The Binding

Ruby Roth

Bound

She will come to think of her youth as a time when she believed that just the right question would unlock the secrets of her past. So many mysteries, so many questions. They hang unanswered, links in an unseen chain growing heavier with time.

On this dark morning in the May of her twenty-third year, the only question Ruby is asking is will she make it to work on time?

A clock sits on a shelf in the boxy room of the run-down motor lodge where she lives with her grandmother. It ticks. The numbers glare.

Ruby struggles into the rough fabric of her hatchery boilersuit and drags the long brass zipper to her throat. Like the clock, like her conscript ID, like the boilersuit, everything is pale blue. Conscript-class blue. CC blue.

It’s a color she knows used to be that of the sky.

A moan comes from the pile of old quilts hiding her grandmother’s wisp of a frame.

The numbers on the clock flip. Late, late, you’re going to be late.

Ruby steps quick and soft across the fraying floor of the second-story flat. Another groan rises from the quilts. The blankets lift and rustle; the squares of faded patchwork shift and slip to one side. It’s a quilt her gram sewed a long time ago. A shock of urgency shoots through Ruby; she’s been waiting, waiting for her grandmother to rally, to be willing to answer a few more questions. But what if it’s too late? What if she’ll never learn the origins of the piecemeal squares? Is that fading pea-green bit of wool maybe from a coat that belonged to her long-dead father? And what about the single square, the only one of its kind, the one where if you pry open the stitched seam spreads a gash of deep pink? Ruby’s always been sure it once made up a section of skirt or dress or blouse from the mother of whom no one will speak.

Her gram’s moan slides up to a wail. It’s a hammer inside Ruby’s head. Pounding, pounding, hard and true down to the lowest reaches of her gut. And just for a moment, Ruby forgets. Just for a moment, she lets down her guard, lets her grandmother’s pain reach out and bind her to the agony in the old woman’s body.

Gram’s voice comes wobbly and frail, but still somehow cuts through the air like the slash of a willow switch. “You’re doing it. Ain’t ya, girl?”

Ruby drops her hands to her sides. Tries to rip away from the connection with will alone.

“Using the binding, even after all these years. Girl, ain’t I done enough to teach ya right?”

Fast comes the memory of the willow switch on Ruby’s legs, her back, her bottom, each blow landing like punctuation, Gram’s words cutting deep: “The binding is bad. The binding hurts everyone around you.” Standing here now, a grown woman working to keep what’s left of her family together, Ruby feels like a child again—as if Gram is rising from her pallet, trying one more time to beat the binding from the girl she got stuck raising.

A scream sticks in the back of Ruby’s throat. She wants to shout at the old woman, I do try! I do. The last thing I want is to feel the pain of others. Instead, she bites her tongue until blood tips it with the distraction of copper and iron.

“Hold on, Gram, I’m getting your pills.” Her voice is flat, anger deflating her of compassion. But another woman’s words slip into the compressed space:

Itis pain, Ruby. It is pain which sharpens your grandmother’s burden. Your own burden, dear one, is to forgive her.

Sister O: the wise woman from the West, as Ruby thinks of her. As old as Gram, but you’d never know it. Now, the woman’s advice fills her.

She grabs the pill bottle and a chipped mug, then goes to the table holding their big filtering unit. Suddenly, her empty stomach spasms. Did she forget to take the unit to the community spigot last night? Her memory of the evening before is blank. But a trickle of clear water threads into the cup, a burp of air chugs inside the chamber, and her gut unknots. As the mug fills, she rests a hand on the polished whorls of the table’s tightly joined boards. It’s perfect, this thing, except one small square bit, about midway, where the seams holding the pieces have come apart, just a little. Ruby often finds herself drawn to this one broken piece. It entrances her, this proof of imperfection.

“Hurry now, I need my pills. Need ‘em bad.” Gram tries to rise to a sit, her yellowed eyes wide with the effort. It’s her liver, the McComb Corp docs told Ruby. Doomed, they said, from an early age—from growing up in the years before, back when everyone thought chlorine tabs and boiling was enough.

“I have them. Hold on, Gram.” Kneeling beside her, Ruby tips the bottle. The last two pills tumble from the upturned container. A wave of fatigue crashes over her; she’ll have to stop in town after her long shift. But she takes a deep breath and reminds herself that going to the Outreach for medicine will at least mean seeing Sister O, the Elohi monastic who, in some ways, has been another grandmother to her.

She’s torn from this moment of pleasure by the sound of an engine outside the old motor lodge. Lifting the corner of the ragged curtain over their single window, Ruby sees a dark pickup crouching there. A waft of exhaust trails up in the dim light of the coming dawn.

Her grandmother shuffles and groans beneath the quilts. She mutters, to herself perhaps, but Ruby cringes at the words. “Damn girl. Damn curse. Stop. Don’t let it get you.”

There’s a clack from the wall. Numbers flip. Late. Late. Late.

Before Gram grew sick, Ruby was never late, not once in the six years since she began fulfilling her life-contract. But now it’s the reason their cupboards are almost empty. It’s the reason her stomach almost constantly growls in hungry protest. A second violation in less than a month might mean something worse than withheld food vouchers.

Gritting her teeth, she finishes settling Gram for the day. Just as Ruby’s ready to leave, a whimper slips up through the floorboards from the flat below. Her insides wilt. A sadness, for the cry comes from the young boy below, who’s as close to a little brother as can be. He’s dreaming something, something bad.

