Chapter 127: Day 126

Day 126,

I woke up this morning to the sound of Maiko moving around the house.  I’m a little unsettled that it wasn’t to the sound of her entering the house.  Actually, I’m unsettled by the fact that it wasn’t so much that the sound woke me up as I happened to wake up and that was the first thing I heard.  Then again, I’ve apparently slept through having my hair tied to a bedpost, so there’s that.

She’d seen my boots by the door so she knew I was here and I wasn’t witness to any more surprised cat scramble jumping when I entered the living room and announced my presence.  

Wiping the last of the sleep from my eyes, I apologized for everything being out of place from where she left it.  Said the nature sprite was having its fun with me last night.

She didn’t know what I was talking about.  Everything looked right to her.

Doing my own double-take of the room I realized she was right.  All was as it had been before a night of objects being rearranged and hidden any time they left my sight.  It seems I hadn’t been giving the sprite enough credit for its dedication to keep its games from involving others.  Also some rather effective gaslighting on its part, which would be its own kind of frightening if I didn’t have proof of its existence from the mess it made of the yard in its encounter with the other sprite (or whatever that was) and the times it set off the bracelets’ alert.

Preparing breakfast for myself I called over my shoulder and asked how she’d slept last night.

Well enough.

It felt rude to add in the question of where aloud, so I let it hang in the air, implied, unasked, gaining weight in the silence until it dropped, unanswered.

She asked how I slept.

Well enough, once the sprite got bored and stopped going bump in the night.

Hesitation as I moved to return the components from which I’d derived my breakfast to the pantry.

I asked Maiko if she wanted any before I sat down.

She looked up from the book she’d had open on top of her near-supine position on the couch.  She’d already eaten.

A pause.

A word of thanks for the offer.

From there our morning and early afternoon continued much as it had last week, save for me skipping the trip out to tell James I wouldn’t be joining him.  That is to say, giving Maiko a more personalized, one-on-one tutoring version of the things I’ve been teaching the children the past week.  Better prepared this time around I even brought a spare pair of tablets so she could get some writing practice in along with a couple of particular books Pat had suggested for different age groups to give her some variety to read from and perhaps not feel quite as much like she was stuck on a child’s level.  Among the story books, there’s usually not a whole lot of variation in reading level, geared towards being references for spoken storytelling as they are, but some good archivist somewhere in the past made a point of penning a collection of works meant to be child-accessible, most likely for these teaching purposes.

We’re taking a break right now.  Ostensibly anyway.  Maiko’s working away at the tablet rather furiously over there doing something.  Once the rain lets up we’ll take another trip out to the stream and spring for laundry and her unique brand of fishing.

 

On our way out to the spring I asked Maiko what she’d been working on so intently with the tablet.

She made a noise cousin to a squeak but to low-pitched to properly qualify and an expression that I’ve come to read as embarrassment (if she’s actually capable of blushing I fear I’ve yet to be able to discern the difference in shade of red).

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A pause of one deciding whether or not to answer a question.

She confided that she was trying to draw.  But anything just came out looking like a mess of jagged lines and illegible squiggles.  Eventually she’d given up and tried just drawing basic shapes to get a better handle of it.  That went better but she wound up just rotating the tablet instead of trying to make strokes at different angles.

That’s one way to do it I suppose.

And she still couldn’t get circles right.

No one ever gets circles right.  But yeah, I commiserated in the lament that the tablets really aren’t suited for drawing.

A break in the conversation as we broke through a patch of undergrowth that had gotten full of itself after growth from the rains and dared extend itself over our path.

I commented that I didn’t realize she had an interest in drawing.

She said it wasn’t serious and she wasn’t any good.  Just scribbled with a stick or a finger in the dirt or sand sometimes.  Insisted that she just wanted to see what all she could do with the tablet.

I offered to bring back some paper the next time I was home.

She said I didn’t need to do that.

I think I might want to though.

Once again we split up at the water.  Me for laundry, her for fish.  Another pleasant stretch of privacy with nature.

On the way back I brought up the idea of inviting the others over for dinner or some such next market day.  Maiko was more receptive to the idea than I expected.  No less so even after making that face again when I mentioned that Lin would probably have to spend the night.  Vernon too I guess.  Cass I can probably walk home after dinner if she doesn’t insist on going on her own.

We got into other planning bits from there.  I’ll probably wind up spending the night before and part of the morning in the Village so I can pick up some extra ingredients at the market.  There’s less of a selection during the rainy season (less crowded in general really) but there’s still enough I can find something.  I’ve got a bit saved up now, especially since some of the parents will give me a bit of coin when they drop off their kids, or else send it with them.  I guess they’ve figured they can’t all pay me in food at the same time or else I couldn’t eat it all.  And now it’s got me thinking of the economic weirdness of those with children currently in school directly paying the teacher.  Then again, it’s unevenly distributed enough that I get the impression that it might be more a situation of whomever happens to have enough to spare on them at the time chipping in to cover for everyone.

Back on topic though, for her part, Maiko said she could catch extra to cover everyone but asked if I could leave my basket here to help carry it back to the house.  I didn’t see any reason why not.

Given the ponderously slow pace our exchanges tend to take, that planning made up our conversation for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, breaking to prepare dinner and get in a little more literacy exercise but picking up after the breaks as if we’d not changed topics in the interim.

I’ll be getting to bed soon.  Already told Maiko that I’m planning on heading back into the Village early tomorrow morning (by my standards anyway) to take care of things there.  I’ll probably try to track down Lin and Vernon while I’m there and extend the invitation (or I guess “will” since the bracelets rather remove the “try” part from tracking one another down).  Next best thing to phones.

 

Why did it take me several minutes to come up with the word “phones” at the end there?  I almost didn’t notice at the time, but now I can’t get to sleep for thinking about it.  Is it a weird translation issue with this world and language not having a properly analogous word or is my memory going?  Come to think of it, I haven’t added much to that otherworld-memory reference secondary journal in a while.  At first I just figured it was because keeping up with two journals at once, was too much to do on top of the archivist work, but now I’m wondering if it’s because I’ve just stopped thinking about those things so much.  On the one hand, I suppose a degree of that is to be expected as I settle in here and they become a smaller proportion of my total memories.  On the other hand, it’s unsettling to think about other possible implications.

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