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Furiosa spends her first Squashtime hiding.
It’s been six months since Dementus left her at the Citadel. Four months since she escaped Rictus. One month since she’d begun daring to walk about during daylight hours, rather than creeping around in the nighttime shadows like a rat.
She’s dressed herself in cast-off clothes and a few rags to cover her tattoo and the hair that’s starting to grow back. She’s as hidden as ever, and safer for the hiding. She’s hopped on a treadmill, and it’s grueling, and grinding, but the job means rations and blessedly leaves her too tired to think at the end of the day when she crawls into whatever secret nook of the Citadel she’s chosen for that night.
Furiosa has thought, up till now, that every day is the same in this rock. That the Citadel lacks the rhythms of home: the feast days, the group dances. All that exists to mark the seasons here is a minute change in wind and temperature—from hot to hotter, or hot to slightly less hot.
But as the season tips toward not-as-hot, there’s a curious fizz building through the War Boys, the other treadmill rats, even the Wretched in their holes. Anticipatory. Uncertain. Almost giddy. She catches wind of the others making things with found objects the way the gearheads built vehicles and made fancy accessories. For the big night.
She cocks her head and tries to listen, catches every few words over the creak of the mill.
Squashtime, Furiosa hears it called. A festival to celebrate a good year’s harvest. Or, in the case of a bad harvest, to mourn what might have been, and to settle in for a hard off-season with grim determination. To give thanks for survival, or to cross your fingers and hope for the best. Whatever the outcome of the harvest, there’ll be a party. Masks. Disguises. Drink. Dancing.
The best night of the year, they call it.
Furiosa ducks her head and doesn’t let her scorn show. It’ll doubtless be a free-for-all that ends with not a few murders.
The day the frenzy is whipped to a fervor and Immortan Joe declares that because of their obedience, Valhalla has blessed the Citadel with plenty of produce to last the dormant season, Furiosa tucks herself into an alcove to watch.
The next Squashtime, Furiosa participates.
It’s not the day that the squashes are picked from the vine that they celebrate, she learns, but rather the day they’re finished curing. The curing takes three months after picking, and that, she gathers, is why anticipation starts so many weeks before the holiday itself. Picking Day is the unofficial start of the Squashtime season, the point at which everyone begins to plan disguises and revelry.
Once the greenthumbs have scooped out the sweet orange innards and taken the seeds they need to sow for next harvest, they send sack after sack down Below to be roasted in salt over fires on the day of the party. Furiosa makes a mask and a headdress from bits and bobs she takes from a scrap pile and moves through the crowd with her shoulders thrown back and her chin held high.
She doesn’t uncover her hair, but in the shadows and with her disguises she feels bigger, more menacing. She’s coated herself in War Boy white and feels like one, too, drawn a grimace on her face with grease. She takes a packet of squash seeds someone has roasted over the fire and follows the others’ lead, passing them out to the Pups when they ask. She tries the rotgut, coughs on her first sip, wipes her mouth, and sips again. Just a little.
There is a memory of bonfires and dancing and music that’s not much different from this.
The wind in the trees, cool grass under her feet—
She drinks again. Tamps the memory down.
The thing about Squashtime is that rank vanishes. Among the faces she can pick out behind masks and disguises, Furiosa notices a handful of praetorians and higher-up blackthumbs and greenthumbs, but there’s no sense of deference to them. Behind a mask, all are equal. The men who would be inclined to bully a skinny dogman in the workshop are, for a night, just like her. They fry up squash seeds and orange rounds over the fires and dance and tell stories and get soused.
Furiosa goes to Squashtime with the rest of the build crew. She shimmies at the edge of a dance circle alongside the Brakeman and Pissboy, cracking flinty seeds between her teeth. When the War Pup assigned to rear defense of the Rig bounds up, he gets a seed each from his fellows and looks disappointed until the Brakeman good-naturedly offers a forearm for him to pinch, pretending to be gravely injured and squeaking like the winch as the War Pup darts away, giggling.
But as much as she likes Squashtime, Furiosa still plans to leave.
She doesn’t plan for a Mortiflyer ambush.
She doesn’t plan for Praetorian Jack.
She doesn’t plan for her Dogman disguise to blow away into the desert.
As much as she minds, as much as she hates that she’ll be stuck here at least another few seasons, Furiosa doesn’t mind getting another Squashtime.
And she thinks, as the season grows nearer, that she wouldn’t mind getting a Squashtime with Praetorian Jack.
