The Marrow Thieves

could hear RiRi laughing and the rhythmic thump of bedsprings as someone jumped.

As it turns out, every dream Minerva had ever dreamed was in the language. It was her gift, her secret, her plan. She’d collected the dreams like bright beads on a string of nights that wound around her each day, every day until this one.
The wires sparked, the probes malfunctioned.

Minerva was feeding her new grandson when the Recruiters busted into her home. They took the baby, raped her, and left her for dead.

Minerva was dark, round, and tiny like a tree stump. She kept her long grey hair in two braids like a little girl with a flowered kerchief tied over her head and under her round chin. She had old-timey ways, but you couldn’t get much from her, either. She didn’t talk, and when she did it was in bursts accompanied by laughter and maybe a scream or two. Mostly she watched … everything: us kids playing in the river, the way the trees tilted to the north towards what was left of the natural landscape beyond the clear-cuts stripped of topsoil. She watched the birds on their perpetual migration to anywhere, the fire at end of day, and the way we clapped each other’s backs when trading off on the traplines.

face, making prayers out of ashes and smoke. Real old-timey, that Minerva.

Minerva made her hands into shallow cups and pulled the air over her head and

RiRi had been just a baby when I’d joined the camp, newly walking and bucket trained. For some reason she quickly grew attached to me. Miig thought I must have reminded her of someone from her original family. Whatever the reason, I often had a chubby shadow throughout my day.

“How do they get in there?” RiRi, now seven, was always curious and not shy with her questions.

Then there was RiRi, who came from a Metis community close to where my father had said ours used to be, who was old enough to piss in the bush and swear when we played Red Ass on abandoned brick walls, but who was still a child.

RiRi made the face she pulled out when she wanted something, like an extra piece of camp bread or to sleep in my tent so I could tell her stories to keep the