Languor clung like a thin, wet cloth.

Or maybe it pulled--dragged at him--urging him to relax. To crumble and rot away to bones.

Lisander wasn't certain how he resisted. His strength had run down to vapors and then to nothingness a long time ago. There were no hands to support him, or voices to cheer him onward.

So then, it was out of necessity. Yes. That sounded right.

He awoke in the mornings because he had to.

He awoke in the mornings because his little sister's hands tugged at the side of his bed, yanking away the blankets in a determined attempt to climb up. He awoke in the mornings because the air did not smell of sausage and bacon and eggs, and biscuits, pancakes, muffins, freshly-juiced oranges, and chilled maple syrup. He awoke in the mornings and accepted the baton because--well. . .who else was going to?

He was the breadwinner.

So why, then, were they still breadless?

Breadless. He remembered slowly, memory returning in flashes, like banners snapping in the wind just long enough to read them. War banners, he thought, mounted high above the cavalry’s heads as the four horsemen came to grace his home. War took their home, taken Lisander’s mother years before he could even remember; but it was Pestilence that took their father first, back when Lisander still believed the worst a corpse could look was with sunken eyes and bloodied pores.

That was when he became man of the house, twelve years old wearing uniform three sizes too large. He had trudged out to the fields scarcely hours after he had broke ground for his father, and learned the movements from the older men of reaping, husking, sowing, until the motions moved through his hands like blood.

Famine crept like a cold wind through the fields, reaching its long fingers deep into the earth and marring the harvest from the roots upwards. The first stalks of autumn arrived pale and brittle, and then none emerged at all. Lisander and his sisters subsided off of apples and preserved meats until that too, somehow spoiled, and his sister—Macie, older, already considering marrying a city man, meaner but richer—closed her eyes and never opened them again, skin clinging to frame as if her bones had been dipped in wax and carved out. Lisander had rushed to cup her hand and found that her fingernails crumbled away at the lightest touch. Her corpse was no less delicate than a dried August bloom, and they buried her carefully with her hair glued back on.

They moved to the city after that, Jackie gripping her older brother tightly amongst this new world of steam and smoke, of bronze and silver, tall dark buildings that went up higher than any tree Lisander had ever seen. He was sixteen then, or tall enough to pass for it, and he applied to the mill that afternoon, returning to the lodging house that night with a lungful of cotton fibres and hands smeared in soot. He lay down next to Jackie, her small frame asleep and cloaked in gingham, and stroked her hair with his cleanest knuckle.

That was long before the machines stole his will from him.