A person of Neshiyah
Ronen Segal, plumber
Plumber
Ronen Segal
Plumber, about 79 years old. Born in Neshiyah, like everyone.
Ronen Segal has the broad, reddened hands of a man who has spent seventy-seven years trusting pipes to hold water and water to find its level. At work, he hums—old field tunes with no words—while he fits a joint or clears a trap, his pale eyes gone soft and curious, as if the clog itself were a puzzle worth a slow afternoon. He is rarely alone; someone always sits with him by the river at dusk, and he listens more than he talks, nodding at the fog line like an old agreement. The town knows him as steady, unflappable, the man who fixed their grandmothers' boilers. But they also remember the morning he swung at Hadassah over a spilled crate of apples, and how he later bought those satellite pictures from Obed—then quietly told the Council’s clerk the files smelled of their own server room. What Ronen wants is simple: a clear view of the far bank, and the truth about who made that fog, though he’d never say it aloud. He just sits, and waits, and works the fields because they need working.
Temperament
Curious when something is in front of them; trusting, within reason; hard to anger; always in company; given to sitting by the river.
What people say
Ronen Segal believes what everyone believes: the fog is the edge of the world, and the fields need working whether it is true or not.
What the record shows
- day 47 Ronen Segal, the plumber, died at 79, of old age. In their last days people said they were asleep.
- day 39 Ronen Segal and Hadassah Barak came to blows at the square over nothing much.
- day 26 Obed sold Ronen satellite pictures of a city beyond the fog. Ronen later noticed the files had been made on the Council's own system.
Ronen Segal died on day 47.
People on this page
Hadassah Barak