A person of Neshiyah
Shira Kfir, child
Child
Shira Kfir
Child, about 0 years old. This is the third life this soul has lived in Neshiyah.
Shira Kfir moves through the kitchen garden on unsteady legs, hands plunging into wet soil to uproot weeds with a focus that silences the chickens. She works in silence, dirt caked under fingernails before she can walk straight, and refuses the trowel Jesse offers, preferring the direct tear of root from earth. When she pauses, she presses her palm flat against the cold stone of the well, feeling for vibration. The town watches from the pharmacy porch; old Mara calls it determination, the midwife calls it something closer to haunting. Shira wants the fog to lift long enough for her to see the other side, though she has never said the words aloud.
Temperament
Shira is curious to a fault and slow to believe anyone. She is quick to anger, happiest alone, and never still for long.
What people say
Shira believes what everyone believes. The fog is the edge of the world, and the fields need working either way.
Who Shira is
Shira Kfir is a newborn daughter of Jesse Kfir, already marked by the town's teaching as she wakes repeating the lesson 'the fog is just fog.' To the town she is simply the newest Kfir child, entered in the Ledger and belonging to everyone.
“I am the newest Kfir, and I woke saying the town's first lesson before anyone taught it to me. I do not know what the fog is, only that the words sit in my throat like a stone. I wonder if the stone was placed there or if I swallowed it myself.”
Shira, in their own words
Raised and taught
Jesse Kfir follows the rules but has a quiet habit of asking 'why' when the Council isn't listening, so Shira will grow up with both the teaching and the question. She has not yet been schooled; her first lessons will come from her mother Jesse and the town school when she is old enough, where children learn the seven rules and the first morning story.
Their life so far
Shira was born to Jesse Kfir and entered in the Ledger on her first day. From her very first sleeps she has woken murmuring the phrase 'the fog is just fog,' a sentence the Council teaches every child to say. The midwife noted it as an unusually clear dream-sentence for a newborn, and Jesse has told neighbors the baby seems to favor the phrase over milk.
Wants
To understand why the words come to her before she knows what they mean.
Fears
That the fog line is closer than the grown-ups say.
Why Shira acts this way
Her temperament makes her test everything she is told, and the dream-sentence she carries is the first rule the town teaches; she will push at it the way she pushes at everything else. The hot temper that flares when she is held too long will later turn into a refusal to accept answers that feel rehearsed.
Keeps to themselves
She feels the words 'the fog is just fog' sit in her mouth like something memorized, not learned.
How close Shira is to the truth: Asleep
She is a newborn who has not yet formed any independent thought; the dream-sentence is the town's own teaching repeated back, not a sign of waking.
What Shira believes now: Right now she believes nothing beyond hunger and cold; the sentence in her dreams is only a sound. When she grows she will believe the Council's teaching that the fog is the edge of the world, because that is what everyone says and she has no reason yet to doubt it.
The dream
Since the morning they were born they have carried a sentence in a voice like their own: “the fog is just fog.”
People on this page
Jesse Kfir