PodCastle

* Author : Maya Chhabra
* Narrator : Eleiece Krawiec
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Originally published in Anathema.


CW: Plague, illness, and death


Rated R.
The Plague-House
by Maya Chhabra
When the plague returned in a rash of aching joints and toxic, pink-froth coughs, Catia did not wait for it to sneak into her family’s home. Armouring herself with sweet oils and talismans of cracked agate—nothing that exorcised fear or released paralyzed feet for another step could truly be called useless—she stalked off to confront it where it lived and died.
Between their freshly painted townhouse and the low, sprawling warehouse appropriated last month by the faceless, vaguely incompetent entity that served as Sanitation Commission, three blocks spread before her like the southern plains amidst a dust storm. The street cleaners stayed home these days, and the promenade might as well have been a gutter.
Soon slim terraced houses gave way to commercial buildings; she lowered her veil and gasped, taking in the docks’ vivid salt air and pungent fish scent. Two wiry, homesick Eldasran sailors menaced a peacekeeper, and a lanky woman, face covered, tipped a burlap sack out of her cart and fled.
No one paid Catia mind as she marched past, agate biting her left palm as she steeled herself to yank the warehouse’s hemp bell pull. No one except the burlap sack, which grunted and twitched as she stepped carefully around it. Catia looked away from the evidence; during the epidemic of ’74, she’d seen fathers slip poison into their children’s medicine, sons dump their parents’ not-quite-corpses into the bay ’til the edict requiring cremation banned the practice. That some were driven to burn the living she did not doubt, but of that at least she could claim no first-hand knowledge. Mercifully, this woman had abandoned her relative near a plague-house; Catia didn’t think the vanished figure had much to be ashamed of. At least this time, Catia didn’t have a child to shield as well. Not like last time, with Nicoletta. During plague outbreaks, Catia revelled in her infertility.
She tugged the cord and it made an echoing, tinny noise. The sack coughed, and let out a kitten’s mew—the sound of an animal, or a very young girl, in pain. Catia looked at it, at the shape of tiny, contorted limbs poking through sackcloth.
The sorceress who answered the bell found a figure dressed in bright green, carrying a small child with a crimson-stained bib. Catia didn’t think the girl’s half-Borran features, her hazel eyes and sweat-plastered auburn curls, much resembled her own. But the sorceress couldn’t see that, she realized.
“We’re full up, madam. You should take your daughter home before she gets chilled.”
“She’s not—” But the healer, callused as Catia had been by a surfeit of suffering, was already turning away. Nearing panic, she remembered her original purpose. “Do you need an extra pair of hands?”
Eyes the choppy grey of rough seas met hers.
“Take your kid home and come back quick as you can.”
This time, when the sorceress called the girl Catia’s daughter, not even the beginnings of denial escaped her.

The child frightened Pier Antonio. Not the plague—Catia kissed him on tiptoe when he waved off her apologies for inviting it in—but the child.