Nepit

The grain goddess had to make herself thin to get through the granary door.

Nepit pressed her belly to the threshold and worked one scale beneath the wood. The keeper had packed the crack with clay. She tasted it, found a place where it had dried badly, and pushed until a flake broke against her nose.

Inside, grain stood in heaps higher than a man’s shoulders.

She went still.

There should have been a thousand small movements waiting inside that darkness: roots folded tight, leaves not yet opened, the pressure of life against its husk. She could feel none of them.

Nepit rose into the shape of a woman and plunged her arm into the nearest heap. Kernels ran cool between her fingers. She went deeper, to the elbow, to the shoulder. Nothing answered.

A hand closed around her wrist.

“Leave some for the rest of us.”

The woman behind her held a broken pottery lamp. She had come through the opening in the roof, and one foot was bleeding where she had landed. Nepit could see the dark print it had left in the dust.

“What did he do to it?” Nepit asked.

The woman glanced at the grain. “Dried it. There were insects.”

Nepit lifted a handful to her face. Beneath the dust lay the faint smell of roasting.

“All of it?”

“It keeps now.”

She said it defensively, as though she had done the work herself. Her grip tightened when Nepit let the grain fall.

“If you’re going to shout, wait until I’m out.”

“Take me to the keeper.”

“So you can tell him I was here?”

Nepit pulled her wrist free. A few kernels remained caught in the crease of her palm. She closed her hand over them, trying to find even one unhurt center.

The woman watched. Then she backed toward the wall.

“I know you,” she said.

Her eyes went to the broken clay beneath the door.

Nepit looked up. “Then you know what is missing.”

The woman put out the lamp.

The Empty Jar

Nepit’s shrine stood beside the threshing floor. It was scarcely tall enough for a man to enter without bowing. Inside, the goddess found a little oil, three dried flowers, and the jar in which the village kept grain for her.

Its seal had been pressed back into place.

She lifted it. Empty.

Outside, the woman stood with her injured foot raised against the opposite ankle.

“Where?” Nepit asked.

“At home.”

“How much?”

The woman did not answer quickly enough.

Nepit crossed the space between them. “How much is left?”

“Enough for the journey.”

The goddess caught her arm. Beneath the thin skin, the bone felt terribly close.

“That grain is alive.”

“So is my son.”

They stood beside the threshing floor, where no one had worked for weeks. The woman did not pull away. She looked down at Nepit’s fingers until the goddess opened them.

“Show me.”

Her name was Tia. She said it as they walked, abruptly, as though it were something Nepit ought to have asked.

The house had one room and a roof that sagged over the sleeping mat. A boy lay beneath it with his eyes open. At the hearth, a covered bowl of dough waited beside a shallow basket. A grinding stone sat between them.

Nepit stopped at the sound.

It came from the basket: a small, crowded rustling that no one else in the room could hear.

She knelt and laid both hands around it.

“I left the rest of the village’s grain alone,” Tia said. “He counts that. He doesn’t count yours.”

Nepit looked at the dough.

That, too, had been hers. The little lives within it were gone. Their torn bodies would rise under heat and become something a child could swallow.

The boy pushed himself onto one elbow.

“Is she taking it back?”

“No,” Tia said.

Nepit drew the basket closer.

What Could Be Kept

“I need this for sowing.”

Tia lowered herself beside the hearth and pressed a cake of dough between her hands.

“Then bring us food.”

“There is food in the store.”

“There is a lock on the store.”

Nepit remembered the cool, lifeless kernels slipping through her hand. So much of herself had already been lost there that she had thought only of what could still be saved.

Tia flattened the cake again. Her palms shook, leaving one edge thicker than the other.

“When the river comes up, we’ll sow,” she said. “When it goes down, we’ll sow. When someone brings seed, we’ll sow. I’ve heard nothing else. He can’t eat a field that isn’t there.”

“If you grind this, there won’t be one.”

“I know.”

The answer stopped Nepit more sharply than anger would have done.

Tia laid the cake on a hot shard at the edge of the fire. The boy watched it. His eyes followed every movement of her hands.

“Tomorrow we go north,” she said. “My brother may still have something. I need bread for the way.”

“May?”

“He had something when the last boat came.”

“How long ago?”

Tia turned the cake with a stick.

Someone struck the door.

The boy dropped back onto the mat. Tia rose so quickly that she stumbled on her bad foot.

