Hagovi’s Bridge, Chapter Two: The Prodigal Door
Listen to the Soundcloud audio narration by N. MacCameron.
Hagovi switched her broom back and forth across the stone steps of her home. Tawny swaths of storm debris swayed and shifted to the end of the path. There they would remain until Dimpfeg shoveled them to the other side of the compound.
No use leaving them where the wind from the Barrier could blow them back.
The broom stilled. Dead grains of seconds accumulated into piles of minutes, and dead minutes heaved into dunes of hours. The deadly storm called the Barrier tumbled the horizon and blended in a blurry haze over her head. The bulk of the compound — a stone-walled stronghold defying the wasteland — blocked her from seeing where the blur thinned and melded with the opposite horizon.
She had only known the stark arid landscape. The old world, Mother reminisced in her saner moments, blended into green grass and humidity that used to curl her dead flat hair.
Maybe the wind would carry some grains into Uncle Agpi’s salad in the ‘old world’. Hagovi hoped it would.
Hagovi dusted the seconds from where they hooked into the coarse weave of her outer tunic and crossed the lintel of her home. She heaved the stone door into place. Rings rattled on the iron rod as she drew the thick curtain to catch the seconds that blew through the cracks.
“Why do we have a door that collects time?” She remembered pestering Testoneel, Mother’s maid, all through her childhood.
“It’s the Prodigal Door.” Testoneel lately divulged. “If a Prodigal come, they would need a door.”
“But that’s impossible.” Hagovi had objected. “The Barrier is so big and so ugly, it eats everything. And what’s a ‘Prodigal?’”
The maid put down the broom and looked her in the eye and said, “Your brother went into the Barrier. We keep this door for him.”
Brother? Hagovi stared with an open mouth. The maid refused to say more. Hagovi took over the sweeping that day. If he comes back, I’m going to be the first to see him.
From a short corridor she emerged into a high-ceilinged cooling tower. No clacking looms disturbed the arid peace. Hagovi looked up. A quarter of the way down from the open sky framed in rock walls, a platform hung. Mother created a tapestry there when she wasn’t weaving on her work looms. Hagovi contemplated the deranged mats of nastergup hides, eqrubup wool, sticks and mud cakes decorating the wall, and sighed.
She fixed her gaze on a shiny object hanging from the most recent patch in the tapestry. Barrier Trash. When did Mother find that? What was it before the tempest warped it beyond purpose?
Mother must be tending her eqrubup worms. She expected them to change the color of their wool soon. The only way she got different colors for her weaving was to catch the wool the moment it changed color. This was also a way of marking the passage of time.
“Do you remember the time…?” They asked each other. “The wool had just changed to emeralds.”
A roar funneled toward her from the hall leading to Father’s station.
“DK!” Dinpfeg hobbled toward Hagovi. He had been wounded when Father and Mother escaped from the old world, when Uncle Agpi had stolen Father’s throne, and there had been no healing for him. “DK, He’s a be that hungert.”
Hagovi wondered what use it would be asking him not to call her DK. Daughter of the King.
“I’m not that.” She often ranted. “The king is a fat slug in a far away land that I don’t remember.”
She smiled. The wool had just changed to the color it was now when Dinpfeg told her he had changed the meaning of DK.
“Delight of Kings,” he said. “You can’t deny that!” He winked and bowed at her.
About the Author: Where are you from? Chances are, I’ve been there. Africa claims me as her child, Europe claims me as a nomad, Canada claims me as a settler. My voice, accent, outlook and style reflect all the places I have lived and loved. What do you love? I love children and hope never to grow too old to get down on the floor and build, romp, or fly through a child’s imagination. I love animals and am pleased to say, they seem to love me back. https://leoshine.micandpen.com/
