Somewhere in Uptown
It was dark in the small room, close to full with two narrow beds shoved between white-washed walls, gloomy and colder than was comfortable in the autumn evening. Despite the small, tight space, the two small girls were huddled together on the same small bed, their two soft blankets heaped over them, hands clasped in the dark.
Nellie shifted, smoothing her cheek against the soft pillow they shared. Her black hair had – as it did every night – escaped the smooth plait it had started in, and it poured over the pillowcase, curls frayed and messy. There was no light for them but what shown through a thin crack in the doorway, and that was soft, no more than a faint tendril that stretched over the blanket, up along Nellie’s pale cheek. Nellie shifted, and it sparkled and glinted in her eyes.
“In fact,” Nellie breathed, “nobody’d ever seen rain like this was. It rained for days, days and days until all the places where rains likes to go just gave up, and then it splashed out and spilled over into the streets. At first it was just wet, like walking through a puddle, but then it got higher like splashing in the bay, and then higher and higher ‘til you couldn’t even go downstairs, it was so high.”
There was a breathless excitement to Nellie’s voice as she began the tale of what she had called ‘The Flood.’ For the Roalis and Yaris the girls had shared this tiny cupboard of a room, Nellie had always been full of stories of Old Rose Harbor. She was always happy to describe its teeming streets and big ramshackle wooden houses, the docks that jutted out onto the waters of the Tincta Basta, sometimes calm and blue and sometimes foaming and huge and green. She liked to talk about the pirates she’d seen, tumblers too, describing their antics and even giving them voices, mimicking them in the cold quiet nights. Bright jewels seen at a distance and sweets of foreign lands greedily inhaled were described with equally vivid longing as Nellie painted a picture of a world outside, a place not soft and taut like this one but bright and strange and rough and always exciting.
“Don’t worry,” Nellie softened her voice and squeezed the other small hand clasped in hers. “When we go, it won’t rain like that again. And – even if it did, we’d be safe. You’ll see. We have two floors in our house, and the upper one didn’t get wet, no matter how high the rains got. So if they come again we’ll just – we’ll stay up there.” She sighed, a little shoulder clad in white cotton peeking out from under the blanket.
Outside, during the day, she wasn’t Nellie anymore. She was Ava, a strange soft name that didn’t feel like hers, no matter how many times anyone said it. She had whispered Nellie to Emelia in the dark hours of night when the world felt safe still, sworn her to secrecy with a pinky promise. Nellie had explained that anyone who broke a pinky promise would be washed out to sea, even if they were in Vienda and not Old Rose Harbor anymore. The sea, Nellie had explained, always knew if you broke your promise.
“Anyway,” Nellie continued, “the flood went on so long that not even my ma and uncle and aunt could go outside anymore, the waters were too high for anybody. So us and all the neighbors, we made a sort of – um – like a system of ropes and all. They went between the houses, ‘cause everybody had a bucket or a basket. So if you needed anything, like milk and eggs and all, you’d call over and you’d send a bit of money too, in your basket, and then – like just that – after a little while the milk and eggs and all’d come sailing back. An’ sometimes there’d be stuff in it you hadn’t even asked for, extras maybe ‘cause they weren’t going to keep, like real nice soft butter.” Nellie paused. “… not as nice as the stuff here,” she admitted, reluctantly, “but it tasted better.” There was something firm and unyielding in her tone, mingled with wistful remembrance.
“But,” Nellie giggled, very softly, a hushed little sound swallowed up by the blankets and the heavy night, “the baskets’re how I got in trouble. I’ll tell you about them, them and the boats, I’ll tell you about them tomorrow. All right?” Her free hand stroked Emelia’s hair. “Now you better sleep, ‘cause if we’re yawning tomorrow they won’t like it.” Her dark eyes fluttered, her cheek smoothing against the pillow again, although her hand never let go of Emelia’s.