Something Translated While Working at a Refujaunt Camp

A Short Piece of Dark Deindustrial Cli-Fi Fiction

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I was new at the refujaunt camp, so I tended to keep my mouth shut, at least with regards to casual conversation. I didn’t want to get kicked out on account of anything I said. My mouth had a way of getting in front of me. That can be a tough thing for a translator, as I’d often want to interject. The way I was raised you had to shout over top of all the other sibs and aunts and cousins if you ever stood a chance of being heard. Funny too, that somewhere along the way I did learn to listen, at least enough to translate. It’s a good skill and kept me out of some real trouble, out of the firing line, and there was no shortage of lines drawn in the sand, and fire on both sides of them, when I was coming up.

I spoke myself three languages, Spanish, Mandarin, and English, but I also knew Sign Language. Not to mention the language of signs. That had come from my conscription, seeing as how I wasn’t fit for much else with my acute muscle pain on account of the Dengue fever I’d had as a kid. It seemed like the mosquitoes followed me north when I left the swamps of Tennessy.

I’d been put in charge of minding after a girl we all knew as Zelzemel. That was the name we gave her. She refused to talk, but knew the rudiments of sign, and I’d been able to coax some of her story from her. She was just one of many orphans. Just one of many who had been separated from her parents by forces outside of her control. She’d gone to sleep in her People’s Army of Missouri issued canvas tent straightaway after the cornbread and pinto beans had been cleaned off her plate. She was an eater, I’ll give her that. Not everyone who ended up in this place was at all healthy. Some had the wasting sickness, no appetite to speak of, anything they put inside their bodies got chucked back up. The medics and nurses thought it was the chemical exposures, depending on where they were from, or some new hatched virus if they couldn’t figure it out otherwise and ways.

I’d grown used to the girl, but I hadn’t signed up to be anyone’s nanny. Yet she did need my services as translator. On the other hand, if she’d just deal with the cards she’d been dealt, and just speak, then things would be different.

I was minding my own business around one of the fires, keeping my fingers warm by clutching a mug of mulligan stew, when a new batch of refujaunts meandered into camp, led over by our chief. They were a raggedy and despondent looking bunch but not many people sought solace with us if they were flush with the clink of coin and on the up-and-up. I figured they must have hopped off that train I heard whistling by not more than an hour ago, and had been drawn in by the light of our fires. One of the new ones was more animated than the rest. She had long wispy blondish hair, on the dishwater dirty side. Her face was full of grit and hard determination.

“This one can’t talk,” Murrie said. “For all that she’s been gesticulating like a mad woman. These others seem to think she’s looking for someone. So come on now, Bobbie. It’s time you earned your keep.”

I scoffed at that last remark even though I knew he was joking. My keep wasn’t much, and my name wasn’t Bobbie, but he called everyone Bobbie, he was always forgetting their names. It wasn’t like my skills got me much more than the daily plate of beans, same as all the rest. There were other perks though, but I can’t get into those here. They are kind of like on a need-to-know basis anyway.

“You got it sir!” I saluted the chief with mock respect and signed for the lady to come sit on down by the fire.
This is the story she unspooled for me, and what a sad tale it was.

Daniela’s Story

My dada cut my tongue out when I was twelve. I’d already lost a lot of my hearing by then, from the way he boxed my ears. My mother was powerless to stop him, as she was half mad, incoherent, from soljuice, and nepenthe when she could get the stuff, which wasn’t all that much, the soljuice was bad enough. I’m sure by that point her brain was cobwebbed and dusted. Because dada was the dealer, that was the only reason she was around. It’s a wonder she ever took a pittance on me, as she wasn’t the only one he kept. I had two other mama’s but they made sure to let me know every chance they had that they weren’t my real mamas.

