"Water Carries It All Away"

 

[Making up for yesterday's missed story...]

Mae sat on the edge of her bed as lightly as her weight would allow and began loosening and peeling back the fraying leathers she wore over her arms, as carefully as if she were peeling away a layer of skin. The practician's orders sang in her mind like a hymn of absolution: "The healing pools are yours tonight, girl. Use the mineral salts."

Her skin exposed, Mae started to study the cuts that the practician had rubbed clean, the joints that she had shifted and worked as close as possible back to normal. "Got you good today, didn't they?" the practician had said to Mae, not needing to hear the answer. "Well, go, get yourself changed, and go sit in the water, then. Water carries away all that pain."

It was a saying in these green hills--water carries it all away--yet as Mae approached one of the pools and began to scoop salt from a nearby barrel into the water, she found herself angry at the practician for offering it. She was divided; her body ached for relief and responded to the hot water with what felt to Mae like its own wave, a wave of release; yet her mind wanted to hold on to the image of each wound that marked her, to examine it like a map, so that she would never again lose her way on the practice field. Sinking into the pool up to her chin, Mae turned so that she could see the barrel of salt. She thought about what she knew of the way that rocks and minerals formed: layers of earthen material, becoming hard under thousands of years of pressure. Inside, she willed herself to turn to stone. Water carries it all away, she told herself, but rock remembers.

"The Pen and the Sword"

 

Before the exam, two students ran out to the student commons to get writing utensils.

The first put her quarters into the machine and received a thin, black ballpoint pen, as plain as could be.

The second inserted her quarters and was given a sword, short but well balanced, with a sturdy silver hilt and a blade that gleamed like a pearl.

The two looked at each other.

"You know, you're still probably going to do better on the test," said the second student to the first.

"I guess," the first said with a frown, "but then there's that whole difference between what you do in school on your tests versus what you do in the real world, and in that case...." 

She fumbled through her coat pocket in search of two more quarters.