Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 21: The Clean Up
(Kara)
I will not pretend I remember the run as more than pieces. The cold street. The boy ahead of me, barefoot and flying, looking back to be sure I was with him. My one good dress dragging and me hauling it up in fistfuls. The pack on my back, heavier each street, breathing its cold breath on my spine. And at the dock-gate a watchman who stood up out of his little hut and opened his mouth to ask us our business, just a tired old man doing his job in the dark — and the soldier put him down before the first word was out of him, one hard movement, and the man folded up and was simply not a man any more, and we did not stop, and I stepped over him the way I had stepped over the beggars in the lane a lifetime ago at the start of that same night, and I have thought about him since more than he would ever have guessed, the watchman, who died for standing up to ask a question. That one was not my arithmetic and I would not have spent him. But I did not stop, because there was no stopping, and a thing I have learned is that you can carry a death you would not have chosen and keep running, and sort out later what it costs you.
The boat was there, small and tarred and bobbing. The boy got me into it — I nearly went into the water, never having done it — and shoved us off and got the oars and bent his back to it, and he could row, that boy, he could really row, the muscles of him jumping in the starlight, and the shore went away from us into the dark and the lamps of the city shrank to a low gold smear behind, and there was only the creak and pull of the oars and the black water and the cold and the thing on my back that might at any breath be the last thing either of us ever felt.
He rowed until his breath was sobbing in him and the city was far and small. And then, when I judged it was as far from anyone as fear and a boy’s arms could carry it, I put my hand on the oar nearest me, and he stopped, and the boat slowed and sat, and the ripples went out from us and flattened, and it was very quiet.
“There,” I said. “I think we’re in the middle.”
For a while neither of us said anything at all. The boat sat and turned, the slow aimless turning a boat does when no one is rowing it, so that the smear of the city went by my shoulder and then was at my back and then came round again, unhurried, like the slowest dance there is. The water lapped. Somewhere out in the dark a fish broke the surface with a small wet sound and was gone. It was, I noticed — and it was a strange thing to notice, with the device against my spine — very beautiful. I had not looked at the sky in a long time. You do not look up much, in a kitchen.
“So,” said the boy at last, and I will give him this: he had rowed a runaway and a thing that made the air feel wrong out into the middle of a black lake on his master’s barked order, in the dark, in his bare feet and his bare chest, and he had not asked a single question until now, which is a discipline most grown men do not have. “So. What’s this all about, then?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “We’ve the time. But first — I know you. I worked it out on the way, even though you’re much bigger now. You’re of the house. You were here all last year, when I used to come and see Fiona — you’d be about the yard, about the kitchen, and we girls” — I made myself say it straight — “we’d notice you and tease you a little, the way silly girls do with a boy who can’t answer back. You were one of the things we visited, near enough.” I looked at him across the little space of the boat, the lean wet shape of him pale in the starlight. “I’m ashamed to say I never knew your name. All those visits. What is it?”
He looked surprised that I’d ask. “Ron,” he said.
“Ron.” I tried it. “Well, Ron. I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“For the way I was with you. Then. When I came here a free man’s daughter in a good dress and you were the boy about the yard, and we teased you and never once thought of you as a person who heard it. I’m sorry for it. I didn’t know what it was, to be the one nobody counts. I know now.”
He was quiet a moment, working at it. “But I was a slave,” he said, not arguing, just setting it true. “I am. That’s the thing of it.” And then, because he was a kind boy and could see I’d meant something by it: “But you were nice to me. You were. The other girls, they didn’t see me at all, or they laughed at me — but you’d laugh with me, like I was in on it, you’d say good morning to me like you meant it. I liked you. I was sorry when I heard what happened to you.” He ducked his head. “But what is this? What’s happened? Why have I rowed you out here?”
So I told him, and I watched him not believe it, the way you watch a person’s face refuse a thing too big to take in at once. I told him what was on my back. I told him it was a wizard’s weapon, the forbidden kind, and what it would do, and he kept looking at the pack and then at me and saying, but how — how does a girl like you, how do you come to have a thing like that, as though that were the strangest part of it, which I suppose, to him, it was. A bird went over us in the dark, low, I felt the air of it more than saw it, some night-bird about its business, and was gone toward the reeds.
“How much do you know already?” I asked him.
“Only what Fiona says. That you were taken. Sold. That your people were ruined and you went to a soldier’s house. And — “ he hesitated,” — there was a dinner. She cried about it, Fiona. She wouldn’t say it all, but there was a dinner, and you were — she cried.”
The dinner. I remembered it exactly — I remember everything exactly, it is a curse and it has been, once or twice, a weapon — every plate of it, every face, the heat of the room and the smell of the food I was not to eat. It was early. It was the first time they made me serve, as a slave, at a table of people I had sat down among as an equal not a season before. Fiona was there. That is the thing of it, Ron, and you would not have known it: the girl whose window I climbed to tonight, the girl crying upstairs in this house right now, sat at that table and watched me carry her plate with my eyes down. So did the Harrolds’ daughter. And both of them — I saw it, I see everything, it is the curse I told you of — both of them, when the sweet was cleared, drew me a little heart in the leftover sauce with a fingertip, quick and low and childish, the only word of love the table would let them send; two hearts, from two girls, melting under my thumb as I bore the plates away, and I could not give back so much as a look to either. My master saw one of the two do it, and thought it was praise for the cook, and said he’d have the kitchen told. He saw one heart and read it as a compliment to the pudding. I saw both and read them true and could answer neither. That is the whole of slavery in a single dish, if you ever want it small enough to carry: they could reach me; I could reach no one; and the man who owned me could not tell love from gravy.
