Carrel Done Lead realtor of all our little town's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Carrel opened the door of the first steel house and the dust hit her like a slap. It rolled out in a gray cloud and coated her tongue. She stepped back, coughing into her sleeve. Two families were supposed to see these houses tomorrow. Both families lived in tents behind the sawmill. If they could not walk through the door without choking, they would not sign, and they would not sleep under a roof this winter. She had inherited both steel houses when the town council named her lead realtor. Two shells of riveted plate, built years ago and left to rot. Her whole purpose, the reason her name now hung on a painted sign above her small porch office, was to put poor families inside these walls. She could not do that while the air inside tasted like ash. Carrel walked back to her office and stood on the front step. The hand-lettered sign above her read Carol's First Realty Office. She had scrubbed the porch boards herself last week. She could scrub steel too. She drew up a list on the back of a listing sheet. Wet sheets to trap dust. Buckets. A broom with stiff bristles. Two helpers. She crossed out two and wrote four. By midmorning she had them. She caught the blacksmith's apprentice hauling coal and traded him a favor. She found the gardener at the farmers' stall and asked plainly. Randall came without complaint. The young woman who helped in the kitchen gardens tied a rag over her mouth before Carrel finished the sentence. "Wet everything first," Carrel said at the door of the first house. "Dust flies when it's dry. Drown it, then sweep." They hung soaked sheets in the windows. Carrel poured water across the floor in slow arcs until the gray turned to gray mud. Randall pushed the broom in short strokes, the way a smith works metal, no wasted motion. The gardener scraped corners with a flat stick. They filled six buckets with sludge and carried them out past the fence line. The second house went faster. By late afternoon Carrel stood in the middle of the steel room and breathed in through her nose. The air smelled of wet iron. Nothing caught in her throat. She paid Randall in coin and the gardener in a promise of first pick of the next garden plot she listed. She locked both doors and walked back to her office in the last light. At her desk she found a folded note pushed under the door. The sheriff's hand. Both waiting families had heard a rumor the houses were unlivable. One had already asked to be moved to the bottom of the list. The other wanted to see the inside tonight, before dark, or they were walking to the next settlement at dawn. Carrel picked up her lantern and went back out.