Midnight's Song Read Online Free Page B

struggled to make it through, with so
much strife that my mother seemed luckier dead than we were
alive.
    Two months passed,
and I realized that with every day that went by was one day closer
to my 16 th birthday. Regardless of drought or sickness or death, I’d
still have to stand before a judge of the Imperial Court and make
my decision. I’d made up my mind to stay here long ago, yet now I
was unsure. The family I’d longed to stay with was gone now. Hunger
gnawed at my bones daily. The ocean wasn’t even a place where I
could seek refuge anymore! Guards constantly patrolled the
shoreline to ensure workers weren’t abandoning their posts to
escape the heat in the waves. Everything was falling
apart!
    Even the glorious symbol of the lily
had withered.
    The darkest day of the Hard Season was
mid-July. I woke up that day to find that Papa had wandered off and
forced myself to find the energy to stand. I hadn’t eaten a solid
meal in several days, and now the pain was agonizing. I made my way
to the sink and splashed my face with a handful of its dirty, warm
water. Although it wasn’t suitable for drinking – I did so anyway.
I held my breath and drank the water as if I’d been thirsty for
days, pretending that it wasn’t as putrid as it truly
was.
    But I still didn’t eat.
    The next thing I knew my
grip against the counter was loosening and the will of my muscles
disappearing as I slipped onto the ground. The world went black.
When it became light again, my mother’s midwife, Una was standing
over me. The nurse had come to check on me just minutes before and
found me lying there, prostrate on the floor and hardly conscious.
She immediately took me and cared for me, giving me an emergency
packet of gruel that she had been saving for the sickest of the
sick.
    “Someone must do
something,” Una muttered over me that day. “Otherwise this child
will die.”
    That night, my hollow
faced father came in through the screen door looking as ghastly as
death itself. I still don’t know where he could have been
beforehand. It seemed that his eyes were bloodshot and glazed,
drunken with grief if not with alcohol. The detached man walked
past the sight of his half-dead child and locked himself in his
room.
    That day was the darkest
of them all. It was the day that I first realized I was fully
alone. I realized that even though my Papa still had breath in his
lungs, the man that I once knew was gone. Papa was dead to me now,
utterly dead. I was no better than an orphan.
    There was nothing
left for me in these Isles anymore. It had all simply withered.
    Eventually the drought
eased. The months passed and the earth inevitably pulled away from
her sun. Cool winds doused the village as small blessings from the
Atlantic. Though, that still didn’t mean that it brought any
rain.
    Una took care of me for
the remainder of that month and the next until I was well. I knew I
couldn’t stay with her forever. I still had to make my choice.
Currently, my mind was only on survival. I was alive, but my mind
was in a clouded jumble. The picture of reality I’d had was gone.
The reality of staying here was bleak, but so did the reality of
leaving.
    August came and went. Papa
was beginning to disappear more frequently, sometimes for weeks on
end. Soon it was September. Then, October came. My choice was now
days away. I still couldn’t decide. I wouldn’t. Soon the same
harvest moon which I had been born under resurfaced in the night
sky. Tomorrow would be the day that I would have to make my
choice.
    But I couldn’t.
    I allowed that day to pass
even though I knew that the decision would still haunt me. When the
papers arrived for me in the mail with the time of my hearing, I
did nothing. I had pulled away just as my father had – completely
desensitized. I didn’t know very much, but I knew that I was not
going to be standing before the judge that day. Of course, my
actions wouldn’t go unpunished. The crime of rebellion had a