Black and White
Judging by the wheel ruts the caravan came through while I was working in the darkhouse, and dumped the body where I’d see it soon as I came out. Tinkas sold any healthy stray they caught alive, and burned the ones they found diseased or dead, so it had to be a cripple or a screamer. They also knew I took in both.
Lindy came hobbling down the steps while I stood over it. “Wha’s tha, Dae?”
“Tinkas left it.” I handed her the basket of tubers I’d dug up for dinner. “Tell Les scrub these good. I’ll be out back a while.”
They’d swaddled it like a child, but when I hoisted it over my shoulder it unfolded into bigger and heavier. Smelled scorched something awful, like they’d tried to burn it then gave up halfway along. It didn’t twitch or make a sound, but I could feel its chest moving.
I carried it out back to my fixing shed, where I had all what I needed for mending hurts. Wasn’t much, but I had wood and straps to splint breaks, gut and needles to stitch gashes and yallo salve to cure festering. Some couldn’t be mended, and for them I kept sleepweed and heartstop.
Once I put it on my table I went around and dropped the shadecloths. The dark scared stiff everyone but me, so I didn’t have to waste sleepweed on a thrasher. I used my blade to cut through the knotted swaddling and pulled it back from the chest. It was a man in black clothes, and that gave me true pause.
Couldn’t be.
I put aside my dagger and reached for my shears, snipping my way through the bundle covering the head. Bone-colored hair spilled out first, lots of it, and fell away from a white face with black brows.
I held onto my shears and picked up my blade. The oldun who’d taken me in had told me plenty about the snowfolk, but I’d never seen one even from a distance. The Tinkas sometimes traded with them; always at edge dawn, when they couldn’t cross over.
His eyes went from closed to open, and I saw two starbursts of blue before his inner lids snapped down. His lips cracked as he muttered something and tried to move his arms.
I spoke every lingo in the zone – with my strays, I had to – and tried Tinka on him first. “You hurting where, iceman?”
“Free me.”
No, I wasn’t going to do that, no matter how pretty he sounded. “Where?”
A slit of blue showed on the bottom edge of his inlids. “Walkers.”
I felt his lower limbs with my hands, but instead of breaks the ridges and bulges of iron grazed my palms. “Shackles?” He nodded. “What for?”
“Ambush. Traitors.” His arms twitched. “Free me.”
A 2011 story with the working title of Black and White was another of those shiny ideas I wrote down to get it out of my head. It had a fairly neat premise for a dystopian tale, and probably would have become a novella. Black and White is Idea #12.
So that's all I've pulled from the archives. I have a few more partial books, a couple dozen unfinished short stories, and too many unsold pitches to even count, but these twelve are my favorites. In the realm of things I'd like to write before I die, I'd say finishing a dozen unfinished ideas is a reasonable goal, too. Stop in after Christmas to vote for which one you think I should tackle first in 2020.
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