The player behind Magda sent me this as her contribution to the 15 August holiday downtime. It’s posted with her permission (and with the award of some delicious XP).
For context, Magda and her Cook specialty have taken over management of Ponikla’s communal cooking arrangements. Her normal crew is three of the village’s elderly ladies and one of the rescued teenagers from the railyard. They’re doing this for her own good…
Magda stands outside the door of the hostel’s kitchen. Her kitchen. Which is currently being blockaded by two less-than-imposing figures. Tamara’s in the middle of a growth spurt; her spindly elbows jut out as she crosses her arms. Old Antonina’s eyes glint sternly behind her scratched glasses.
“I need to start the bread,” Magda says, confused.
“No, you don’t,” Antonina says. “It’s a rest day. Go rest.”
“It’s a feast day. We need to—”
Antonina waves a gnarled hand to silence her. “The last rest day was two weeks ago, and you spent it in here, cooking. If you’re not out scouting or harvesting, you’re in here stirring the soup. You need a day off. We’ll handle everything.”
Magda looks past Antonina for support, but comes up empty. Kazimiera’s wrinkles deepen as she grins and nods decisively. Over by the stove, Josefa glances toward Magda and flips one hand. Off with you, girl.
“If you’re sure…” Magda says.
The door closes in her face, firmly but not unkindly.
Magda looks around the tiny courtyard. Rest? She walks to the gate and stands there for a moment, trying to think of something to do that wouldn’t involve work. Maybe just…go for a walk? She circles around to the hostel’s front door, climbing the stairs to her cubby of a room. When she comes out, she’s got a small pack on her back.
She negotiates at the kitchen door briefly. They still won’t let her in, but Josefa approvingly provides a picnic packet, along with a canteen of water. Magda tucks them into her pack and sets off, hiking northwest through the trees.
Soon enough, she reaches the river and walks upstream until she finds a large, spreading oak. Feeling odd, she climbs up among the branches. She hasn’t climbed a tree since she was a child, but it’s here, and she’s here, and there’s a perfect perch on a large branch not too high up. She settles herself with her back to the trunk, with her pack in front of her.
The river ripples placidly. A warm, gentle wind caresses the long grass on the riverbank. Clouds drift across the sky.
It’s so lovely, so serene, it makes Magda’s chest hurt. A tear drips down one cheek, then the other. She holds herself taut for a moment, then gives up. There’s no one here to see or care. She curls around her backpack and sobs.
It shouldn’t be so beautiful here. How could anything dare to be so peaceful in a world gone utterly insane? In another time, she’d have wanted to share this view with someone, but everyone from before is gone, either dead or lost. At Christmas five years ago, her grandparents’ farm had been a chaotic, jubilant mass, at least fifty people, counting herself and her siblings, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins…not to mention the babies and the people who weren’t family but might as well have been.
Maybe some of them are still alive, somewhere.
She can’t remember the last time she cried like this, huge, racking, coughing sobs, until her throat hurts and salt water runs down her arms. Finally, the ache in her chest eases, and she raises her head, sniffling.
The river burbles, wind riffles the grass, and the clouds float on. Nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
She opens her pack and pulls out the canteen with quivering hands. After all that foolishness, she’s probably dehydrated. She takes a few careful sips, then hangs the canteen strap off a branch. Josefa’s packet proves to contain a few strips of dried meat, two wheat rolls, a little ceramic tub of fresh cheese, and another of plum jam. A bundle of cloth secured with twine holds what must be the last of the fresh cherries. Despite herself, she smiles through her tears at the kindness.
She remembers buying cherries in a grocery store. Just a little treat. She hadn’t realized then what an unimaginable luxury it truly was.
So much is gone, and wrong, and strange, and not what it was. There was before, and now there is after.
She takes another sip from the canteen and leans her aching head against the warm trunk behind her. She’s tried very hard, up to now, not to think about either of the two worlds. There was simply work to be done, and she did it.
Why? Why does she keep trying? She’s never thought of herself as a survivor. The people who could make it in this new world are people like…like Minka, tough and fearless and capable. Or like Red, whose skills are welcomed and valued anywhere he goes.
The murky river swirls below her. She snaps off a dry twig and lobs it toward the water. It lands without a splash and disappears.
If she never returned to the village, would it matter?
The wind picks up, hissing through the oak leaves, and a branch taps sharply against her leg. She looks down just as the carpet of leaves below rises up, dancing across the ground. The way they spin…she shuts her eyes tightly and clutches the sturdiest branch, holding on against a sudden surge of dizziness.
The wind dies down again. She doesn’t move. Scenes play themselves on the insides of her eyelids: Zenobia and Red, asking Josefa where Magda had gone, why she hadn’t come back. A search party, Leks and Minka and young Miko. Tamara begging to come along to help. Antonina holding her rosary in both hands, a stricken look on her weathered face.
No. She can’t do that to them.
Her friends would put themselves in danger, roaming around to look for her. She can’t tell herself it wouldn’t happen that way. It would.
She matters to them.
They matter to her.
The wind breathes another sigh, ruffling her hair and drying the tears on her cheeks. She opens her eyes and slowly relaxes back against the sturdy trunk.
Antonina can run the kitchen if needed, but she’s not able to climb a cherry tree or shoulder a rifle. Tamara is nigh-ungovernable, with her teenage overconfidence, but she listens to Magda. And what would the others have done in that last fight with the ZOMO if Magda hadn’t turned the BTR’s gunner into barszcz before he could fire at them?
Maybe she’s not ready to think about before or after. But she doesn’t have to. There’s just now.
She pulls a cherry out of the tiny sack and pops it into her mouth, eating around the pit. She’ll save the pits in the sack and bring them back home. Maybe there will be a good place in the village to plant them.