The keeper pushed inside carrying a short staff. There was clay dust on his tunic, and a piece of broken seal in his hand.

“I followed the blood,” he said.

He saw the basket.

For a moment he looked relieved.

“Put it down.”

Nepit stayed kneeling. “Your grain will not grow.”

His eyes moved from her to Tia. “Who is this?”

“You heated it until nothing inside it could wake.”

“It was crawling. I saved it.”

“You saved food.”

“Yes.” He struck the end of the staff against the floor. “Food. Have you seen what happens outside when there isn’t any?”

Nepit had no answer that would not sound cruel in that room.

The keeper took a step toward the basket.

“There is enough in your store to keep them here,” she said. “Give them that. Let them put this into the ground.”

“And every house will hear.”

“Every house is hungry.”

“I know how many houses there are. I know how many mouths. I know what is left.”

“Then count the seed separately.”

He looked at her as though she had offered him another task when his back was already breaking beneath the first.

“Give me the basket.”

The Grain in the Fire

He seized its rim.

Nepit held on. Tia reached between them, catching the keeper’s wrist, and for an instant all three were joined over the hearth.

The dry basket split.

Grain struck the hot shard, bounced, and poured toward the fire.

Nepit let go of her human shape.

She felt the first kernel land among the coals. Heat broke through its husk. Another fell beneath it, then a dozen more, and the room became a confusion of small, separate agonies.

She could not gather herself quickly enough.

One part of her lay on the cold floor. One was caught in Tia’s sleeve. One rolled down the edge of the hearth toward a red crack between two pieces of wood.

She pushed from inside it.

The kernel turned. It stopped.

Then the husk split.

Tia tore the cloth from beneath the bowl of dough and stretched it across the hearth. Grain rattled onto the linen. The keeper stood staring at the place where a woman had been.

“Help me!”

Tia thrust one corner at him. He caught it too late; more seed slid past his hand. She swore at him, dragged the cloth upward, and trapped the last falling grains in its fold.

Nepit came back badly.

Her knees struck the floor. She had hands again, but could still feel the kernels blackening where she could not reach them. She plunged one hand into the hearth.

Tia caught her elbow.

“Those are gone.”

Nepit tried to pull free.

The woman tightened her grip. “Look at me. These are here.”

She held up the sagging cloth.

There was so little in it.

Nepit bent over the fold and listened. Beneath the smell of scorched linen, the surviving grain answered her. Small and whole. Waiting.

The keeper sank onto his heels. He had put the staff down without noticing.

“Lady,” he said.

She looked at the bowl. A smear of dough clung to its side. On the shard beside the coals, the child’s bread had begun to burn.

Nepit reached for it.

Tia’s hand closed on her elbow again, then loosened.

The goddess lifted the cake. Its underside was black in places, its upper edge still soft. She turned it between her fingers, feeling nothing living within it, and put it in the boy’s hands.

He looked at his mother before he ate.

Nepit waited until he had swallowed.

“Bring a measure,” she told the keeper.

He rose at once.

“From your store,” she said. “Tomorrow, too.”

He stopped in the doorway.

She could see him beginning the count again. How many mouths. How many days. She could not make the heap behind his locked door larger simply because he now knew her face.

“Come with me,” he said at last. “You should see how much is left.”

Nepit folded the cloth over the seed.

“I have seen it.”

She got to her feet anyway.

A Small Sowing

At dawn they took the seed to a strip of ground beside the lowest channel. Tia carried the cloth. The keeper came with a bowl of grain from his store and stayed to clear the silted passage with his hands.

Nepit walked behind the sowing. Wherever Tia’s fingers opened, the goddess felt a little of herself leave the light.

No stalks sprang up beneath their feet.

They carried water. They ate measured portions of the grain that would never grow. On the third day the boy asked whether his uncle knew they were not coming, and Tia said she would send word with the next boat.

Some of the seed failed.

Nepit knew each place. She passed over them without asking anyone to dig.

When the first green tips broke the soil, the boy came running too close to the row. Tia caught him by the back of his tunic and set him down on the path. He stood there with both feet pressed together, studying the narrow blades.

He had brought a piece of bread.

One edge was missing. He looked at the bitten place, then held it out to Nepit with the unbroken side toward her.

She took it and sat beside him, where their shadows would not fall across the shoots.