A Dirt Road Led through the Village....

Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec 15, 2025

A dirt road led through the village. Shacks lined the road on both sides, hovels, really. They all looked on the verge of collapse; some had actually collapsed, but it appeared that this did not rise to the level of concern for the people who lived there. People were everywhere; they milled about, going in and out of the shacks seemingly at random, and children scampered this way and that. As the two of them proceeded, everyone who caught sight of them stopped what they were doing and stared, a mixture of surprise and fear on their faces. Samantha had tried to smile and nod at the first few who noticed them, but Joel had stopped her: "Don’t do that. They don’t perceive that as friendly."

So she stopped doing it. She simply stared back as they passed, and when she became inured to the stares, as she did toward the center of the village, she simply ignored them completely and tried to analyze the natives’ living conditions and method of organizing their village.

Then the two of them were in the center of the village; the dirt road widened and then split left and right to enclose a central dirt mound, the top of which was flattened and raised about 10 feet above the flat level of the plain. On top of the mound was what looked like a pile of old clothes—the steep angle of the mound made it hard to be certain what it was that was up there, exactly, but it appeared to be some sort of fabric scraps of some kind. “What’s up there?” Samantha asked as they walked along.

“It’s a pile of old clothes and rags. For some reason, the people of the village come here and put old clothes and rags up there, and then one of the royal family, usually a young prince, comes in the evening, climbs up there, and spends the night up there.”

“Reallly?” Samantha said. She stopped, turned to face the mound, and squinted against the small red sun, which was already low in the sky. The system’s main star, a brighter yellow one, was still high in the sky; the natives based their system of time on the yellow star, not the red one. “Why does he do that?”

“We don’t really know,” Joel answered. “Come on, we’ve got to be inside the fence before they start bringing the oofahs in.”

“Oofahs,” Samantha repeated as she moved to catch up with Joel. “I keep looking for one, but I haven’t seen one at all, not yet.”

“You won’t see them until they bring them in from the fields,” Joel said. “They’re not much to see, though. A cow with feathers, and that’s about it.”

“With the power of speech.”

“Well, yes, but they won’t talk with us around.”

“Ah,” Samantha said. She looked at her watch; it was the middle of the night onboard the ship. She suddenly realized she was tired. “How much farther to the fence?”

“Not far. Three miles and change,” Joel answered.

Samantha stopped and wiped her face with her bare hand. “Three miles? I don’t think I can go three more miles.”

Joel looked around and then unshouldered his pack. “Let’s take a break.” He opened the top of his pack and pulled out a foil-covered rectangle. “Here, eat this and drink some of your water.”

Samantha took the rectangle and peeled back one corner of the foil. “How old is this?”

“I just put it together this morning,” Joel answered. He was unwrapping his own foil rectangle and he sat down clumsily on the dirt ground. “This one’s the turkey, so you got the ham. You want turkey instead?”

“No, this will be fine.” Samantha had dropped her own pack now and she retrieved her canteen, opened the top, and took a slug. “Ah, that’s better,” she said. She sat down on the bare ground too and stroked the soil with her fingers. “Doesn’t anything grow here?”

Joel ran his fingers through the soil too. “Not really. The fields are fertilized, so they can support some of the imported plants, but if this stuff doesn’t have any nitrogen in it at all, unless somebody puts some in it.”

“Hmm,” Samantha responded. Her mouth was full of her sandwich. She gulped some more water and swallowed. “This bread is so dry, it’s like cardboard.”

“Ah! You’re welcome,” Joel responded with a smile, and Samantha smiled too. Then more seriously: “Yeah, nothing much stays hydrated here. Too hot and too dry. That’s why you need to keep drinking water, even if you don’t feel thirsty.”

“I do feel thirsty,” Samantha said. She took another bite of the sandwich. The two of them concentrated on chewing the dry food for some time, and then Samantha swallowed again and turned. One of the natives saw staring at them from a short distance. “Oh, look. We’ve got a visitor.”

Joel turned and saw the native, a boy of about sixteen, he judged, but they tended to look younger than they actually were. He frowned, rising, put his canteen back in his pack, and motioned for Samantha to get up. “Come on, we need to be mobile.”

Samantha rose and brushed the dirt off of her rear end. “What’s the problem? He doesn’t seem threatening.”

“Yeah, they never do,” Joel said, shouldering his pack. “Get your pack on. We don’t have to actually start moving yet, but we need to be—”

The native unaccountably picked that moment to pitch his head back and utter a blood-curdling scream, something between a shriek and a screech, with the worst qualities of each and much louder than Joel or Samantha would have thought to be humanly possible.

“Oh, my God,” Samantha said as she clapped her hands over her ears. Joel didn’t hear her—nothing of a normal volume could be heard over the howl that the native boy was making. Joel grasped Samantha’s arm and started tugging her away from the boy. “Wait, wait—my backpack!” Samantha wrested loose and stepped back toward the boy to get her backpack.