A Mother's Journey
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: First Fire, First Night
~ Emmie ~
The first problem was the fire.
She had managed a fire every night of the past four — scraping flint against steel in the way her father had shown her, coaxing the spark into the dry pine needle tinder she gathered each afternoon while the light still held. It was hard work that left her fingers raw, but she had managed it alone, in silence, with no one watching.
Now there was someone watching.
The boy stood three feet from her and observed her every movement with the solemn, total attention that only very small children and very old people brought to things, as though the flint-striking was the most significant event he had witnessed in some time. Every time she struck and failed he made a small sound — not quite distress, not quite commentary, something in between — and when she finally caught a spark and bent to blow it gently into a flame he made an entirely different sound, a soft exhalation of what she could only interpret as relief.
“There,” she said, mostly to herself. Then, because he was still watching, she said it again and gestured at the growing flame. “Fire.”
He looked at her. He looked at the fire. He said something in his own language, a single word, low and certain.
“I’ll take that as agreement,” Emmie said.
She built the fire up carefully, banking it the way her father had taught her — enough heat to last, not so much as to attract attention she didn’t want. Then she turned to the practical problem of the boy, who was still standing exactly where she’d left him, watching the flames with those dark, serious eyes, his small hands hanging at his sides.
He was shivering. She hadn’t noticed it immediately — it was a fine tremor, barely visible — but now that she looked she could see it running through him in steady waves, his thin shoulders lifting and falling with it. The sun had gone behind the western ridgeline and the temperature was dropping with the suddenness that characterized these mountain evenings, the warmth of the day simply lifting away like steam off a morning creek.
“Come here,” she said, and patted the ground beside her.
He didn’t move.
She tried again, patting the ground and then patting her own arm, trying to communicate warmth by gesture. He watched her do this with the same solemn attention he gave everything, then appeared to consider, then sat down approximately two feet from her — close enough to acknowledge the invitation, far enough to preserve some independent dignity. She found, to her surprise, that she respected that.
“All right,” she said. “Two feet it is.”
She turned to the more pressing problem of food.
She had told herself this morning that she had nothing left — had believed it with the flat, gray certainty of someone who has inventoried their supplies and found them wanting. But now, with the boy’s shivering to contend with and something new pressing at her chest that had nothing to do with her own hunger, she climbed back into the wagon and looked again. Properly this time. Moving things that had not been moved, lifting the corner of her mother’s good quilt, checking behind the false board at the wagon’s front wall that her father used to store the deed papers and the family Bible.
Behind the Bible, wrapped in an old flannel petticoat, was a tin she did not recognize.
She pried it open with her paring knife. Inside, packed in paper, were a dozen small rounds of dried apple studded with cloves, the kind her mother made every autumn and called her “traveling sweets” — a secret store, Emmie realized, that her mother must have tucked away before they left Missouri for exactly this kind of emergency. The smell of them — sweet and spiced and searingly familiar — hit her so hard she had to sit back on her heels for a moment and press the back of her wrist to her mouth.
Her mother had been dead of cholera since the third week of July.
Emmie stayed very still for three long breaths. Then she closed the tin carefully, climbed back out of the wagon, and sat down beside the boy.
She opened the tin and held it out to him.
He looked at the contents. He looked at her. He reached out with two fingers — very carefully, very precisely — and took one of the dried apple rounds and examined it closely, turning it in his fingers, smelling it. Then he put it in his mouth.
Whatever he had expected, it was not that. His eyes went wide. He chewed once, twice, and then looked at her with an expression of such pure, uncomplicated astonishment that something cracked open in her chest — something that hurt and didn’t hurt at the same time, like a window being opened in a room that has been closed too long.
“My mama made those,” Emmie said.
He didn’t understand the words. But he reached into the tin for another one, and this time when he sat back he moved — without appearing to notice he was doing it — approximately six inches closer to her.
She pretended not to notice too.
They ate in silence, the two of them, passing the open tin back and forth in the firelight. She rationed carefully — four for him, four for her, the rest back in the flannel petticoat for tomorrow. He ate with the focused seriousness of a child who has gone too long without food and is not yet certain there will be more. When his fourth piece was gone he looked into the tin and then looked at her, and she shook her head gently and closed the lid.
He accepted this without protest. That surprised her too.
The fire had built itself into a steady, reliable thing by the time the dark came fully down, and with the dark came the sounds — the creek whispering over its rocks, the wind troubling the high pine branches, and beneath and behind all of it, the vast, pressing silence of the mountains. An owl called somewhere upstream, two low pulses of sound, and the boy went very still beside her.
“It’s only an owl,” she said.
He did not relax.
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