[if someone were to go into your garbage and root through it, what would they
learn about you?]

The oil was, if you can describe any of it that way, luckily confined to just
the bottom of the crate. Now empty, one could see the rusty imprint of whatever
had been in the container previously, an oblong and somewhat irregular shape,
set just so inside the square confines, but its footprint was hardly enough to
identify it.

Meera felt her face flush as she knelt and tried to sort her school papers in
some sort of order combining importance and portion covered in oil. Most of the
papers were a loss, but they’d served as a shield for some of the more
important things above them. Most of the silks were untouched, only a great
white silk-and-wool sari having a stain in one corner. Two of the school
uniforms were destroyed, oil soaking into some part of each piece, but the
third was free of damage, save one stocking rent by splinters of wood. 

Meera thrust the oily clothing into the trashcan, taking what usually held no
more than a paper or two and an apple core and filling it with the thick reek
of machinery and destruction.

The floor was covered in a thin layer of oil, now, and the well-worn stone was
becoming slick where Dick scooped sawdust up and dumped it back into the box.

The pile of clothing was surprisingly large. Meera finally stood, stopping her
one armed sorting and clutching a small pile to her chest and returned to the
bedroom.

Meera’s phone rang. 007 51 6161. Dick recognized the school’s number. 

He fumbled with the phone for a moment, then said “Hello?” into it and
listened.

“She’s had a family emergency. I’ll have her call you. Thank you.”

He snapped the phone shut just as Meera unlatched the bedroom door again.

“Who was that?”

“The school. They wanted to know where you were. I told them you’d had a family
emergency.”

For a moment she thought about how ludicrous it would be to call this an
emergency, but then, if ending up in the hospital with a broken arm and then
being evicted from your home in the space of twelve hours wasn’t a family sort
of emergency, she wasn’t sure what counted.

The pain in the arm was subsiding, the medicine was reducing it to a dull ache
already.

“I think I need a walk.”

Dick nodded as Meera slipped into her shoes and fumbled for a moment.

“Help me with my laces?” She looked utterly defeated.

She pulled her coat around her, clutching at the loose flap where she’d left
her arm. The fog had rolled in thicker, the morning sun no longer making much
effort, it seemed, content to merely show up today. At least it hadn’t phoned
out, she thought.

She traced along the fence and road down toward the village. Where the rough
track met the pavement was soggy, the constant moisture leaving a place for
moss to take hold and trail down the sides of the road for some distance, its
verdant green laced with starry bursts of bright, looking surreal in the
otherwise dim light. Moss like that always seemed to glow, and today it felt
like it might be mocking her.

She frowned at the expanse of moor above her, and the road winding the long way
around the hills toward her uncle’s house. It felt further than ever. Funny
what being unwelcome will do to distance, she thought.

The road had no real shoulder, and she supposed it didn’t really need one. Not
many cars passed this way, since the only thing beyond the farms and a few
estates on this stretch was a tiny town called Berwickshire, a little pull-out
where hapless tourists who’d managed to find themselves out this way could stop
to take a photo of the crags from just the same perspective as some painter
who’d captured those same crags looking like they do, and one of the
northernmost train stops before crossing into Scotland, which was just a lone
platform sitting in the middle of nowhere. You couldn’t even buy a ticket
there, you had to purchase it round trip from your starting point if that was
your stop, and if you were trying to leave from that platform, you’d have had
to fetch your ticket from elsewhere or have it delivered by post for the fee of
a few pounds and a three day wait.

She heard a car in the distance behind her, though it was still invisible in
the fog.

She trailed back toward the larger village, though she didn’t actually intend
to go there. She just didn’t relish the idea of being any further away from
anything, and figured that someone would be less inclined to ask what she was
doing wandering toward nothing at all in the fog. At least this direction was
going toward something. Anything.

The car was closer now, and it whizzed past her on the right, right down the
center of the road, fully expecting there to be nobody else on it.

The field on her left was full of sheep, but a lone collie ran out of the fog
and darted around them and the whole herd turned away from the fence and
vanished into the creeping dark.

As she neared the village, she spotted a walking path leading away from the
road. The place where it met the pavement was red brick, the hard kind that
people used when they wanted something to last, and even so, it was half worn
away, the formerly hard edges now round with wear, the center having a gentle
cup to it where years of feet had worn it away.

A brick wall sprung up in steps, starting as a low guide to contain the path
and rapidly becoming a wall higher than Meera’s head, obscuring what might even
be tall buildings on the other side. If there were, they had no connection to
the path. Not a gate, nothing. 

A low iron railing trailed along the other side, separating the path from a
marshy patch, though the marsh looked as if it had no intention of encroaching
any closer. The same bright moss covered the sides of the path, making a little
river of bright green studded with even greener jewels. 

She couldn’t see where the path led. The fog was even thicker on the marsh.
She kept walking.

The path ended abruptly in more bricks, just as time-worn as the other end, and
beyond the short expanse, she could see a wrought iron fence.