrow of his spine.
Dread is what kisses his feet and injects his legs with what his wit is yet unable to comprehend: run.
He hears the echoing laughter of black-clad men as he flies through the metal pathways of the spaceship, and he wishes so desperately to feel the familiar relief of crisp wind on his cheeks as he nears the doors that would lead him back to his planet.
It never comes.
Boothill emerges to heat and suffocating clouds that he almost mistakes for the makings of a storm had it not been for the horrible orange and red stain on the night sky. He looks back to the ugly, beastly mass of metal, chambers of hot cannons open to deploy the force of apocalypse unto his land.
The rockets look like stars streaking across the sky.
He mounts a horse he steals from the nearest stable and rides. He ignores the cheers.
Boothill feels the ashen wind on his face, catching on the wetness trickling down his cheeks. There is so much smoke.
He rides long enough to know that he is cresting the hill home, and yet there is nothing recognizably home about it.
“Nick!” he roars, “Graey!”
He must be confused.
There is nothing here. He must have lost his way, must have somehow mistook one of the trees as the signpost for home.
There aren’t any trees.
But sure enough, there lies a hot mass of charred wood where the house should be; needs to be.
It looks like the breathing remnants of a bonfire, glowing red heat dancing across burnt up fuel unable to sustain a flame. He almost thinks it’s just the leftovers from the festivities mere hours before. Boothill starts shouting then.
“Nick! Graey! Where the hell is everybody?”
He dismounts the horse which startles away from the smoking ground. He does not watch it leave as he begins to search. He does not know how long the journey took to get back here, but there is no longer a burning fire, only its hot corpse.
“Juniper, baby! Call out ta papa! C’mon baby girl, tell me where y’are!”
He thinks that maybe there was never a flame to begin with. Perhaps the calibre of the spaceship’s weapons was truly beyond his comprehension—are human hands even capable of wielding such terror?
He thinks he hears her crying.
He thinks he hears his daughter crying. She must be here, she must be somewhere close by.
Papa. Papa, papa, papa.
His sweet girl is calling for him, isn’t she?
He has to find his daughter.
“It’s okay sweetheart, it’s okay,” he repeats like a prayer as hot cinder blisters his fingers. “It’s alright now, it’s okay, yer papa’s gonna find ya.”
Papa, papa, papa.
He does not know how long he searches. His throat is raw from shouting. From crying out for his baby. From the smoke.
It must be so hot where she is; he needs to get her out.
“C’mon, sweetpea,” he mumbles. It tastes like salt. “Tell me where you’ve gone, baby.”
He cannot find her. He cannot find his daughter.
“Juniper!”
Where are the trees?
“Baby!”
He can’t find the trees.
“Sugar, papa’s back!”
He can’t see the damned trees.
“Junie, sweet girl, where are ya?”
What’s happened to those fucking trees?
“Juniper?”
Boothill cannot see his trees.
This land knows him and he can barely recognize it in return.
“Juniper,” he breathes.
Gone is the bough from where Juniper’s swing hangs, gone are the three sisters that blanket the field behind the house, gone is the rickety porch and Graey’s beloved cushion, gone is Nick’s portrait of Boothill and his siblings, gone is the mere greenery sprouting from the ground.
“Nick!” he screams, “Graey!”
It’s so hot. There are no trees. Oh god, are Boothill’s own human hands capable of this terror, too?
Papa, papa, papa.
He cries out into the dawn, and then he looks up.
The sunrise is green, and Boothill’s baby never learned to speak his name.
⋆˖°.𖤓𐚁.°☽˚˖⋆
The thing about grief is that it is like a dog.
You throw the stick hoping for it to run, then you shut your door and will with all your might to forget that you ever met such a lovable animal. Then you rise out of bed, break your fast in companionable silence with yourself and hold your breath before you step outside—the dog is not there.
You smile, perhaps. Or you just get on with your day.
But then by the time you’re back home again, that old mutt is sitting in front of your house once more, the same stick between its salivating muzzle. You only shake your head and throw it again, repeating the motions.
Years later, when Boothill travels to the homes of people who would never be able to pronounce his old name, they’d joke about how he should learn to ‘speak proper’.
And years into this, Boothill will never understand it. He grew up with teachers, rows upon rows of them in the forest and across the grassland. His planet was enriched in teachings. He still remembers the instruction of mud between his toes, the guidance of prey, even the magnet of the moons and stars.
He remembers the perfume of tobacco before a harvest, feeding well the land before it fed his people back in the feast that followed. This reciprocity never was understood by those men in black.
And then you think it’s fine, you can feed a starving animal once. But suddenly the dog is in your house, sleeping on your footrest and scratching at your furniture.
You’re tearing your hair out: you shouldn’t have fed it, you shouldn’t have fed the damned thing in the first place. Now it curls up at your feet, begs for food when you’re doing mundane things around the house, trips you as you’re trying to tend to the flowers—and then the flowers are gone because the dog’s accidentally trampled all over the soil beds and you can’t even be angry.
Now, it guards you and growls when someone gets too close. It brings you dead animals because that is what it does. Boothill never asked for this kind of reciprocity.
He didn’t mean to feed the grief; it will not stop feeding him back.
Throughout it all he will recall a saying that he would dare not utter out loud, at least not in his language. Not for the galaxies to hear. The last piece of homeland he has for himself; it means—meant ‘what the plants show.’
He’d look at rows of bright-yellow corn they sell in the shops around different planets and spaceships he passes through now, and he’d recall the rainbows that used to blanket the stretches of Nick and Graey’s backyard. Not that the ‘backyard’ actually has any sort of border; the land is just—was just home.
He once spoke to a stranger at a bar, a weathered old man somewhere in the wrinkles of space who was very fond of fiction books. He’d told Boothill of these spectacular imagined worlds where ordinary people ‘just like you and I, sonna’ were forced to live under gruelling conditions, dispossessed from the land and hunted for fear of difference. These writers imagine such creative horrors, the old man had said. Boothill left the bar later that night with the memory of malt fruit juice on his tongue and the knowledge that a dystopian fantasy to someone somewhere in a bar is his people’s reality.
Even down to the barebones of his vernacular; lilts and the grammar of animacy. To hear a stranger call him ‘sugar’ or ‘honey’ one unassuming afternoon and have his foreign ear made fresh again for a mournful minute as grief returns to his veins and leaves just as quick as it came. He will hear the phrase ‘home is not a place’ and he will be hollowed out.
Home is a place. It is the house by the riverbend, it is the grass and the dirt and the sunrise. It is his daughter’s cradleboard and her little guitar and her darling laughter and it is Nick and Graey’s porch and it is the lake where a million lives flourished in each other’s company.
Home is Aeragan-Epharshel when its name still belonged to itself.
The thing about grief is that you will cling to it like a lifeline. One day, when you’ve been so busy hunting and shooting and running, you will come home to roost and realize that the dog got out through an unrepaired tear in the screen door. You will spend the entire night searching desperately for it until your voice is hoarse, until the sun rises.
The thing about grief is that it will come back to you. The dog will always return, even after you’ve re-oriented yourself to a life where it is a mere memory, a little worse for wear but with that same battered stick in its mouth. You will be so far from home, and then you will see a pink sunrise, and your knees will buckle.
Boothill is on his knees in the soil of whichever planet in whichever galaxy he has not bothered to remember the name of quite yet. Wild wind ruffles his hair, not quite as crisp as home’s but there nonetheless. It smells sweet. He is on his knees, and the sky is pink.
Grief is like a dog, and Boothill is looking at a pink sunrise.