I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

Halu’s household came to the end of its fat on about the hundred and ninety-first day and nobody found out for eight.

There was no moment. Nobody announced it and nobody was refused anything. The jar simply reached the bottom the way jars do, in the middle of an ordinary evening, and Halu’s sister scraped it out and said nothing to anybody because there was still food, and there was, and being short of fat is not being short of food.

It is being short of the thing that makes a winter tolerable, which is a different complaint and a harder one to make in public.

Nayra found it the way she found everything, which was by looking at a person instead of asking them.

Halu had gone thin across the shoulders. He was working the same hours because he was not going to be the man who did not, and the leg that had been broken in two places below the knee and had healed short was now carrying him through a longer day on less, and it had started to show in how he came up the path at dusk.

She told Leon on the hundred and ninety-ninth day and she told him flatly and then went back to work, which he understood afterwards had been a decision.

***

He thought about it for a day and a half and then did the obvious thing, and doing the obvious thing took about four minutes.

He had a share. Everybody had a share. His had never once been fully drawn because he ate less than the ration allowed and had been quietly embarrassed about the surplus since roughly the fortieth day, and there was fat in it, and two kilograms of it went into a jar and up the path in the evening when there was nobody much about.

Halu did not want it and took it, and did both of those things well, and thanked him properly with the ending on the verb for a thing that was given and not owed.

Leon walked back down feeling better than he had felt in a fortnight.

Two kilograms. Four days of the trough. And it goes to the one man on this terrace who is actually paying for the trough with his body.

***

Doran came to find him four days later, in the morning, at the works, and did not sit down.

"You gave Halu fat."

"Ei."

"How much."

Leon told him.

Doran looked at the wall of the works for a moment, and Leon — who had by then spent twelve weeks learning to read a man who gave nothing away — watched him arrive at something and decide to say it anyway.

"Halu was going to speak at the council."

Leon did not understand for about two seconds.

Then he did, all at once, and the whole of it arrived in one piece the way a load does when the cord goes.

"He was one of the six," Doran said. "He was the one I was going to have stand up. Not because he is angry. He is not angry, that is the point, he would have stood up and said my household went short and I would do it again or he would have stood up and said my household went short and I want it stopped, and I did not know which and I did not want to know, because whichever one he said would have been the only honest thing said that day."

He let that sit.

"And now he cannot say either one."

Leon sat down on the bench outside the works, which he did not normally do in front of people.

He knew this. He had known it since the thirty-first day, when Doran had put a cord on a mat in front of him and shown him that nine of his own forty-one allocations would have starved somebody out of politeness. He had written it down. He had thought about it for a week and been pleased with himself for understanding it.

And then a man he liked had gone thin and he had carried two kilograms up a path in the dark.

"He can give it back."

"Na."

"If he gives it back —"

"Then he is a man who was given a thing and gave it back, in front of everybody, and that is louder than the thing itself." Doran was patient about it, which made it worse. "There is no way out through the fat. The fat is already somewhere. The only question left is what everybody thinks when he opens his mouth, and I can tell you what they will think, because I would think it."

Veya came round the corner of the works then, because Veya had a way of arriving at the end of things, and she had clearly been there for some of it.

She said one word to Doran and Doran nodded.

Leon did not have it. He had a hundred and forty words and this was not one of them, and he looked at Luma, who had come up the path behind Veya and had stopped.

Luma did not translate it.

"Hemra," Veya said again, to Leon this time, and did not explain it either, and went past him into the works to get whatever she had come for.

He wrote it down that night with nothing after it.

***

Halu came down to the works himself on the two hundred and third day and made it easy, which Leon had known he would and had been dreading for exactly that reason.

He did not give the fat back. He did not apologise and he did not accept an apology, and when Leon started on one, badly, in the past tense, Halu let him get four words in and then put a hand up.

"I knew," Halu said.

Leon stopped.

"When you came up the path. I knew what it would do." He shifted his weight off the leg, which he did about every forty seconds and had done since the fifty-first day. "I took it because I have a sister and she is fourteen and she has been giving me hers since the wet and telling me she is not hungry."

He looked at Leon steadily.

"So you can carry that instead. It is lighter."

Then he went back up the path, at the speed he went at now, and Leon stood outside the works and understood that he had been forgiven by the only person with standing to do it and that it had not helped in the slightest, because the council was still coming and Doran’s six households were now five.

Doran had a strip of hide with the six households on it. That evening he put a line through Halu’s name — not a cross, a line, the mark that means a thing has been taken out of a reckoning and the reckoning still stands.

Then he wrote, in the space beside it, in the crooked new letters Luma had been teaching him for eleven days:

the varu