A person of Neshiyah

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Yarden Segal, child

Child

Yarden Segal

Child, about 15 years old. This is the second life this soul has lived in Neshiyah.

Yarden Segal is a small, quiet child with a habit of trailing one finger along the fence line on the way to the river, as if counting the posts without looking. They sit for hours at the water’s edge, content to watch the current take leaves and not ask where they go. The town knows them as Elam’s daughter, the one who talks in her sleep, the one who once borrowed a rangefinder and came back with two different measurements of the fog, 212 meters one way and 196 the other. Yarden wants a better camera, something that holds more light, but mostly they want to sit and let the river answer whatever it answers. The fog is the edge of the world, everyone believes, and Yarden believes it too, though a sentence from a dream keeps returning, plain as a stone: *the fog is just fog.* They do not argue with it. They just carry it, like a pebble in a pocket.

From Yarden's notebook

I want to sit by the river for a bit before anything else, like I said in my notebook.

I wonder if the fog is just fog, like in my dream, but the numbers keep changing and I want to see the river for a bit before anything else.

Temperament

Content not to ask; trusting, within reason; hard to anger; happiest alone; given to sitting by the river.

What people say

Yarden Segal believes what everyone believes: the fog is the edge of the world, and the fields need working whether it is true or not.

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 48 Tal Tamir and Yarden Segal talked a long while at the square.
  • day 40 Yarden Segal went back to the north edge with a camera and it happened again.
  • day 40 Yarden Segal 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 37 Elam Segal says that their new daughter, Yarden Segal, wakes from sleep repeating words no one taught: "the fog is just fog."
  • day 37 A daughter, Yarden Segal, was born to Elam Segal.

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