The Necessary Beggar

The Necessary Beggar Read Free Page A

Book: The Necessary Beggar Read Free
Author: Susan Palwick
Ads: Link
Girls, the latest teen lip-synching sensation, as much as she loved gardening. She was a good American child.
    And so we were all of us stunned, when she told us that her wedding must be performed by the Necessary Beggar. Even Aliniana was stunned, and it was from her reminiscences of Lémabantunk that Zamatryna had grasped the importance of the custom in the first place. Certainly I had never told her of it, for I knew better than to impose old ways upon her in a new place. Her parents had told her about their own wedding, of course, for little girls always ask for such stories, but they had never thought for a moment that it would occur to her to follow the tradition. Our headstrong, assimilated Zama, with her letter sweaters and her laptop computer and her cellular telephone, instructing Jerry not to buy her a diamond ring, but instead to give the money he had saved to a Necessary Beggar? What kind of American child was this?
    Jerry was the only person who didn’t seem a bit surprised. “It’s just like her,” he told me, much later. “That’s why I love her.”
    The problem was how to achieve what Zamatryna had commanded. For, of course, the United States does not honor its beggars. They are not empowered to perform marriages. They are considered curses, not blessings. And there was the further difficulty that Nevada, where we lived, had just passed the Public Nuisance Act of 2022 commanding that no one was to live on the streets, and the Reno police had plucked all the homeless people they could find up into county transports and had taken them away.
    That is why the entire family, plus Jerry and Lisa, wound up climbing into Lisa’s SUV and driving to the first place in America we had ever seen, eleven years before: the place, I suppose, where the story of Zamatryna’s wedding truly begins.

2
    Bodies
    The door into exile was blue, and it shimmered. “Don’t be afraid,” the child’s mother told her, but Zamatryna-Harani, standing in the Plaza of Judges in the somnolent warmth of high summer, was afraid anyway. The Plaza of Judges was vast, paved with smooth gray granite stretching away on either side into a distance that could have held fifty houses. Along the edges of the Plaza rose stone statues ten times taller than a grown man, the stern images of all the Judges who had ever ruled upon the fates of the citizens of Lémabantunk. The child could hear bees somewhere, although nothing grew on the Plaza; above everything stretched the sky, serenely blue. In front of them was the door, a different, more dangerous blue.
    Zamatryna-Harani’s nose itched, but she didn’t scratch it. With one hand she clutched her little bundle of things, and with the other she clutched a fistful of her mother’s skirt. She was afraid to let go of either one, lest something—her things, her mother, herself—be left behind. Her mother couldn’t hold her hand, because all of the grown-ups were carrying possessions: cooking pots, bags of clothing, sleeping mats. Their hands were full and they wore bundles on their backs. All of them looked like Mendicants, but it was no honor.
    Zamatryna didn’t want to go away, but she knew they had to, because all the grown-ups said so. Twenty days ago, Uncle Darroti had done something terrible, and now he cried all the time, and Grandfather Timbor and Uncle Macsofo and her parents wouldn’t leave him, and she and her cousins couldn’t leave them, so they were all going together. Her twin cousins Rikko and Jamfret, who were only a year younger than she was, pretended it would be a splendid adventure, but she knew they were only
boasting. She had heard Rikko crying one night, while Jamfret tried to comfort him. Her other cousin, the baby Poliniana, three years younger than Zamatryna, had cried openly, in front of all the grown-ups. Poliniana’s mother, Auntie Aliniana, had cried too, and Zamatryna’s parents had

Similar Books

The Passion Series

Emily Jane Trent

The Camberwell Raid

Mary Jane Staples

The Zona

Nathan Yocum

The Main Chance

Colin Forbes

A Taste of Ice

Hanna Martine