The Coveted

A short, short story.

[NOTE: Since this is a vacation time for many people, I thought I’d provide something different today and Thursday, namely a couple of very short fiction stories for people to read on the beach or wherever else they might be.]

Daniel was only seven years old, but his job was to stoke the campfire.  Here on the frontier, even the youngest had their responsibilities, and Daniel’s was to make his Pa’s coffee hot.  When the ashes were near white, he gave the pot one more stir and poured a cup.

“It’s ready Pa!” he yelled to the family tent.  He admired the ribbon of steam that wafted from the tin cup, folding over itself as it crept upward, carrying a pleasingly pungent scent.

Pa slung open a tent flap and came out in his unbuttoned overalls.  He stared at the boy and took the cup.  He took a big sip.

“That’s good, Daniel!” said Pa, smiling.  “Go ahead and offer it to some of the others in the camp.”

Daniel took the pot and set about ambling from tent to tent.  There was Langford and Louisa, with their new baby boy.  His Pa told him Louisa’s father had been waiting for a grandson to be born into the camp as long as Pa could remember.  Louisa’s father practically raised Pa after his own dad died of a pox after getting too close to another hunter while tracking deer.  And there was Willet and Margaret, whose daughter his Pa said Daniel would marry some day at the camp chapel.

When Daniel’s coffee pot was empty, he brought his eyes up and noticed the horizon.  In the distance, amidst the fuzzy line of tall grass that cut into the azure sky, there danced what looked like a pair of silk ropes.  They had pink ribbons on them, and when Daniel looked more closely he could see they were pigtails shooting like sparks about the head of a smiling girl. She was running after a butterfly that jumped like popcorn in the air.

He had never seen a girl outside the camp.

Daniel dropped the pot and found himself inching toward her.  Soon he was running, and her face became clearer as he grew nearer.

Then, there was a loud cracking sound.  For a second, Daniel thought it was thunder following the girl’s sparking pigtails.  But when a shard of cut grass lashed Daniel’s ankle, he realized a bullet had cut through the soil near his feet.  He stopped and looked back.  His Pa’s rifle was tinged with smoke.

“Come back here now!” hollered his Pa.  “You know better than that, Daniel!  The pox is everywhere!”

Daniel sulked back for his licking, and after that he thought his Pa would never let him so much as move toward another person.

But then one day traders were spotted at the edge of the camp.  And Pa tossed Daniel a coin.

“Go ahead, son,” said Pa.  “Go get yourself something.”

Daniel came alive and ran from the tent.

“But keep your distance from them!” his Pa yelled after him.

Traders often came through the frontier, but they never got so close that you could easily see their faces.  They would set out their wares in a line, then walk away, with two riflemen poised to shoot anyone who tried to grab something and run back to the camp without dropping something in payment.

The traders signaled their presence with a flag on a tall pole, which let everyone know it was okay now to come look at the merchandise.

Daniel walked up with some others from the camp.  He saw some paper and pencils.  He saw a weathered old trampoline about the size of a wagon wheel, but its springs were too rusted to trust with even his own small weight, Daniel thought. And if he hurt himself playing on it there was no doctor at the camp to mend him.  Then his eyes caught the reflection of the sun off the surface of a rectangular black plastic wafer.  He stared at it a bit.

“That’s what they used to call a ‘sell’ phone, son,” yelled one of the traders from the distance who must have seen how the object intrigued the young boy.

“A sell phone?” said Daniel.  “Did they call them that because they were easy to sell?”

The trader was a good ways away, and Daniel wasn’t sure he smiled or shrugged.

“Sell phone used to work magic, you know,” yelled the trader.  “You could look into it and see what they called the innernet.”

Daniel felt a hand on his shoulder.  It was his Pa.

“Those things don’t work no more, Daniel,” he said.  “Don’t waste your money on that.”

Daniel looked up at his Pa.  “What’s an innernet?”

His Pa shook his head.  “Have you not been reading your Book of the Covet?”

“I do, Pa!” Daniel insisted, blushing a bit.  “I just forgot that part.”

Pa smiled.  “The innernet was something so tempting, it trapped you in like a net and kept your attention there forever.  You ignored everyone else.  Your family, your friends.  Even your real self.  Lots of kids got sucked into those innernets during the first pox.”

“What did they do in the innernet?”

“They just watched other innernet people, mostly.  But then some of them got tired of just doing that and wanted to make some trouble. They figured out how the innernet worked and shut it down.  They made a pox for the innernet, except they called it a virus.  And then one day the innernet didn’t work.  And so people couldn’t hide there anymore.”