I’d go out and play and be gone for hours, for as long as I dared. I’m surprised I hadn’t left before I was sixteen when I finally did get the nerve to go. I first met Arnie in the woods behind the houses between our street and Cyclorama Drive. There was an abandoned concrete bridge there that used to connect our streets together, but parts of it came down in the floods and mudslides. It used to cross Valley View Road, which went back to being a creek more or less, with trees of heaven coming up from all over out of the concrete long before I was born. Most of the houses on Massona had rotted and crumbled and that was my playground. There was some other woods there too, on the sides of either hill behind the molded homes that looked like pus sores along the valley. Some of the old trees I liked to talk to and they talked back to me. Old Man Nik the Oak, he used to tell me things. He told me to go, to get my stuff and get the hell out of the flop shop I’d been born into. Besides Old Nik, Arnie must have been my only friend in the world.

One day Arnie and I got to kissing, it was the first time for each of us, and it was something special, there underneath Old Man Nik, the only one who saw us do it. It was after then he brought me his trinket, said he loved me.

His dada was a repo man, often working out on the old highway between Cortland and Syracuse. He’d repo some fine things off any high minded dandy he pleased. One day he brought me a trinket and I weren’t durned if it was some kinda silver, all shiny like an old soul caught in metal.

It was real dumb of me to tell mama. Don’t know why I felt any obligation to her but I did. I’d come home and take care of her, after the soljuice had worn off and her lips were half blue, covered in red spittle. I’d giver her little snorts of the revivver and she’d wake up enough to go into a lull. Then I’d tried to feed her some eggs if we had any or corn mush. Sometimes Arnie would give me some racoon meat, but mama didn’t hardly have any kind of appetite except for the soljuice. Whatever was left my other mas would fight over, if they was in an eating mood, and of course I had to cook for dada, and it wasn’t no lol if his dinner was burned.

Lucky he weren’t home all the time but down at the dog pit, gambling over them dogs, seeing which one would live. He really liked himself a cock fight too. Or when they made those broken soljuice men fight for a shot, he liked that too. There weren’t much of a fight he didn’t like.

Now some of the folk who lived over on Cyclorama said Arnie was a headcase. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but later I knew. I figured it out. He just didn’t think like other people, and it sometimes caught him off guard, as he didn’t know what to say or do. We’d meet down by the bridge as often as we could, and sometimes hunted for crawdads together. They lived in the pools where the asphalt had sunk as the creek took over the abandoned street.

Arnie’s dada gave him lots of goodies, and every once in awhile, he’d get enough to buy me some candy nuts or a little cheese to take home. Then the heat started overtaking our bodies in the summertime when we were thirteen or fourteen. We made ourselves a nest there under the deep copse of honeysuckle, the best smell around. All those kisses had led to other things before, but now they really led to something. I was careful of my moontime and I stole some of this drink my mamas had that was supposed to keep the babes away.
It worked for awhile anyway.

Then my mama had another one of her close calls, almost died before I found her and gave her the revivver.
I’d gone and gotten a candle with some words written on it and oils. It was dedicated to Lady Maria of the Stars. But dada came home and saw my praying with the candle, chanting the prayer just as I’d been told and he blew out the candle and threw it down the hill in our backyard where the rest of the garbage was, and whomped me on the ear over and over again. That was when the rest of the sounds started to disappear. I’m surprised I made it through, but I think Lady Maria was watching over me, if not my mama anymore.

I wasn’t there when she died. I was in the woods again talking to Old Man Nik. I felt bad always pouring out my woes to the Old Man, but he listened better than anyone could, better than even Arnie, who understood me without words. Dada came looking for me, which had never happened before, and he heard me talking to the tree, talking about him, talking about mama, talking about Arnie, and how I was scared because my blood was three weeks late. Talking about what the hell I was gonna do if I was with child.

I never even felt the blow come to my head because I was so wrapped in my own thoughts and mind, and I hadn’t heard him creeping up on me. I woke up at the house, and I was all tied up in a chair, and he was yelling at me for talking to a devil tree. That I was a witch and I’d cursed him and mama. He’d blamed me for his losing streak betting on the dog fights. He was blaming me that his rival Zane had stolen most of his soljuice bidness.

I tried to protest and he said only one way to stop me using my magic was to cut out my tongue, so I could speak no more spells on him or anyone. My own mama was dead in the other room, she’d taken her last drink of the juice, and I hadn’t been around this time to bring he back from the edge of the forever sleep. My other mamas held my mouth open as dada sauntered over with his buck knife. I struggled, but they held open my jaws even as I tried to bite. After the cut, when blood was spilling down my mouth and all over my greasy shirt and skirt, he held it in front of me as he railed, talking about how I’d never talk back to him again, how the devil would never speak through me again, how I would never be able to cast another spell.

