Excerpt from suspended:

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Chapter 1             
             I was sold to the undertaker when I was eleven years old, to pay for my mother’s funeral tableau.

             You are wondering why my father, a mere captain of a merchant ship, would ever have requested such an extravagance, instead of ground burial, or even a much simpler window burial in a mausoleum, costly as even those were. The truth is that the undertaker himself suggested the exchange. And I still believe my father would never have agreed to it if he’d had another option.

             Pulled into one of those knotty moments in time where everything happens at once, neither of us had a chance to breathe, to consider, to think of consequences. How different might my life have been had my father simply taken me with him, down to his ship, to set sail and be gone. We might never have come back to Baskendi. I would never have witnessed the thousands who died. And I would never have known anything at all of Lucien.

             One day we were a happy family: Desi and I and our mother, living our lives carelessly, waiting for my father and my brother to return to port with a cargo of fine textiles and furniture from Uruthay. Then it seemed as though I blinked, and my mother and my sister were dead.

             The night before they died, I’d stayed up late translating a poem, determined to please my most demanding teacher, since I was by far the youngest in his class. When I put down my pages of writing, I rose from our dining table, intending to go to bed. 

             The darkened room revealed a pool of bright moonlight stretching across the floor. I went to the window in bare feet, the floorboards cool beneath my toes, and marveled: the moon was so large and close and round, filling half the sky, it seemed. My spyglass stood on the windowsill in its usual place. I took it up and examined the moon’s face with interest, her dark eyes and prominent cheeks the color of pure snow. Did I glimpse a blue cast reflected across her white face? I peered, rubbed my tired eyes, and peered again.                       Couldn’t be. 

             So I told myself, as I stumbled through my usual bedtime routine, that the moon was white and I hadn’t seen anything, not knowing it would be the last time I ever went up to my room on tiptoes so as not to wake Desi in the next bed. I pulled my long, dark brown hair over my shoulder and braided it, put on my white nightgown, and slipped between the cool sheets, my head filled with poetry. 

             I wish I had said something to my mother, but by morning I had forgotten that faint wash of blue.                   Everyone who lived in Baskendi knew the spring tides were high, but no fisherman coming up through the locks had yet spoken of an algae bloom on the coastal seas, or that it might have been caught up in a fishnet. No one had yet spoken of its reflection tinting the moon. We all knew: blue algae caused white plague. I had been taught to watch for the signs, but I was young, and the last time plague had spread through the city, I had been four years old. 

             Still, every child in Baskendi was taught the quarantine procedures from our earliest school days, repeating them back to our teachers, our young voices chanting in unison: “Keep to your homes, store food for a month, avoid houses with plague flags. Do not touch hands, railings or walls. Eat no food that has been passed to you with fingers, and eat no fish at all.”