* Author : Lalini Shanela Ranaraja
* Narrator : Shweta Adhyam
* Host : Eric Valdes
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously Published in Strange Horizons, 15 August 2022 Issue.



Content warnings for animal cruelty, blood, and suicide


Rated PG-13
Tusker Blue
by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja
 
You still remember the first time Hailé visited the pharmacy, because that was the day the rogue battle elephant overturned the village water tank and flooded five stores on Sacred Heart Road. The pharmacy was one of them, and you were bailing it out with a plastic jug, swearing a blue streak, when the bells jangled over the door. Without turning, you shouted, “As you can see, the pharmacy is closed today!”
“Please help me,” begged a voice hoarse with smoke, and you plunged your arm into the yellow water and cursed Raj, as you’d done frequently since the wedding, for leaving you to handle customers along with everything else. “If you just walk to Trincomalee Street, the surgeon’s office will be opening soon — ”
“Please,” the voice begged again, and this time there was something terribly familiar about how it wisped at the edges. You turned and Hailé was hunched by the counter, holding the Rift in his bare stomach together with his hands. Blue memory fluid, almost but not quite the shade of an April sky over the paddy fields, flowed through his fingers and down his sarong before coiling away through the ankle-deep water.
You said, “God’s sake, come here,” and hauled him into the alcove where you kept the extra bindings, because you already knew this color wasn’t on the pharmacy’s regular shelves. Hailé was taller than Raj and solid with farmer’s muscle, but in that moment he was unfathomably light under your tugging hands, his bones shifting about like the limbs of a stringless puppet. You left him on the tiled floor while you climbed the shelves, all the way up to where Raj stocked the blues, wringing dung water from your fingers as you scrambled for a shade that wasn’t there. Hailé tipped back his head to watch you.
He was your first Bereaved after your grandmother died. Raj liked to think he was better at treating the Rifts, and he wasn’t, but after her funeral he’d ordered a whole new inventory from the city and made you sell it while he received the Bereaved. So you were far from your best healing self when Hailé showed up. Even after you found bindings that almost matched the bleeding, dyed navy and cyan and cobalt but never that one elusive color, it took you four tries to wrap the Rift. The linen kept snagging on your wedding ring and the colors seeped through for another hour.
You remember that by the end Hailé dragged himself off the floor and helped you finish bailing out the pharmacy, even though the water had stopped rising; neither of you said a word, not about what triggered the Rift, not about what he owed you for binding it, not about the consequences he might have brought upon both of you by entering the village, never mind the pharmacy. He was gone long before Raj came home, filthy and loaded with arrack after a fruitless search for the rogue elephant, and you prayed any witnesses would hold their tongues, because if Raj didn’t know it happened he couldn’t beat you for it.
The entire corner where Hailé collapsed was stained bright blue, and you scrubbed it for weeks with the coir brush, but the color never faded.