Pulse racing, she grabs her satchelpack and hurries from the flat. The pickup is gone, but a sense of something being not as it should hangs dense in the morning air.

At the lower level, Ruby’s heart tugs her to a halt. Just a few doors away are Harold Sr. and his boy, Little Harold. Every part of her yearns to check in, to hold the growing boy to her, to do something to keep him safe. But then above, a door slams. Ruby jumps, slings the satchelpack over her shoulder, and runs for the omnibus stop.

She’s rounding the last corner of the quarter-mile stretch between the old motor lodge and the stop, her lungs burning, legs aching, when she sees twin brake lights through the carpet of fog. For a moment, her body floods with relief. The omnibus is still there. She’s going to make it.

But then the lights dim and her only chance of getting to her shift on time, of avoiding the punishment that will come, accelerates away.

Colin Tate

For a moment, Ruby is frozen in place. She feels nothing, but there’s no comfort in that. Her heart begs her to turn around. To go back and wash Gram’s quilts, tend the bedsores on the woman’s bony hips, even, maybe, spend time with Little Harold. The price of not showing up would tower over simply being late. She’d risk being turned out, of being set adrift, of being made worse than the lowest caste in the country. No, moving away from those she loves is her only real choice. Denton’s three miles away, and the hatchery another two north of that. If she hurries, there’s a chance she might make it to the transfer station in time for a different omnibus to the hatchery: still late, but at least not absent. So, she sets out, her footfalls sounding oddly soft in the dark morning, like it’s just a casual stroll.

A touch flutters gentle ghost fingers on her shoulder. She turns, squints into the dark. But there’s nothing there. For a moment, she thinks she hears a whisper, the voice soft and sweet and sounding a bit like Little Harold. Like HJ, as he’s so recently insisted she call him.

Something’s happening to the boy, something beyond just growing up. Ruby’s felt a change in him and the growing anxiety of Harold Sr. Just two nights ago she was out back of the motor lodge, pushing their rubbish into the big burn pit, when Harold Sr. joined her.

After a moment, with Ruby moving more slowly, certain the older man was trying to muster the courage to speak, he said, “Ruby, there’s somethin’ I been meaning to tell you.” Harold was using a long rake, the tines worn almost to nubs, to push some burnt ends of waste further into the thick mess. A wave of smoke plumed up at the disturbance. Ruby was glad for the distraction, relieved for an excuse to not meet the man’s eyes.

“It’s ‘bout my boy,” he said. Ruby’s heart seemed to skip a beat. Here in the Atlantic States, bad things happen to good people, little kids especially. Getting older didn’t mean one got used to it.

“He all right, Harold?”

“Oh sure, he fine, body-wise. Boy’s growing and starting to scare me with how soon he’s gonna be, well, you know.” He cleared his throat. “Of working age.” Harold Sr. was a plainspoken man, but the last three words were drowned with dark meaning.

“You see, here’s what I think. He been dreaming a lot. Not just the usual though. A whole nother thing. Maybe akin to what you got? You know, that thing you do?”

Ruby thinks of this now as she’s running toward a place she doesn’t want to be. Harold Jr.’s having dreams. Dreams that sometimes come true, so his daddy says. Then another thought comes to her, a way to make something positive of this day: Maybe Sister O at the Outreach will know what Ruby should do. Ruby can help both HJ and his daddy. It’s been something she’s been trying to do since even before Little Harold was born, but guilt, she’s learned, is about as hard to lose as the micro-ID in her arm.

Twenty minutes later, the eastern sky is a smutty yellow, the rising sun doing its best to burn through the ever-present wall of haze sitting over the Eastern Shore. Sweat stings her eyes as she jogs past another old motor lodge, a cousin of the one they live in, with a crumbling brick façade and peeling white columns at the corners. Just past that sits a rambling structure that used to be a self-storage facility. Like the motor lodges, all are now McComb Corp conscript housing.

She’s over halfway to Denton, panting and coated in sticky sweat, when from behind comes the low rumble of an engine. Her mind jumps to the pickup from earlier, and her heart leaps to her throat. Her steps turn stiff as she fights the urge to run or dive behind a curtain of kudzu draping some forgotten relic from before.

The growling grind of tires against tarmac slows to a crawl behind her. A knot bunches in her throat and it’s hard to breathe, but she doesn’t turn. The engine thrums. The car pulls alongside. The knot loosens a little when she sees it’s not the pickup from earlier, but the fact it’s a McComb Corp micromulti isn’t good either.

The window slithers down, and Ruby’s stomach sinks. Colin Tate, the hatchery assistant manager, sits there in a suit, silvery gray with the kind of sheen that looks like corp class, but the lime-green ID badge of a free-worker hangs around his neck. One arm rests on the steering wheel, the other on the edge of the door. He smiles, flashing polished white teeth, too evenly spaced, out of place in the gray morning. Out of place grinning at her.

“Ruby Roth. Looks like you’re about to get lucky.”

She forces herself to nod and keeps walking.

“What I’m saying is get in. I’ll give you a lift. Don’t want you being late again, now do we?”

Ruby swallows. A grimy, slippery fist grabs at her insides, gives them a twist.

“Come on. Don’t make me give you an order.” He laughs the kind of laugh that doesn’t invite a smile. “Get in.”