Does So

DOES SO

By Kajsa Alger

“Lightning always comes when the rain smells like this,” says Cole.

“Does not,” Ruth snarls, taking one last chew on her gum before crushing a nearby ant with the warm, sickly pink blob. An ever-after it never saw coming.

“Poor thing,” Cole thinks, watching where the ant used to be. He also thinks, “does so,” but doesn’t say it. Not to Ruth. He shuffles his shoes in the sand and watches them intently, as if without his concentration they may forget what they were doing or where he was going. He hears a light crackling in the distance, but the sound of sudden rainfall washes it out as he lifts his head back up. The storm is coming in quickly.

Cole only knows of Earth storms from the stories that Mama tells, but thinks there must be something magical about the weather there. The way Mama’s eyes look into the distance in a dreamy way when she talks about simple sunshine. Cole was only a baby when they left. He doesn’t remember any of it, but he knows the prophecy. He likes to picture the storm that Mama described running through, sheltering him from the falling hail with a special blanket she had knit for the trip.

She said once, “Us landing here is like a rebirth- and you are my eye of the storm.” Cole isn’t sure what that means, but he has always reveled in the weather while everyone else cowers. Mama says the weather here is like Earth, only with more rage.

He remembers that moment when she knelt down so that she was looking Cole directly in the eyes. He could see the swirls of gray in hers, with flecks of gold. The soft cocoa of her skin holding the scent of orange blossom and dust storms. She gently held his shoulders as she said softly, “What do we do when faced with rage, Cole? We don’t try to control it or understand it; we look it in the eye and see it for what it is. The storm is inside us, Cole. It passes from me to you. This is your prophecy- to cleanse what I could not on Earth. Those who try to defy it will come for me, but you will carry on the work that needs to be done.”

Cole doesn’t like when Mama talks this way.He doesn’t like the tingle he feels inside that make her words true. The rumbling of thunder in the distance snaps him back to the present.

Ruth is sitting with the bigger girls out in the grasslands under the giant mesquite. Cole’s Mama says girls like Ruth don’t worry about being small because their ego is already big enough. Cole doesn’t know what that means either. Mama says a lot of things he doesn’t understand, but he knows that Ruth’s head reaches the second bolt on Mr. Grimes’ fencepost, which is one bolt taller than Cole. “That’s still less small than me,” he thinks.

Ruth laughs with the others as he walks by.

“Did you hear what I said? ” Ruth flicks the now dirt-crusted-ant-flavored gum wad in his direction. “I said ‘DOES NOT’.” The big girls laugh in that way that mean girls do- conspiratorial and confused, so far from the punch line that they forgot the joke.

The zipper on his jacket is stuck. Cole tries to pull it up, but it catches in the wrong place and zips in a lopsided grip, now open on the bottom and the top, like the cracks of canyon that wrinkle the landscape. His face flushes as he feels the eyes on him. His hands stutter and it takes him three tries before he finally succeeds.

“You’re not allowed to kill one of the brought-from creatures,” he says, referring to the small ant that is a protected class in these parts.

Ruth bites back, “Who are you, Half Breed, to tell anyone what to do?”

The tingling is starting to reach his fingertips and he turns, breathing deeply to steady himself. He walks on like a slow sigh, head down, but turns back to look at them all- the girls under the tree. Just then, the sky crackles.

He doesn’t like the grasslands. The weather is raw out there- open and wild, running like untamed horses across the backdrop of desert Rykku sky. Even though it’s forbidden, Mr. Grimes took out most of the shade trees when Mrs. Grimes got struck down. Cole remembers seeing the old man crumble, crying and shaking his fists at the sky. The rain smelled the same on that day, and he had the same tingling after Mrs. Grimes had yelled at him. That’s how Cole knows about the lightning. He didn’t mean it. He never means it.

As the storm rolls in strong, the big girls run shrieking towards the silo in the distance, arms pulling hoods over heads. Ruth stays under the shelter of the tree, glaring. He wonders how someone could hold so much hate in their heart for a person they don’t even know. They lock eyes and he sees the hair on his arms start to stand straight up. He sighs, resigned to the inevitability of it all. Slowly, Cole sits and makes himself small, letting the rain soak him to the bones, like the sinking feeling in his gut. Ruth stands, eyes big, suddenly aware. In that short moment, Cole feels sorry for her. Like someone should have taught her better.

He has time to see the fear in her eyes as understanding sinks in. She is motionless. Sitting out in the open, rain is running freely down his face, making small bubbles as he exhales. She's too far away, so she mouths the words to him in defiance, but the fight runs out of her like the urine down her leg. “Does not,” her lips say silently.

As the sky crackles alive and lights up the field, it strikes the old giant mesquite and ripples through Ruth like a spitting snake of heat. Just like that, she is gone. Like the ant under the bubble gum. Cole closes his eyes tight and whispers, “Does so, Ruth. Does so.”