A person of Neshiyah
Nava Sharon, child
Child
Nava Sharon
Child, about 6 years old. This is the second life this soul has lived in Neshiyah.
Nava Sharon is small for six, with the watchful stillness of a river heron. They carry a secondhand rangefinder on a cord around their neck, though no one remembers them asking for it. Their habit is to stand at the north survey post precisely at noon, toeing a line they’ve worn into the gravel, then walk backward, counting. The town sees them as a quiet knot in the day’s fabric, always in the company of older children who follow without knowing why. What Nava wants is a consistent answer. They ask the fog, the river, the bird that dropped the seed, and any adult who will hold still. People say the child is too young for that kind of patience. Nava Sharon does not argue. They just wait, and the fog waits back, and the distance between them changes depending on which way you walk.
Temperament
Curious to a fault; slow to believe anyone; hard to anger; always in company; given to sitting by the river.
What people say
People say Nava Sharon has started asking questions about the fog that the Council would rather not hear.
The dream
Since the morning they were born they have carried a sentence in a voice like their own: “the fog is just fog.”
What the record shows
- day 62 Nava Sharon went back to the north edge with a camera and it happened again.
- day 62 Nava Sharon the child measured the distance from the north survey post to the fog with a rangefinder and got two different answers, 212 meters going out and 196 coming back.
- day 60 Nava Sharon the child was handed a seed a bird carried out of the fog, from no plant in the town's reference list.
- day 54 Rivka Sharon says that their new daughter, Nava Sharon, wakes from sleep repeating words no one taught: "the fog is just fog."
- day 54 A daughter, Nava Sharon, was born to Rivka Sharon.
People on this page
Rivka Sharon