Ama found solace in her knitting. She had control of every weave, every knick, every loop, and every stroke. She could make a blanket, a rug, a tunic, a tablecloth, and with a few carefully placed incisions and a small tug, she could unravel everything she had been working on. That simple thought of unravelling her work, of a modicum of controlled chaos made her wrinkled hands tense whilst holding the needle, breaking her concentration.

       Ama glanced up, surveying the one-room house with a small cot, an adobe table with two adobe chairs, a tiny kitchen with clay utensils and clay pots all neatly organized as she left it, and not a single ounce of dirt or mud on the clay floors nor on the ochre and beige rug she had made two summers prior. She took pride in her cleanliness, her order, which was so hard to come by in the inhospitable desert she resided in. And it had only grown harder with the meddlesome Zudrik. Like a stain on her pristinely knitted clothing, the rusted shortsword lay haphazard by the beaded doorway, propped at an angle, just the way she didn’t like it. She wished she could throw it away, but she knew it meant too much to Zudrik. Her eyes wandered over beyond the beaded doorway to see the bustling thoroughfare of beige tunics and wooden sandals, with no child among their troop. He was late again for lunch, no doubt causing trouble once more to try and give even more grandiose examples of his fantasies.

       Like delayed clockwork, she saw an inevitably dirtied small teenage form walking towards the hut. Ama prepared herself with the steeliest of gazes and waited as Zudrik dramatically threw the beads aside and entered the hut, his normally beige tunic dirited and soiled, faintly ripped at the hem by his feet which caused another strain in Ama’s neck as he tracked mud and dirt into the doorway and the hut. He had his shoulder-length auburn hair tied up, somehow just as dirtied and mud-filled as his tunic, which was poorly kept up, as bangs of hair lie on his fraudulently scarred face which beheld the same determined grey eyes that she could never convince. This time, his small muscled frame held a bestial skull, six times the size of his tiny palm.

       As he lifted it in the air, Zudrik exclaimed, “See Ama? I have slain another. Let me go with the Shirobā.”

       Ama simply raised an eyebrow.

       “Zudrik,” she responded simply, “I told you not to dig in the sand. You are dirty. This house is clean. You are dirtying it.”

       Zudrik groaned in frustration as he shook the skull in her direction. “I cleaned it Ama! I buried the Lycrith in sand so its blood would not be in the house! Killing is not clean but I made it clean for you!”

       Ama simply stared, with no change in her demeanor or eye. Just disappointment and familiarity as she spoke, “And you had killed this Lycrith with your hands?” as she gestured towards the skull and the rusted shortsword.

       “Why won’t you believe me Ama?!” Zudrik whined as he stamped his foot on the ground and threw the skull on the pristine flooring, crossing his arms, causing another twitch in Ama’s lip.

       “I didn’t use the blade because you said it makes too much of a mess! What can I possibly do-”

       But Ama raised a winkled finger, and stopped listening. He was not going to admit that this was a fantasy and this would go nowhere. She simply took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and returned to her knitting.

       After a minute of silence, Zudrik let out one final huff, grabbed the rusted shortsword, and turned on his heel, his wooden scandals loudly clacking as he left the hut. She barely lifted her gaze, knowing no matter what she said he wouldn’t come home to rest. She watched his wooden sandals stamp angrily and with purpose on the hardened clay that was the thoroughfare of the village, as he stopped in front of the butcher, his mouth running quickly and angrily as he spent the last of his meager coin from working to buy half-rotted intestines and unbought raw meat. Food was scarce, and even though he paid for second-rate meat, Zudrik had to have been agreeing to do some kind of favor, and this made Ama’s shoulders sag even further. Her eyes lazily trailed him as he kept walking further and further away from the hut, towards the wet clay used for construction with his eyes peeled beyond the village, towards the horizon of endless dunes of sand with interspersed fragments of rock jagged and bleached against the sun.

       It was a good meal. His large, rubbery hide slumped happily into the colder sands, sheltered from the intense heat by the sandstone spire above him. He liked the taste of human, they had such a diverse flavor profile, and they always put up a funny fight. They had their little sticks with strings that made annoying pokes at his hide, and they really did have faith in them, making it so much easier to just gobble them up when he got close.

       Just as he got comfortable, his long form pushing aside the multitudes of bones that littered his home, the mouth-watering scent of fresh, bloodied meat caused him to raise his bloated head. Now this was a damn good day. Slowly he began to slither out of his cave, hissing as his strong muscled body pushed through the sand, and he could see a freshly bloodied slab of meat right in front of his cave. Strange, but he didn’t smell anything else. And as he opened his maw to consume this morsel, the last thing he remembered seeing was the form of a child, falling from the sky, coated head to toe in clay with a rusty shortsword, plunging it into his maw, past his rubbery hide.

       It was messy, Zudrik was right about that, but she could not deny this one! A few onlookers gasped and ran into their homes as Zudrik proudly walked through the thoroughfare, coated in now-dried clay with splatters of thick blood and ichor staining his white tunic as he dragged the head of a Glutwurm behind him. Even a few of the militia were interested, and began following at a distance, wondering where the child could have possibly procured such a thing. As Zudrik came to his Ama’s house, he pushed past the beads once more, blood trailing from the head and clay flaking from his skin onto the immaculately kept clay floor. But he grinned and held the severed head up.

       “See Ama? All by myself!”

       But despite this kill, a creature that had slain many of the village, Zudrik got one of the worst punishments he had ever received from Ama, as not only did he lie, make promises he couldn’t keep the butcher, and make up stories, but he also completely ruined the house and his clothes. But despite what Ama threatened, no matter how hard she tried, she could never take the shortsword away from his hands.