Page 77 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

I sit in my grandmother's kitchen and do not say anything at all.

"There she is," Vessik says, to the ceiling. "Right on time."

"What."

"You went quiet." She gets up for the bread. "You always go quiet. That's the same trick, boy. That's the exact same trick."

She makes me eat again. She makes me sleep four hours in the room I slept in as a child, on a bed that is nine inches too short and has been my entire life.

I come down at dusk and she is at the table with the seed catalogue and she does not look up.

"Is she still up there?" she says.

"I have no way to find out."

"That's not what I asked."

I stand in the doorway of my grandmother's kitchen with my hands hanging.

"Yes," I say. "She is still up there."

"Mm," says Vessik, and turns a page.

CHAPTER 29

JUNIE

DAY 18

Fire on the second strike.

That is the event, entire, and it takes four seconds and there is nobody here to say anything about it, so I say it myself, out loud, crouched in the ash with a handful of shaved cedar going in my hand.

"Second strike."

On Day 4 it took me two minutes and forty seconds and eleven cuts of television. Today it takes two strikes and I have the pot on before the light is properly up, and here is the thing about that: nothing dramatic happened in between. I did not have a breakthrough. Nobody taught me. I have simply done it forty times and about six of those times I did it slightly less stupidly, and the stupidity has been leaking out of it a drop at a time for two weeks and today it went on the second strike.

That is what competence turns out to be. It is the least glamorous substance in the world. You cannot cut it into anything. There is no music you could put under it.

I do the water. Twelve minutes at a rolling boil for the day's four liters, which costs me an hour and a quarter of wood, which I now have because I have been two days ahead of the weather since Tuesday.

I check the deadfall line. Four sets. Three empty, and on the fourth, under the slab, a vole.

I stand there in the salal for a while looking at a dead vole.

Fifteen days ago I would have made a joke about it. There is nobody to make it to, so I take it back to camp, and I dress it, badly, with a knife I have finally gotten sharp, and it is the first animal I have ever cleaned in my life and I do a poor job and I do the job, and there are about two ounces of meat on it, and I put them in the pot with the last of the oat thing.

Nobody films any of this except an alder tree.

Coby and Stitch come up the ridge trail at noon.

Coby has a phone gimbal and a face on. He gets about twelve feet into the clearing before whatever he had prepared falls out of him, because he is looking at the tarp, which is drum tight over a Spanish windlass, and the woodpile, which is a day and a half deep, and the fire, which is banked in the shape somebody taught me.

"Oh," he says.

"Hi, Coby."

"You're..." He turns the gimbal down without appearing to attend to it at all. "Junie, we came up to, honestly, we came up because we figured you'd be, whatever."