The Isis Knot by Hanna Martine

the wide, low porch that surrounded Viv’s shack, hands on her knees, chin tucked to her chest. Trying to remember.
    She knew big things now, large aspects of her former life that painted a wide picture but still skimped on the details. Things like she was from the United States of America. From a year in a far distant future. There should be toilets on this farm, and airplanes should be making white streaks across the sky, their engines rumbling beneath the other sounds of modernity.
    Nothing specific , however, came back to her. Not her birthday, or what kind of car she drove. Or what the gold bracelet meant or how she’d come to be here.
    For the past eight days, she’d had to learn to live all over again. Learned how to drag water from a stream a half mile away and having to boil it to make it drinkable. How to eat bland, terrible food that consisted of meat and brick-hard bread. How not to speak a lot or use too many words that could mark her for being even more different than she was. Not that Viv would notice. He lived in his own world and time, his rum bottle in one hand and an eye permanently cast into the past.
    He called Sera “wife” sometimes. “Mary” on occasion.
    It made him happy to do so, and it didn’t bother her as much as it probably should. He never touched her, not even casually. As long as he didn’t ask questions she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer. The way of him—his low cackles at some private joke; the way he said, “Remember when we…?” and then launched into a rambling story about a foreign time and place; the tottering around and constant forgetfulness; the way he always asked if she was full enough or warm enough or happy enough—did, however, inch its way into her heart.
    In eight days, she found she’d come to care for him in a way that seemed both welcome and foreign. As though it were a new feeling for her, which was strange because who didn’t care for someone else at some point in their life? Why did this feel like a completely new experience?
    Little points of pain splayed across the tops of her knees and she realized she was digging her now-jagged fingernails into them. The nails pressed easily through the thin, loose fabric of the brown pants Viv had given her, and she knew another panic attack was bearing down. Her chest started to heave, her breath coming dry and fast.
    What if I’m trapped here? What if I can’t get back?
    Every day since she’d seen Viv’s coins, those two thoughts had played over and over in her mind. And every day she’d forced herself to stifle them.
    She couldn’t remember her school years in any detail, but she sure as hell knew that she hadn’t gotten through life by curling up and praying for the hard times to just go away. Though the faces and names of the influential people in her life were nothing but blurs, she knew they’d taught her to kick weakness into a corner and stand over it screaming.
    She wouldn’t scream now, so she yanked her hands from her knees and ordered her lungs into a steady rhythm. It took a minute, but they finally obeyed. Her gaze swept over the barn on the opposite side of the muddy yard, where Viv was inside shearing his sheep, and landed on a group of eight gray kangaroos standing on their hind legs, staring back.
    Kangaroos. Hopping around on their own, not behind a zoo fence.
    As what sometimes happened when she was idle, when she wasn’t paying special attention, her right hand absently drifted to her left forearm, fingertips scraping lightly over the gold.
    The answers lay inside the thing clamped around her arm. It was the one undeniable truth about this place and her situation.
    She rolled up her sleeve and touched the gold. She traced the curious image of the knotted rope and listened to the answering thrum in her heart. Listened to what it told her to do.
    For the thousandth time, she contemplated leaving Viv and going out to search for the blond man. For the thousandth time, she talked