cabinets in the kitchen of the new homestead until he found a large glass jar. Pella and Raymond and David sat and waited, still as much strangers in this house as the other children. The fish potato sat waiting on the kitchen table, quivering slightly when someone walked nearby.
Bruce filled the half-gallon jar two-thirds full with water from the well tap at the sink, put it on the table, and sawed a small hole in the top of the potato with his pocketknife. Pinching the rupture shut, he tilted the potato up, then opened his fingers and squeezed the contents into the water like a baker writing with a bag of frosting.
Seven little bodies flooded out into the jar. Sardines with legs. They drifted toward the bottom, but before the first bumped down it was beginning to squirm andthrash. Within a minute they had untangled and begun swimming around inside the jar in frantic darting movements, and the amniotic gunk that floated away from their bodies dissolved and made the water gray. Bruce took it to the sink, and covering the top with his fingers poured off most of the floating sediment, then refilled the jar from the tap with fresh water.
“There.”
Even Martha, who had obviously seen this before and had been clamoring to have it demonstrated to others, crowded closer. And Morris forsook his distance to have a look. Everyone peered in at the swimmers. The legs of the fish groped back and down, like swimmers searching for the bottom in the deep end of a pool, and though their tiny blistered eyes were still shut they avoided collisions with one another or the walls of the jar.
“You can feed them whatever,” said Bruce. “They don’t grow or anything, you can’t train them. They’ll die, eventually.”
“That guy makes soup out of them?” said Raymond, incredulous. “That makes me want to retch.”
“It’s pretty rotten soup,” agreed Bruce. “But they make pretty bad pets. Efram says they’re not real animals, just some kind of screwed-up Archbuilder food thing. All the potatoes are just stuff the Archbuilders wanted to have big supplies of around to eat.”
“Why are they alive, then?” said Raymond, his forehead screwed up. It was an urgent question.
“Maybe the way you can wake them up if you put them in water is just some weird mistake.”
“The Archbuilders eat them,” suggested Pella. She understood Raymond’s objection. She too wanted the confusing and horrible fish to have a clear place in the order of things.
“Nope,” said Bruce. “The Archbuilders ignore them. When they dig them up they throw them out in the sun to rot. That’s why Efram says that it’s a mistake.”
“Only E. G. Wa eats it,” said Martha, wrinkling her mouth and nose. “In soup.”
“Dad eats the soup sometimes,” said Bruce. “Ben Barth eats it too, when Efram’s not around. E. G. Wa’s always handing it out when you go in there—probably
all
the grown-ups eat it sometimes.”
The assertion went unanswered.
“Speaking of
not eating,
” said Morris Grant to Pella, “Martha told me you’re not eating the pills.” The words could have been neutral, but his voice rose tauntingly at the end.
“Mind your own business,” said Bruce.
“Martha told me.”
“Then Martha should mind
her
own business.”
“Efram isn’t going to like it,” said Morris.
“Efram isn’t their dad.”
Pella felt she should speak up, not leave it to Bruce, but she didn’t know what she would be defending, what it meant to the people here that her family wasn’t taking the little blue pills. It was her battle, inherited from Caitlin, but she didn’t understand it.
David sat with his chin resting on his crossed arms, staring at the swimming figures inches away.
Morris went to the door. “I’m telling Efram.”
“Efram isn’t even
around
,” said Bruce. “You can go tell anybody you want. Tell some old Archbuilder. Get out of here.” He moved suddenly at Morris, stomping on the floor threateningly. Morris