“Does the world make sense now?”
“It’s beautiful. You should feel it.”
“No, thank you. I prefer not to catch pneumonia,” he sniffed. “What’s down there, anyway?”
“The decaying corpses of quarrymen.”
“Lovely.”
“What do you think is down there? Slate and algae and dirt, mostly.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Dirt and algae, imagine that!”
“It’s not that. There’s something else.”
There is a boat for me…
“Just like there’s ‘something else’ wrong with the babies?”
“Never mind.”
“And speaking of the babies...you really must come out of there. We can’t afford for your immune system to shut down. Especially now with there being three of you and all.”
He stretched out his arm and bade me to take it. Instead I pushed away from the steps.
“Bel...that’s enough.”
“Don’t speak to me as tho