Furiosa is in a corner of the workshop carving her disguise when Jack finds her.
“What are you making?”
She tips the mask in Jack’s direction. It’s meant to be a surprise, a secret until the big night, but it doesn’t matter if Jack sees it now; she’s just getting started.
Jack looks at the mask. Looks at Furiosa. Looks back at the mask. Squints.
Furiosa is just wondering whether she should threaten him, keep him from stealing her design, when Jack ventures: “For Squashtime?”
She lifts a shoulder.
Jack huffs and shakes his head.
“What?”
“Just…” he rasps one hand along his cheek, resting his palm against his chin. “Doesn’t seem like your cup of aqua-cola.”
Furiosa shrugs again, turns away. She’s busy.
The War Boys often bring booty back from scouting parties: vehicles, supplies, medicine.
And people.
“Got a wily one today, boss!” one of them crows to she and Jack as they watch the scouting convoy roll in through the parting waves of the Wretched. There’s a slim body chained in a cage that’s familiar enough to make Furiosa’s skin crawl.
The driver of the bike pulling the wheeled cage comes to a stop before she and Jack. “Get a look at him, eh?”
There’s a figure curled on the floor of the cage, clutching something to its face. Fabric?
“It’s his mother,” hoots the War Boy driver, and Furiosa bites the inside of her cheek to keep her expression stoic. “He done made a mask out of ‘er! Right feral, this one.”
“Reckon it’s a good sign,” says another War Boy as he pulls up behind. “An om-men. For Squashtime. Came with his own mask, didn’t you, boy?” He pokes a foot through the bars of the cage to give the figure a jovial prod.
“Found him with these,” says a third War Boy. He hoists a box made of wood, hole in the center, long handle strung with what look like metal strings. “Could make a good disguise out of it, sure enough.”
At that, the curled figure on the floor of the cage springs to standing, reaching through the bars of the cage toward the object. He’s gabbling something unintelligible, moaning.
Furiosa seizes the object, returns it to the captive. “You don’t take booty like that without the Immortan’s permission,” Jack says. “Could be valuable.”
The War Boys name him Coma for the way he goes limp and still—staring, maybe, though who could tell behind that mask—for hours at a time. The box with the long handle is an instrument, which the Immortan allows him to keep, so long as he plays battle hymns for his magnificent War Boys.
When she’s on guard rota in the Immortan’s throne room, Furiosa passes Coma a sliver of rat jerky and a lettuce leaf. Coma sniffs them, licks them, then gobbles them down.
Squashtime draws nearer. Furiosa finishes her disguise. Jack has been curiously absent the last few days. She wonders idly if she’s ever seen him at the party in years past; she wouldn’t know, and nor would he. The whole point is to make yourself unrecognizable.
Still, maybe they saw each other from across a bonfire, through their masks. The thought sends a shiver through her that has nothing to do with the cool edge to the air.
She doubts it.
She doesn’t think she’d forget his eyes.
The air of the Citadel tightens. Everyone is snappish, or hushed, or contemplative. Furiosa sees one of the younger crew members crouching in the corner, rocking, a low whimper coming from between his lips. She can’t blame him. A good harvest means living to see another year; a bad one…well. Survival’s not guaranteed in the Wasteland, but a slow death of starvation is decidedly mediocre.
Finally, Immortan Joe calls the Citadel to attention. Furiosa could swear everything stops. He lifts a hand, in which he holds a squash. He digs his fingernails into its sand-colored skin and pulls, opening, revealing two orange halves that drip juices onto the rocks below.
“Because of your obedience to me this year,” he says, “Valhalla has blessed us.”
A cheer goes up, silenced with a wave of Immortan Joe’s hand. Even Furiosa is awash with relief. “Continue this in the coming days and we will have more successful harvests!”
Dusk falls. Bonfires are lit. The War Boys and blackthumbs and treadrats roll barrels of rotgut from the distilleries, start heating sheets of seeds over the fires. The air is thick with good festive smoke and nutty seed-smell and excitement.
Furiosa dons her disguise and puts up her hair, eager to make herself as unrecognizable as possible. The party’s just picking up steam when she steps off the lift and scans the crowd of jubilant bodies. Someone presses a pouch of seeds into her hand.
Jack had asked to borrow the Apache and Furiosa caught him testing his finger on the blade, so she knows he must have gotten it in his head to carve something. Still, she’s expecting that something to be a mask like hers, so it takes her a couple of passes over the crowd to notice the tall, broad figure holding a lit-up squash.
