Hearsay Horizons

My name is Kemisi, but everyone calls me Sheba. They always have. When my parents called me it, it was a child nickname. They were glad to have found me and glad to have raised me and praised the gods by naming me after one, but they believed to use a god’s name so lightly, even if it was messed around, was bad luck. So they called me Sheba, a ritual offering to the gods. I thought it was because, again, they were happy to have found me. Only later, when I went among the other girls, did I realize that it also meant an offering of meat. Like something left for the wolves.                   This was something the girls in the village were very quick to point out to me. Eventually calling me a meat roll or dog food lost its novelty, but it was always something that could be quickly taken up when a village boy spent too long talking with me, or when a traveler commented on my skin. They were always commenting on my skin.     ...

No one survives alone in the polar wastes. Those who walk alone almost always do so with the limp of imminent death. They go, with steady gazes and straight backs, to give themselves to the animals and wilderness, lest the tundra devour the rest of the tribe. It's no true sacrifice, this departure, but the last act the dying do for a tribe that has helped them live this long. They stagger through frozen lands that will not accept footsteps, or cast off on floes whose ripples fade with slowing breaths.                Exiles scurry, or run, or trudge with anger warming their limbs, but they too give their lives to the cold and dark in unwilling sacrifice for the tribe. Thus do murderers and thieves make up for lives lost or ruined.                 She does not limp or march; she walks the frozen wilds with no one but herself, and yet no thought of death--at least, not her own. She bares her head to the fri...