“So where did people go?”

Pa began to look impatient.

“Let’s get back to the camp.”

Daniel thought he might like to buy that sell phone now, but Pa was already hustling him away.

When they got back, Daniel couldn’t help thinking more about the past.  Over dinner by the campfire, Daniel asked why everyone came to live in tiny little camps anyway, away from everyone else.

His Pa leaned back in his chair, rocking back and forth, as if trying to hone his answer before giving it.  But then his Pa seemed to realize the creaking of the chair had become awkward, and he still hadn’t formulated a proper response.  So Pa looked to mother, and she took the cue.

“Hundreds of years ago,” said mother, “there were only a few Inocos.  But though they were few, they were much revered.  And so even when the first pox passed, it was decided families should still keep to themselves, and away from others, to protect the Inocos.  People didn’t go to school.  They didn’t trade things so much.  And the stores and such kept closed.  The Coveted said we needed to change the way we lived, so we could all be safe.  And so we did.  We formed smaller and smaller tribes, avoiding others to make us all safe.  Safe and separate.”

“So said the Coveted,” added Pa.

“And did everyone stay safe?” asked Daniel.

His mother put her elbows on the table and leaned forward.  Mother never put her elbows on the table, so Daniel knew she was being very serious now.

“Everyone stayed safe and separate, Daniel,” she said.  Then she paused, and looked right in Daniel’s eyes, squinting just a bit.

“But then,” she whispered, “after a long while of living like that, some people began to get close to other tribes again.  To trade things in person.  To get together and talk and have fun.”

Daniel could feel his mind’s eye brightening.  He began to smile.

“That sounds wonderful, mother!” he said.  “Did kids get to meet other kids, too?”

His mother’s brow tightened suddenly.  And her squint grew stern.

“They did, son,” she said.  “But then they died.”

“Why?” asked Daniel.  “Did the pox come back?”

Mother leaned back, and her posture slackened a bit.

“Yes, son,” she said.  “But this time, lots of poxes came back.  All sorts of pox.  Pox people had never got before.  Even old sicknesses that never used to kill people began to kill people -- things like the coldpox.”

“That’s terrible!” said Daniel.

“No, son!” said mother, suddenly sitting upright.  “It wasn’t terrible. It was good.”

“How was it good, mother, that people couldn’t see one another anymore?”

“It was good, Daniel,” said mother.  “The Coveted said that because people had stayed away from each other for so long, they had all become more likely to be killed by poxes of all sorts, and not just the big one.”

Mother saw that Daniel was confused, and so she leaned forward again.

“We had all become Inocos, Daniel.  And now we all knew we had to keep separated.  The good of the Incoco had become the good of all.”

“So said the Coveted,” said Pa.

“But how is that good?” asked Daniel.  He was thinking of the girl on the horizon.  “Everyone’s all separated now.”

Pa seemed to have gotten his bearings back and was ready to continue where mother left off.

“We’re all separated, son,” said Pa.  “But don’t you see, while we’re all separated now, we’re all one tribe.  We are all Inoco.”

Daniel wanted to feel good about what his Pa just told him.  But he still had more questions.

“Pa, what does Inoco mean?”

“It’s our people, son.”

“I know that, Pa, but what’s the word mean?”

Pa seemed to lose his confidence again, and he looked to mother.

“The Coveted say it’s short for a much longer word,” she said.

“That’s right,” said Pa.  “And what was that word?  Innimaco … no, like immi-no-comp …”

“Immunocompromised,” said mother slowly, and gently.  “Inoco is short for immunocompromised.”

“That’s a real big word!” said Daniel.

“Well, you’d have known it if you’d read your Book of the Coveted!” said mother.  And with that she got up, strode to a stack of books on her desk, picked up the one on top and tossed it to Daniel.

He caught it and brought it slowly to his lap.  He opened it to the first page.  It had a picture of two rows of people, sitting, with dour looks on their faces.  They looked concerned, he thought, but maybe that was just the look of the wise.

“Are these the Coveted?” he asked.

“Sure are,” said mother. “They are the very wisest of us, and they make the rules for everyone.”

Daniel counted them. “There are nineteen of them, mother,” he said.

“Sure are. The Coveted took on that number in honor of the first pox.”

“Their right proper name’s the Covet-19,” said Pa.

“Oh, yeah,” said Daniel.

“The Covet-19.”