There are forty-nine of them in the village. She lives in a little one-story pastel-blue house built from wood and scrap metal with a greenhouse attached. She has a son: three years old, busy, hot, eager to test everything, learn everything, put everything in his mouth. Inside her grows a second child, not much more than a flicker, a little intelligence unfurling.
It’s August, the sun has not set since mid-April, and tonight most everyone else is out gathering bunchberries. In the distance, at the bottom of the town, past the docks, the ocean glimmers. On the very clearest days, at the farthest edge of the horizon, she can see a low lump that is the rocky island eight miles away where the Argos rusts beneath the weather.
She works in her container garden behind the house while the boy sits among the stones. In his lap is a misshapen book made from the scraps of empty Nourish powder sacks. He pages through it back to front, past Aethon Means Blazing, past The Wizard Inside the Whale, his mouth moving silently as he goes.
The summer twilight is warm and the leaves of the lettuces in her containers flutter and the sky turns lavender—as close to dark as it will get—as she moves back and forth with a watering can. Broccoli. Kale. Zucchini. A Bosnian pine as tall as her thigh.
Παράδεισο, parádeisos, paradise: it means garden.
When she is done she sits in a weather-faded nylon chair and the boy brings the book over and pulls her pant leg. His eyelids grow heavy and he fights to hold them up. He says, “You tell the story?”
She looks at him, his round cheeks, his eyelashes, his damp hair. Does the boy sense, already, the precarity of all this?
She hauls him into her lap. “Go to the first page and do it properly.” She waits for him to turn the book right side up. He sucks his lower lip, then pulls back the cover. She runs her finger under the lines.
“I,” she says, “am Aethon, a simple shepherd from Arkadia, and—”
“No, no,” says the boy. He bats the page with his hand. “The voice, with the voice.”
She blinks; the planet rotates another degree; beyond her little garden, below the town, a wind hazes the tops of the swells. The boy raises an index finger and pokes the page. Konstance clears her throat.
“And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you’ll never believe a word of it, and yet”—she taps the end of his nose—“it’s true.”