The Best

If we hadn't been attacked during the blizzard, I don't know that my sister and I would have survived.

As it was, when the others found us (and what was left of our parents) they assumed we'd been set upon by wild animals, and they did their best to nurse us back to health. When I think on it now it's almost heart-breakingly pathetic- three small families facing down death by starvation in a blizzard, and rather than do the obvious thing with two girls who have been mauled in such circumstances, they actually tried to save us. I'm sure they'd even have wasted energy on giving a proper burial to our parents, if the ground hadn't been too hard to dig. As it was they simply covered them with the remnants of our tent. Of course, leaving them unburied was probably for the best, all things considered.

Everyone had already been reduced to 1/3 rations by the time we were attacked- but I know the adults must have gone with even less, in an attempt to heal us. And then there was no food, and we sipped on heated snow.

And then there was a meat stew, and it was the best thing I'd ever tasted, and we got strong again. So strong. Much stronger than we should have. But no one was paying any attention to us by that point- they were all too wrapped up in their own guilt, their own gods.

We were rescued, of course. Everyone knows that, has read it in the papers. Maybe if things had been different, one of those other families might have adopted us, but I don't think any of them could stand to raise us, knowing what had happened to our parents.

Again, this was probably for the best.

We had been in the orphanage not three days when I noticed my sister picking listlessly at her food. She was pale, thin-looking. Perhaps this was to be expected from a child who had been rescued from near-starvation, but I knew that just one week ago she had been flushed and full of life. Finally she shoved the bowl away from her.

"It's not good," she muttered to me.

"I know it doesn't taste good, but it's all we've got," I said. And it didn't taste good. It wasn't that the porridge it tasted bad, exactly. But it was sort of like eating grass- you could do it, but it just seemed strange. It surprised me to see the other children wolfing it down so enthusiastically.

"No, I mean it's not good for me," she said, looking up at me with dark eyes. "I can tell. I may as well be eating air. I eat and I eat and I eat and I'm never even a little bit full- I'm hungry all the time."

"Me too," I admitted. "But we've been hungrier than this," A lie; the hunger gnawed at my gut worse than it ever had in the blizzard, twisting like a pain-maddened snake. "We'll survive."

"Do you know the last time I was full?" she continued in a dreamy voice, as though I had not spoken. "When we ate the stew. Do you remember the stew?"

"We mustn't talk about that," I scolded. "It upsets people."

"I'm sorry," she was abashed, but I could see the glow of memory in her eyes. I pushed my porridge away as well.

"Let's go for a walk," I said.

***

Nowadays when you read about orphanages in our time, it's all doom and gloom and terrible circumstances. I don't doubt that many orphanages were that way, but ours was not. We were given three meals a day (which were gobbled up by every child but us), were kept in clean, well-mended clothing, slept in comfortable beds, and were encouraged to stay active in body as well as mind. Still, as good as our orphanage was, it was the early 1800s, and child mortality was much higher then than it is now.

Again, this worked out for the best, as far as we were concerned.

Our orphanage was quite large, as I reckoned things. It had three long bedrooms (one for the girls, one for the boys, and one for the nuns); two school-rooms (again, one for the boys and one for the girls); a common-room (where we ate or played if it was cold out); a kitchen (which we turn turns cleaning); and a decent-sized garden in the back. Off to one side of the garden was a small cemetery, which held more than a few miniature graves. Of course no family tended these graves, but some of the children were always romantic enough to want to care for them, so they generally had at least a few blooms.

My sister and I spent a great deal of time in the cemetery, not so much because we had romantic streaks but because it was a good place to get away from every one else. It wasn't that we didn't like the other children, or the sisters, it's just that being around them... agitated us. Especially when we were already feeling so very weak and peevish. I'd heard one of the nuns talking about sending my sister to a hospital, she was getting so thin. I was determined to prevent this separation, but had yet to figure out how. Anyway everyone else was so loud and smelled so strongly- the cemetery was the one place we could go to get relief from that, to clear our heads enough to maybe think a little.

We were sitting by the grave of a boy who had died just before we came to the orphanage (now over a week ago). His stone was still clear and easy to read (John Alfred), and snow in front of it was smoother than the patches around it, unblemished by the many thaws and re-freezings this spring had produced. My sister was more laying than sitting, and I could tell even being awake was costing her more energy than she had. If any of the sisters caught us out here in the cold I'd be switched for sure, for allowing it.

"I'm hungry," she whispered, although by this point it had become such a constant refrain that I barely heard it. It was like the sound of insects in summer, or the fall of water in a brook.

"I know," I murmured, the way one might casually waft a hand at a fly. You didn't expect it to do any good- it was just what you did.

"Clarissa, I'm going to die," she said this with a sort of peace. It wasn't a threat, wasn't a complaint: it was a statement of fact, like it being wet on the ground.

"No you're not," I said, too weary to protest with any more vigor.

"No, I am. I really am." She flailed weakly for my hand, squeezed my fingers with her own. "I'm going to die because food doesn't feed me anymore. I think maybe we did die in that mountain pass, our spirits did, but it's just taken our bodies this long to catch ups."

"That's ridiculous," I closed my eyes. "That's not how death works. And anyway we were strong- our bodies and our spirits were strong, both of them. We're just... we got sick, somehow. We've got a sickness." She was quiet long enough that I thought she'd drifted off to sleep. Then,

"The stew made us strong. The food they tried to give us before that- it didn't help. Nothing helped, until the stew. The stew was the best."

I could say nothing to this. She was right, and I knew she was right. I remembered how life and energy had poured into my limbs with every mouthful. So strong...

"Clarissa, we need more of the stew."