I wrote a poem about that dinner, after, in the second-bed book. I wrote that for my behind to be bared like that before my old friends — to stand and be seen as the thing I now was — was the most breaking thing I could imagine one person doing to another; that I would sooner have died than be looked at so. Those were near enough my words. The worst thing in the world, I called it. The very floor of everything.
And not one hour before I sat in this boat, in the warm kitchen of that same Fiona’s house, I had taken the hem of my dress in my own two hands and lifted it and bared myself to her and to her father on purpose, to make a point of law, and felt nothing about it at all. Nothing. The same girl. The same eyes on me. I did it the way you’d hand a man a receipt.
That is the thing about the worst thing in the world. You find it, and you build a whole poem on it, the floor of everything — and then you go on living, and you learn there were rooms below that floor, and rooms below those, and that the thing which would once have killed you with shame becomes, in time, a thing you do with your own two hands to get a job done, in front of the very same witness, and walk out of the room steady. I remember the dinner perfectly. I have not lost a plate of it. And sitting in that boat I set it in its place among everything that came after — the bedding, the whip, the table, the bag on my back — and I will tell you the truth: it did not make the list. The worst thing I could once imagine does not, any more, make the greatest hits of the worst things. I could almost have laughed, except that it is not, when you look straight at it, funny.
“Fiona was lovely to me,” I said. “She always was. Tell her I said so, if — “ I let that go, because there was a great deal in the if and the boy didn’t need it. “But never mind the dinner. Here’s what matters, what you’ve a right to know, since you’re out here in it with me.” And I told him plainly, because he had earned plain: that the thing on my back could end us at any moment, with no warning at all — not a hiss, not a spark, no time to be afraid in — that one breath we would be here, the boat and the water and the stars and the two of us, and the next we would simply not be, would be bits of us scattered warm across a mile of cold lake, and never know it happened. That this was why a clever frightened man had sent us out to the middle of the water in the dark: so that if it came, it would take us and the fish and nothing else. “He put us out here to die in everyone’s place,” I said. “If it comes to that. The two of us, instead of a city. That’s what we are tonight. That’s the whole of the job.”
I thought he might weep, or rage, or want to row for the shore. He did none of it. He took it in, the way he’d taken the order at the house, and he was quiet, and the boat turned us another slow quarter-round under the stars, and then he said, “Well.” He set the oars in and folded his hands. “Then I’m glad it’s a useful death, if it’s one. Better than most of us get.” He looked at me, steady, a slave boy on a black lake with the end of the world buckled to a girl an arm’s length off. “I’m proud to, if you want to know. Proud to sit here with you and be what’s spent instead of them. There’s worse last things than that.”
And I found I had nothing to say to him for a moment, because no one — not in all the long time of my owning — had said a thing to me as clean as that.
The water lapped at the boat. The city turned by again, small and gold and asleep, not knowing. We settled in to wait, the two of us, and the long part of the night began.
After a time he asked me how it had happened. Not the plot — the rest of it. How a free man’s daughter came to be a soldier’s slave with a bomb on her back in the middle of a lake. “If you want to tell it,” he said. “We’ve nothing but time, and I’d — I’d like to know. If it’s not a thing you’d rather keep.”
And I found that I did want to tell it, and more than that, that I could — that here, for once, was someone I could tell it to the right way. You have to understand what that is worth. Every other time the story had come out of me it had come out bent: shaped for a purpose, cut to be believed, folded small to fit in a poem no one would read, or pulled out of me by a man weighing whether to hang me. To the free, you cannot tell it true at all; they need every plain thing explained and then they cannot hold it, they look away, they make it about how sorry they are. But Ron was of the house below the stairs, like me. He knew already how it goes for a girl who is sold — knew it in his body, from the network, from the back-lane talk, from things he’d seen if not in his own master’s house then near enough; knew what bedding means and what sharing means and what a whipping is for, without my having to draw him a map. I could say the plain words to him and he would not flinch and he would not weep and he would not need me to make it bearable for his sake. He would just know.
So I told it to him straight, in our own tongue, the way you can only tell it to your own. The fall — my father’s ruin, the creditors, the block. The soldier who bought me, and the price he paid; and his wife, who called him the goose, fondly and not, and was, in her way, the nearest thing to kind that house ever held, and who died — and how I took that name of hers for him after she was gone and have called him nothing else in my own head since. The bed. The herbs I learned to use so the bed would not become a child. The dinner he’d heard of, and the two hearts in the sauce.
The whipping, and what it was truly for, which was not the beggars at all but the proving that he could reach in and break the part of me I’d sworn he couldn’t. The table, and the five of them, and the using and the listening in the one hour. How I went under that table a broken slave, because of the whip, and because no one cared, or could do anything about it, and how I discovered while under the table that someone did care: me. And I could do something about it: I would steal their device from them. Else I would die, and take a crowd with me. And how I came out from under that table a free woman in my heart.
All of it, in order, plain. He listened the way only one of us listens to another — no horror, no pity, just the steady grim nodding of a person matching each thing I said against things he already knew to be true of the world we’d both been sold into. Now and then he said, low, “aye,” or “that’s how they do,” the way you do when a thing is being named that you have long known and never heard said out loud. It was the first time in my whole life as a slave that I told the truth entire and watched it land in someone exactly as heavy as it was, no lighter and no worse. I cannot tell you the rest it gave me. It was like setting down a thing I had carried so long I’d stopped feeling the weight, and feeling, only as it left my arms, how much it had been.