Call Forth the Waves by L. J. Hatton Page A

You open the box. You use the clothes. That’s the order.”
    Despite Winnie’s insistence that the woman was mentally ill, this didn’t feel like crazy to me. This felt like something else.
    I took another look at her face. Her eyes had been brown before, but now they were darkening toward black from corner to corner, the way mine did when the Celestine was in full force, and the way Winnie’s had when she turned on Warden Arcineaux. Nafiza had been touched, and from her apparent age, she wasn’t born that way. She was like my father. Whatever was keeping her from communicating had to be tied to her abilities.
    “Is this the red you meant? These clothes belonged to Winnie’s mom?” I asked.
    “Not now, of course. When she’s Winifred’s age, yes.”
    “She was Winnie’s age years ago,” I said.
    “Out of order?”
    “I think so.”
    She was mixing up timelines. The past was overlapping the present so that she couldn’t get a handle on what happened when. What she meant to say was that the clothes had belonged to Winnie’s mother, but now that Winnie was the same age, she could wear them, too. Why Nafiza had kept things belonging to Winnie’s mother was a different puzzle.
    I picked up another sack. This one had a blue flannel shirt and jeans with a pair of boy’s sneakers.
    “They used to match, but he changed his eyes,” Nafiza said.
    “Jermay?”
    “If you insist.”
    The blue squares on the shirt were precisely the shade that once sparkled in Jermay’s eyes. Nafiza was right. They’d changed like the rest of him.
    The next bag had another pair of jeans and a light purple sweatshirt, the perfect size to fit me. They’d been tied together with a soft flowered scarf. I looped the scarf around my hair to get it out of the way.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “I told you that you didn’t have to,” she said.
    “Right—long hair is cumbersome.”
    It sounded like the future was mixed in with the other timelines, too. Was it even possible for someone to see the future?
    “Fair trade,” she said.
    “Trade? What is it you want in return?”
    I stepped into the jeans and pulled them up under my nightshirt, happy to finally have something on my legs to block the chill. They fit perfectly.
    “I gathered those yesterday because you arrive tomorrow and need them,” Nafiza said.
    “We got here today.”
    “Yesterday, it was tomorrow, but they switched places and made it now. The order is never easy to see.”
    Her eyes kept fluctuating between black and brown. I’d never seen anything like it. When they were brown with the usual white on either side of the irises, her voice was an even, normal speaking tone. When they were overlaid with solid black, chronological confusion reigned.
    “You said these were a trade. For what?” I asked.
    “Repairs.”
    “We just broke Baba’s house, so I’m not sure I’m the right person to fix much of anything.”
    “Tomorrow you did repairs, but needed these yesterday.” Nafiza paused to reconsider what she’d said. “Yesterday tomorrow, I mean. Tomorrow’s yesterday. There used to be a word for that.”
    “Today,” I told her.
    “Today is now. Today is now ,” she said, shaking her head. She definitely wasn’t crazy. She sounded more like someone with a brain injury. Her mind was fine. She understood me, and she knew what she wanted to say in return, but there was a glitch along the route to her mouth. “Stones can’t fly, so they fall, but not today. Today is now and that is later. You’ll make repairs tomorrow.”
    “Okay. Well, thanks for the clothes.” We were well past awkward in this encounter, and I was afraid she’d get more frustrated if she felt like she needed to keep talking. I didn’t know how to end it other than to leave. I put Winnie’s and Jermay’s bags of clothes back in the box and picked it up.
    “Charity should be given, not taken,” Nafiza said.
    My father used to say that. He believed that we should make our own way, no