singelisilverslippers asked: hey so i think tumblr maybe ate my ask or it went to you when you were in the middle of moving/conferencing, but i find myself kept awake at night by a pressing question: What (whom) did Jaylah eat all those years she was living in the wrecked spaceship by herself?
Her house tries its best to feed her, but the foodbox is missing a piece.
Sometimes after eating, with the ugly ache still in her belly, Jaylah will thumb through the foodbox settings, just to see what she could have eaten, on some other world, in some other time. The options light up in dull orange: taquitos. Caesar salad. Pizza of pepperoni.
“What is taquitos,” she asks her house, carefully, in its tongue. Her house tells her it is meat in rolled dough, fried in oil. It has been a long time since Jaylah has eaten dough. No nuts grow here, to grind to flour. No axeroot powder to leaven it, should she find some.
“Give me taquitos,” Jaylah says wistfully, and listens to the gears of her house whir and grind, trying to obey an order it is too damaged to fulfill.
“What is the meat,” she asks her house, when she tires of the sound of it trying and failing her.
The house tells her it comes from a cow.
“What is a cow,” Jaylah asks.
The house tells her it is an alien animal which lives on a world far away, bred for milk and slaughter. On her world, no beast lives for slaughter alone. The custom strikes her as barbaric.
The fist in Jaylah’s belly tightens, and for weeks she dreams of cows, their big eyes, their funny spots, their slow, fat bodies, designed for violence.
*
For a year, she survives on these things:
Whistling leaves, boiled down to soft coils in pale green water.
Salt sucked straight from mountain rocks.
She finds a strange artifact in the house, a box full of many thin leaves, covered in markings. The house says it is a book, but Jaylah knows books, and they are not these things to be held in the hand, to smell of dust and distantly of plants. She eats the pages of the book, one yellowed leaf at a time, and has the house tell her of its provenance: Around The World In Eighty Days, by Jules Verne. A story of an incredible voyage, to a primitive species.
There are fish in the river, when she dares go to the river. It is hard to make herself do it, though, and she is too rigid with fear to stay for long, so often her catches are small and scant, hardly worth the risk.
The yellow beetles, ground into paste. They are more palatable if she can wait and let them dry into powder, but often she is too hungry, and licks the yellow slick right off the pestle.
Thin-winged lizards, dumb enough to fly into her traps. They are mere mouthfuls the size of her first, full of bones, and stink of sulfur, but meat is meat. Jaylah plugs her nose to cook them, and tries not to breathe while eating. She spits the sucked-clean bones into a pile, and boils them the next day for broth.
A bee who falls from the sky, body and ship too badly damaged to fly home to Krall. She drags the bee two terrifying miles to her house, flinching at shadows, but no one comes to collect it. Under the shelter of her house’s cloak, she separates the meat from the metal, and tries to tell herself that the waste should go in the ground. But her belly hurts, and the meat is not soured, and there are only the beetles to eat that night.
*
There are other flesh-eaters Jaylah knows of, besides the men of Krall, who do not eat the meat of others but devour them whole, body and spirit both. She has had to avoid ending up in the cookpots of fellow survivors more than once. Jaylah is not like these people. Jaylah is smarter, stronger, better protected. She has not forgotten her father, her planet, herself. Yes, she is eating the meat of a dead man, wrapped in the leaf of a dead book to mimic the dough she does not have, but Jaylah did not kill this man to eat. It’s a distinction she feels is important.She brings the rest of her meal to the captain’s seat, and puts her legs up on the arm of the chair. The meat is delicious, lean and good.
“Tell me again about cows, house,” she orders, rejuvenated despite herself, the animal pleasure of being fed making her dumb body glad. “Tell me what food can be had of cows.”
The house obediently recites the byproducts which should be available in its foodbox: butter, hamburger, steak, stew, half-and-half, cream, milkshake.
“I don’t know what is a milkshake,” Jaylah says, although she does–the house has explained before, that it is ice cream made soft, to be drunk through a straw. That ice cream is milk made cold, made sweet, and milk flows from a mother cow to her calf, a willing gift.
The house tells her about milkshakes again, and tells her to program 987 into the replicator should she wish one.
“You can’t give it to me,” Jaylah says, and takes a savage bite of her meat. “So no. I don’t wish one.”
The house sighs itself into perfect silence, until the only sound is Jaylah herself, chewing, swallowing.
“Play me some music, house,” she says hoarsely, and the house gives her beats and shouting.
*
Ten days after eating Krall’s man, Jaylah cannibalizes the fallen bee’s secondary systems–nothing that could help her fly, or reinforce the shields. Just the air temperature and the sound in the pod. She finds a little metal construct that lights up a connection in the back of her mind, although she has never seen it before.
The part slots perfectly into her house’s foodbox.
Her hands shake too badly to install the part that day. She ends up leaving the work undone for a full week, until the next time she finds a lizard in her trap. It isn’t yet dead, when she comes for it, only one wing broken, the wound reeking of sulfur. It mewls in pain when she reaches for it, and Jaylah finds herself crying wildly over the poor stupid lizard, crying harder than she did for her own father.
She can’t let it go–it would only end up food for someone else, unable to fly.
She splints the lizard’s wing–a reckless, foolish indulgence. She fixes the foodbox, and feeds the ill-tempered hissing thing little crumbs of taquitos, little saucers of milk.
*
When the lizard is healed, Jaylah grabs it up in her hands, and carries it to the roof of her house. It bites the pad of her thumb, drawing blood.
“Fuck you too, lizard,” Jaylah tells it, and throws the small thing into the sky. The lizard wavers briefly in the air, testing its wounded wing, and then lets out a joyful trill and soars over the cliff, leaving the protection of Jaylah’s house for the uncertain freedom of the dark.
Jaylah stands there looking over the cliff for a long time, sick with envy over the little lizard’s escape.
“I am leaving this place,” she swears to herself, and although she has eaten well for weeks, she feels a familiar twist her gut, the hollow ache of hunger.