I ran down to the lady I bought the candle from and she knew how to cauterize my tongue.

My other mama’s had built a pyre in the backyard and burned mama before I ever got home.

The next day when everyone was partied out and asleep I crept out back down to Old Man Nik. Arnie came along and I showed him, my tongue never to meet his again, but I still had my lips. He told me he was going to take me away. His own father had been missing for a few weeks, probably killed on one of his repos.

That night we left for the coast where Arnie thought he could make a living as a salvage trawler. We left right then and right there, it weren’t as if we had anyone to tell, or any stuff to gather. It was a long long walk but we had some luck on us then. That’s when we met Sister Argyle of the Cord Cutters Guild and she started teaching me the sign language. She came around quite often to check on us in the encampments surrounding Hartford, who were something of her flock, and she made a point to visit us. It was Argyle who delivered Anzelma.

I can proves she’s mine. We have a birthmark in the same place, on the left shoulder. It’s part of why my father thought I was a witch, having the mark of Cain and all on me since birth.

Arnie brought in enough to keep us mostly fed. It was better than the life I’d had growing up, and we were happy, but it was hard. Then he got cut on something, wading out in the tidewaters scrappoing, pulling in whatever he could find. It was a bad cut in his leg, and he kept it hidden from me, not wanting me to know. Two days later it festered and he was feverish, and something was in his blood. I fetched Sister Argyle and she tried with all she had, but the fever and infection spread and he burned himself out. She seen something like it before, a mixture of all the chemicals and bio contaminants pulsing together in the hot soup of the intertidal zones when the summer heat got to a rolling boil.
​
I didn’t know what to do after Arnie was gone. He’d always been my protector, my provider. Argyle helped Arnie transition, helped me build a pyre I got to light myself this time. She knew my plight and said their might be a place for me working for the Cord Cutters. I took her up on it, and stayed there for a time.

When Sister Argyle was called to go to a nearby town to help with an outbreak, I went with her. Two nights into the trip the three of us were camped in a large parking lot at one of the empty strips of stores. The sound of motors woke me up and set me on a path to disturbance. I couldn’t hear them all that well, as most of my hearing was gone by then from the repeated slaps to the head, but I could feel the reh-reh-reh of motorbikes outside, vibrating through the dirt and land.

Anzelma was only five at the time. As they got closer we were running and hiding, inside the abandoned store. I hid her under some rags, and put one of the fallen pieces of moldy drywall over her and then I let myself have them, hoping she wouldn’t cry and give herself away.

I don’t even want to tell you what happened when Jimbo and his crew got a hold of us. Eventually Sister Argyle and I did get away from them, and we spent our time searching for Anzelma to no avail, and I worked with her and learned, and one day she got sick with a fever that never came down when we was tending down by the intertidal. I didn’t know if I had what it took to be a Cord Cutter, so I lit another candle to Maria of the Stars and started combing the land again looking for Anzelma. In between then and now all kinds of different things happened. I was traveling with these here refujaunts, tending to them as best I could with the weeds I was shown, and we all hopped a train.

.:. .:. .:.
When she was done telling her story, I wen’t over to Zezel’s tent, rather Anzelma’s I should say. I gently woke her up and bid her to come out to the fire. She was hesitant and I understood her reluctance. The fire was usually no hang out spot for kids. It was the place where old fogies recounted their own youthful foibles. There weren’t many others her age at all in the refujaunt camp. Those who were less than teeners had a tight leash kept on them, if they had any kind of parental authority over them at all. There were plenty of kids who had run away from a mom or a dad high on soljuice. My own authority over this child was about to end.
​
When she finally saw I wasn’t going to leave her alone and came to the fire, and she saw her mother there, and her mother saw her daughter, and they were reunited, no further words needed to be spoken or signed. Everything they had to say to each other was done in quietude, and for that, no one needed any translation.

.:. .:. .:.

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