Read Online Everfair by Nisi Shawl - Free Book Online

of a summer cottage. The dirt floor made her feel like a pioneer, uncivilized, but its surface was really very hard—Jackie had tamped it down with a stone weight lifted by one of the traction engines—and clean. And it stood several inches higher than the ground surrounding it, to forestall flooding in the rainy season to come.
    Like a ring of clerestory windows, the gap between her house’s high, thatched roof cone and the mats of her outer wall let in gentle, indirect light and a refreshing breeze. A red-tailed parrot came sometimes to the trees the builders had left growing by the front entrance. If Lisette lived here she’d want to tame it.
    Surely the children would enjoy spending a year or two here, far from the horrors Leopold wrought upon the lowlands. She had written to her husband a month ago. He would bring them by Lily’s birthday, before the start of the rainy season.
    â€œI knock on your door.” Lisette had become so formal since they ceased to share quarters. Or had the watershed been her nonsensical “confession”?
    â€œEnter!” Daisy called from her new stool. The door was a bit beyond Lisette’s reach, a few feet inside the doorway, leaning against the post from which it would later be hung, well before any danger of storms. For now the frame was filled by a fringe of raffia. Lisette pushed this aside, her down-drawn face expressing—what? Impatience? Frustration?
    No table yet. “May I offer you some beer?”
    â€œWater only. I must go back…”
    Expressing exhaustion, Daisy decided. “Beer would be better for you.” The Bah-Looba who had emigrated here with them said that fermentation got rid of certain parasites. Or that was one translation.
    â€œVery well, then. Beer. But not so much as to make me drunk.”
    Daisy got up to go to the beer jar in the storage room. “Will you sit?”
    â€œI mustn’t stay.” But Lisette collapsed onto the stool anyway. When Daisy returned with the beer-filled calabash, Lisette’s head rested on cupped hands propped up by the elbows on her knees. Her white kerchief lay spread in her lap, exposing the coiling disarray of her plaits.
    Daisy knelt on the mat-covered bed next to the stool, her only seat for her first week in her new home. She lifted the calabash cup. “Here.”
    Lisette took a long pull. “Ahh. Thank you.” She offered the calabash back. Daisy accepted it and drank what was left. When she was finished, she set the empty cup on the mat.
    Lisette looked around the hut’s interior silently for a moment, taking in the carved posts, the prettily woven baskets hanging from them, the bare bench. “You have adjusted yourself quickly.”
    Daisy laughed. “Are you saying I’ve ‘gone native’? I only accepted this place because it seemed easier than arguing.”
    â€œNo, but it is beautiful. I don’t find any fault.” Not with where Daisy lived, but how . Alone.
    â€œNor I with you, ch é rie,” Daisy responded gently. If her cottage—their colony’s first private permanent structure—had been built to reward her for composing Everfair’s national anthem, the infirmary had been built as a lure for Lisette. Who’d begun sleeping there before Daisy’s hut was habitable, deserting their shared tent for its fresh-laid wooden floors.
    Another silence. Longer and less comfortable. It stretched and stretched. Only the soft rustling of thatch brushed by the straying wind ruffled its awful smoothness. Then Daisy held out her hand.
    Lisette took it. “I can’t. Patients are waiting.” But she let Daisy slide her palm up along her brown-skinned arm and tug till she followed the pull downward and fell beside her on the bed. “Ch é rie, my dear…” They kissed.
    â€œYou don’t know—”
    â€œShush. Of course I do.” Daisy had helped out, bathing and bandaging