The Appointed

After the songs had been sung and blind, old Gaddis had finished reciting the required pledge, the six young men that sat surrounding him began to unfold their strips of cloth. This they did slowly and with care, one fold at a time, until each held high an open piece of light cloth the width of an outspread arm. Then one of them stood.
Marek had endured this moment so often in his thoughts that he now felt detached from himself. His own name, traveling in whispers throughout the gathered crowd, sounded strange in his ears, like it might belong to someone else. He looked to the others in the circle, the cloths they held unblemished, their cheated faces bitter with disdain. Earlier, before the ceremony began, he had made the mistake of finding his father’s face among those in the crowd.
Old Gaddis, of course, had seen nothing. He stood with his red palm raised and dripping, his clouded eyes fixed upon some invisible distance. Marek, finding himself unable to move, wondered whether he envied the man’s blindness.
If he ran, he would be killed, or banished, and then he would likely die more slowly than if he had been killed. Nobody had ever pleaded to forfeit their appointment, but he knew what would happen if he did. 
And so his feet took him forward, close enough that he could smell the sour warmth of the old man’s breath and sweat.
Gaddis’s bent back straightened. “Red water for the soil!” he shouted in a parched voice, and reached out his bleeding hand.
A pulse beat in Marek’s ears. He looked back to his empty seat, helpless, and heard curses muttered from the crowd. A stone was flung that he ducked to avoid.
In front of him, Gaddis took a casual step back before turning with a vicious kick. Marek took it above the knee without realizing what had happened. His hands fumbled the cloth as he fought for balance.
Sounds of ridicule erupted in all directions.
“Red water for the soil!” Gaddis cried again, the sides of his mouth caked white with spittle, his bleeding hand groping as if for help.
Marek collected himself. He cleared his throat and repeated the words as loudly as he was able. Then he pressed the bloodied handprint on his cloth to the hand trembling before him.

***

All throughout the afternoon, Marek sat trapped in the arid heat at one end of the head table, faint with hunger and sick at the sight of food. His company, the five hopefuls that had not been appointed—each, like himself, come of age in the spring of that year—took turns loudly predicting tomorrow’s outcome as though Marek were somewhere else.
Down the table’s length, old Gaddis gorged himself on the roasted leg of a rawboned goat, freshly slaughtered for the occasion. Now and then people approached to place a hand on his shoulder and speak into his earless hole. The old man nodded at their words, and took with his bandaged hand whatever drink came his way.
Later that evening, only a few came by with customary blessings for the appointed. Marek could hear through the wall of his room when his mother met them at the door, their voices low and secretive. None stayed for long or were asked inside.
Out his open window he could see the sharp tips of blasted trees past the southern wall. He wondered, as he often did during the dim haze of sundown, whether his brother had found the means for a life in that dead land, or was he now only a heap of bones to be buried by changeless seasons, a memory in the hearts of those forbidden to speak his name?
How can you stay when you know what’s here? he had whispered to Marek at this very window, the house quiet in the grey dark before dawn.
Because I don’t know what’s out there. I’m scared of out there.
You’re scared of here, too.
At least I know what I’m scared of here.
The betrayed look in his brother’s face was a ghost that still haunted the room. He had allowed Marek a minute to reconsider, and then he slipped over the sill and was gone.
When their father returned from the search on the following night, he announced to a small group in Marek’s presence that he had lost his only son.
A chill repelled Marek from the window, though the air outside was warm. There was a crawling in his gut, something alive that wanted out. He sank to his knees and tried to be sick, but all that came was a black taste that burnt his throat. After a few minutes, he managed to crawl into bed.

***

He awoke suddenly. He thought that some noise had shaken him back into the room, but all he could hear as he lay still in the dark were the small sounds of hunger inside himself. Maybe it was better this way, he thought, a vague dread building in his chest. Maybe life would be more merciful if all you knew were the sounds in your ears and the things your hands touched. He sat up. At the foot of the bed he could make out the pale shape of the nightmare cloth, and he wished that he had died in his sleep.
Throwing off the covers, he rose swiftly and felt his way down the hall.
“Mother?”
The sound of his own voice in the dark frightened him, but not so much as the answering silence. He needed to speak to someone, to explain the terror he had felt that morning, a fear that lifted him outside himself. It was the very same kind, he now realized, that had kept him from running to this door in the hours after he watched his brother disappear from the world. Why did no one else feel what he felt? Why did others covet what he would give anything to be rid of?
“Mother?” he called again, and hit the door with his open hand.
“Go back to bed.”
It was his father’s voice. Marek dropped his hand to his thigh and became aware that he was naked. He stood stricken, bewildered by the impulse that had brought him here.
“I said go back to bed, Marek.”
He looked down the hall’s impossible length. He could not move. The door before him opened and his father’s shadowed form loomed in the lightless frame. Marek’s eyes fell to his feet. His hands shook as he covered himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said, wincing.
His father gave a small laugh. “Sorry for what?”
Slowly, as if attempting to move unnoticed, Marek turned away and shrank back down the hall. He’d almost reached his room when he heard footsteps behind him.
“For crying naked to your mother on the night of your appointment?”
“I’m sorry,” said Marek, his eyes on the window that had taken his brother. “I said I was sorry.”
A hand grabbed his arm and flung him to the floor. Marek screamed.
“He’s a blind old man,” his father shouted, and kicked. “A blind and broken man who wouldn’t stand a chance to a child. Are you a child, Marek?”
But Marek couldn’t answer. He’d begun sobbing, curling in on himself and shrieking at each blow to his arms, ribs, and shoulders.
“Is this what you’ll look like come dawn?” his father asked. “Is this the sight you’ll leave behind for us to keep?”
Marek rolled over and saw his mother’s gaunt face in the doorway. He called to her and she only looked at him, blank-eyed and motionless. Then she turned and left.

***

By the time he was carried weeping back to the square, ripe bruises marked his nakedness like the sign of plague. No one else would touch him. Those already gathered parted stiffly to let him pass, their faces dead to his piercing pleas.
Old Gaddis sat dozing just where he’d stood during the appointment ceremony. It was Marek’s cries that woke him. The wilted face lifted while the eyes twitched behind their lids, as if searching for the one who wept in the dim hollows of a dream. He began to stand and stumbled forward, drunk. His hands felt the ground for his stick, and, finding it, he hoisted himself to his feet and lightly swayed in place.
Marek was dropped in front of him. He held himself still, a crumpled heap, until a pair of hands helped him to stand. It was then that he noticed, with a glazed look, a smooth fist-sized stone tied by hair to the blunt handle of Gaddis’s stick. For a moment it was all that existed, the whole of his world contracted to a single point. Then, bending forward, he retched and spit blackly into the dust. He had not eaten in two days and would never again go hungry.

***

Rory Say is a Canadian fiction writer from Victoria, BC, currently surviving somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Stories of his have recently appeared in Lucent Dreaming, Flash Frog, Curiouser, Short Fiction: The Visual Literary Journal, as well as on podcasts such as NoSleep, Tales to Terrify, and Nocturnal Transmissions.