Fire Country Read Free Page A

follow our noses toward the stench, which becomes more’n more unbearable with each step. You’ve done this ’fore, I remind myself. You just hafta get used to the smell again.
    If the smell is bad, the heat is unbearable. Although the heart of the summer is four full moons distant, you couldn’t tell it by the weather. The air is as thick as ’zard soup, full of so much moisture that your skin bleeds sweat the moment you step from the shade, as if you’ve just taken a dip in the watering hole. All around us is flat, sandy desert, which radiates the heat like the embers of a dying cook fire. With summer nipping at our heels and winter approaching, almost everything is dead, the long strands of desert wildgrass having been burned away many full moons earlier. A few lonely pricklers continue to thwart death, the usually green, spiky plants turned brown by the sun, but rising stalwart from the desert; we call them the plants of the gods for a reason, bearing milk even in the harshest conditions. Without them, my people might not survive the winter.
    We reach the edge of the blaze pit and look down. It’s a real mess, as if no one’s been here to shovel i t for many quarter full moons, maybe even a few full moons. It’s gonna be a long afternoon.
    “Maybe we can just cover it with durt,” I say hopefully.
    Circ gives me a look. “Don’t be such a shanker—you know it’s not full yet.”
    “I’m not a shanker!” I protest.
    “Well, you sure sound like one,” Circ says, grinning. Now I know he’s trying to get me all riled up.
    Determined to prove him wrong, I roll up my dress and tie it off at the side, and then clamber down the side of the pit, feeling the blaze squish under the tread of my bare feet. Gross. Some even slips between my toes. Cockroaches scuttle out of my path. The smell is all around me now, a brownish haze rising up as the collective crap of our entire village cooks under the watchful eye of the hot afternoon sun. Not a pleasant sight.
    Gritting my teeth, I start shoveling. The goal is to even it out, move the blaze that’s around the edges to the center. You see, people come and dump their family’s blaze into this pit, but the y’re sure as scorch not gonna wade down into the muck and unload it in a good spot; no, they’re gonna just run up to the pit as fast as they can, dump their dung around the edges and then take off lickety-split. That causes a problem: the blaze keeps on piling up around the edge, usually the edge of the pit closest to the border tents, until the pit is overflowing despite not being even close to full. Then a lucky shanker like me—not that I’m the least bit shanky—gets punished, and hasta use a shovel and old-fashioned sweat and grit to move the blaze around. Or if the pit is full, you get to cover it with durt so people can start using the next one. That’s what I was hoping for earlier.
    Anyway, I get right into it, heaping the scoop of my shovel full of stinky muck and tossing it as far toward the center as I can get it. Some of it splatters my clothes, but that’s inevitable, so I don’t give it another thought. Clothes can be cleaned, but the job’s not gonna get done without us doing it.
    A moment later Circ’s beside me, and within two scoops, his bare chest is glistening with a thin sheen of sweat that reflects the light into my eyes like thousands of sparkling diamonds. Every once in a while, one of us gags, our throats instinctively closing up to prevent any more of the blaze haze from penetrating our lungs. Can a person die of excessive blaze fume inhalation? With three more Shovel Duty afternoons to come, I’m certainly gonna put that question to the test.
    Scoop, shovel, gag, repeat.
    It goes on like that for a while, neither of us talking, not ’cause we don’t want to, but ’cause we can’t without choking. At some point I become immune to the smell, but I know it’s still there, like an invisible force lying in wait for its next