The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

Together, they lifted the girl and carried her to Elizabeth’s room, where she was put in bed. Elizabeth fetched some water in a bucket and a rag, and they cleaned the exhausted, feverish girl of all the blood. Then Anita recognized the girl as the mother of the twins.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Let her rest,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She must have run all the way from the town.’

Almost twenty kilometres. Half a marathon. Anita shook her head.

‘What happened? What the hell did she say?’

Elizabeth shrugged.

‘I don’t know. Come, let her sleep a little. I’ll give her some paracetamol for the fever.’

They spent the rest of the day in waiting. Lunch was had, but they barely touched the food. By the middle of the afternoon, the girl started to wake up with a moan. Anita and Elizabeth stayed by her side.

‘Feeling better?’ asked Elizabeth.

The girl nodded weakly.

‘Thanks, Ma—’

‘It was nothing. Rest now, we’ll take you home tomorrow first thing in the morning.’

Anita thought the girl would complain, but instead, she just closed her eyes and began to snore almost immediately.

They left the door of the bedroom open, and had some coffee on the porch. Elizabeth started rolling a cigarette.

‘Ma?’ Anita said.

‘What?’

‘She called you Ma?’

Elizabeth took some time to answer. Anita watched her finishing rolling the cigarette and lighting it with a match.

‘These girls are very lovely when you get to know them better,’ she said. ‘They treat me like a mother sometimes.’

‘But you give them tough love. I saw the way you talk to them.’

Elizabeth took a long, deep drag, and let the smoke out in a huge grey cloud.

‘Being a mother is a hard job. Even being a surrogate mother.’

Anita wasn’t convinced.

They stayed on the porch until the night had fallen deeply around them. Then Elizabeth stood.

‘Let’s go to bed. I want to take her home as soon as the sun rises.’

‘Okay,’ Anita said, then, feeling a bit uncomfortable, added: ‘Take my room. I can sleep here.’

‘Nonsense. We can share your bed.’

‘It’s not a big bed.’

Elizabeth stared at her.

‘What are you afraid of?’

Anita didn’t know what to say.

‘Come.’ Elizabeth reached out to her, one hand extended over the abyss of Anita’s thoughts.

And she did.

There wasn’t any whistling that night.

*

The girl had no fever when she woke up the next morning. They ate a hearty breakfast (hearty being a meal with chicken and fried cassava), then went on their way to the riverine town. The girl was still weak, so they took longer this time, stopping every now and then to catch a breath. They arrived near noon.

There was a bit of a commotion among the women, but men were nowhere to be seen. They went straight to the girl’s house, where a few of the ribeirinhas were gathered. When they saw the visitors, they started yelling and ran to the girl. Her neighbour (who was indeed her mother, just as Anita had suspected) embraced her and started to cry.

One of the other women told them that the girl always used to slip away and have a smoke in the middle of the night. And that the Matinta had appeared right at that time, bringing a freshly killed body, dropping it in front of the terrified girl. Without a head. That was what they could piece together; the girl, relieved at returning home, confirmed it.

Elizabeth declined their offer to have lunch, and took Anita by the hand to get back home.

Anita felt surprisingly good holding Elizabeth’s hand. She was almost at peace, but for a nagging thought in the back of her head. No, scratch that, a veritable bunch of thoughts right in the forefront of her head – that was the truth. They walked part of the trail hand in hand, but soon Elizabeth had to let her go because the path narrowed enough for them to go one in front of the other.

‘Why do you like westerns, Anita?’ Elizabeth asked suddenly.

‘I like guns and action,’ Anita said after a while. ‘I can’t stand big books and philosophical observations of the world and things like that.’

Elizabeth didn’t say anything. She looked back once, glancing at Anita. Anita gazed back at the older woman and thought she had seen something in her eyes, but didn’t wait for her to spill her guts.

‘And you? Why do you like them?’

‘Because the western is not about the landscape.’

Anita frowned.

‘But you said yesterday that—’

‘The western tale shows the landscape as the protagonist, but the landscape can be anything, really. You can write a western taking place in the Russian tundra – in fact, there are quite a few stories from Soviet times that fit the bill very nicely.’

‘And here?’

The woman looked around, to the trees surrounding the trail. Anita could smell mango and jasmine, and a variety of plants and fruits hard to find anywhere else in the world. She couldn’t even begin to describe all the species.

‘Here?’ the older woman finally answered, startling Anita a bit. ‘You could write a western here as well, a western as good as any written by Elmore Leonard, Louis L’Amour or Alan LeMay. Have you read Ferreira de Castro’s The Jungle?’

Anita shook her head.

‘It’s a damn fine book,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Castro was a Portuguese young man who decided, in the 1930s, to become rich in the Amazon.’ She snorted. ‘Poor fucker. He came to Brazil broke and he left broke and heartbroken on top of that. But he ended up giving a description of the rainforest like no other writer had ever done, not even Brazilian writers. The truth is, we don’t like our country so much.’

This realization left Anita very sad. She couldn’t tell why exactly; they didn’t have the same political views. She didn’t believe in politicians of any party. She did believe, however, in hard facts. In what the eye could see, in what the hand could touch. She believed that there were more poor people than rich all over the world, and in Brazil this truth hit