He’d taken one of the scooped-out squashes and carefully cut into the remaining skin, making slits and slashes so the candle inside draws attention down and away from his face. He’d kept that part of his disguise simple: painted with War Boy colors and used some grease to draw lines that reminded her of some animal. He’d left his hair dark, but parted in the middle, not slicked back over his head. Furiosa is impressed. If not for the way he was standing, even she might not have recognized him.
Jack is looking over the crowd the way he scans the horizon. He stops on every face, every figure. She forces herself not to flinch when his eyes land on hers, but his crinkle in a smile and then he’s moving through the party.
“You found me.” She’s a little disappointed; she’d thought her disguise better than that.
“Course.”
There’s a loose ease in his shoulders. A Pup skips toward them, stops, and sizes them up. Jack dangles his seed packet in invitation.
“Squeak or squash!” the Pup says, and Jack gives him two whole seeds. The Pup darts off.
Furiosa finds them two hollowed-out ends of a gourd and fills them from one of the barrels. This shine is honey-infused, the Boy tending it tells her, “sweet as you.” There’s no malice in his tone, so Furiosa just gives him a friendly elbow in the side in exchange for the drink.
She and Jack move from fire to fire. At one, some are using their hands and sticks to cast gruesome shadows on the wall, telling scary stories. They listen to half of one about the Headless Bikey, who traverses the Wasteland searching for his missing head, before the story devolves into squabbling about the details.
Jack gives his illuminated squash to a group of wide-eyed Pups.
There’s wild dancing at another fire, more like a joyous brawl than anything, the dancers egged on by the Immortan’s drummers. Furiosa sticks to the stone wall, enjoying the warmth of the alcohol in her throat, her belly, her veins. Enjoying the warmth of Jack at her side. He’s always just there, just beside her, for almost a year now.
She leans her head back, looks up at the stars through their veil of smoke, rolls her head against the stone. The air is cool. The fire is hot. Her belly is full of squash and seeds and drink. For once, she’s not sore. Everything’s softer at Squashtime, even the stars.
She must say that aloud, because Jack turns to her and murmurs an agreement.
They float through the crowd, full to bursting with paint, masks, cloth, stitching, ink, tattoos, until they find a low boulder where they sit. Coma’s cage is just to one side. Someone has attached his instrument to an amplification system, but as Furiosa watches, Coma’s long fingers drift to the cable attaching the instrument to the speaker. Is it just her, or does he breathe a sigh of relief when the cable falls and he can strum the instrument without the sounds reverberating across the Citadel?
Furiosa nudges Jack with her elbow and nods in the direction of the cage. The rest of the rowdy festival disappears. Coma turns toward them, strums the instrument he’s made, makes a satisfied noise. He keeps playing. It's a low, slow song, haunting and elegant and so beautiful Furiosa wishes she could bottle it up and keep it to listen again and again.
The partygoers settle, pairing off to dance or swaying by themselves or talking as quietly as the War Boys ever are. Furiosa glances sideways, catches Jack's eye, looks away. She inches her knee closer to his, feels her face flush when his knee pushes back against hers. She clenches her fist around her empty cup, then sets it off to one side. Jack throws the rest of his drink back and he stands and extends a hand.
It’s awkward at first. They begin palm-to-palm, his right to her left, her right to his left, and saw their arms back and forth for a few beats. But Furiosa looks over at the creature in the cage and he seems…disapproving…somehow, so she slows the pace.
She and Jack have never needed words to understand each other. They lift one pair of hands, Furiosa lets her other settle on Jack’s neck, and his lands just above the hem of her jacket, in the middle of her back.
They couldn’t do this in light of day, in front of their crew. This kind of thing isn’t allowed, not for Praetorian Jack and his second. But tonight, they’re not praetorians. They don’t have a crew. They’re not even Furiosa and Jack, and that fact should be disquieting, since normally Furiosa and Jack are the safest things to be.
Her hand is resting on the short, soft, filthy hairs at the back of his neck and his thumb is fluttering over her knuckles and even if she only gets to have this once a year—fuck, even if she only gets to have this once—it’s worth it.
Coma’s song fades, slides into another, liquid as smoke. When they pivot Furiosa sees him, face turned in her direction, and behind his mask she can see his approval. She knows Coma can see hers, as well.
“I like Squashtime," she starts.
Jack hums.
"I like…that you can be anything. Anyone.” She swallows. How can she explain that after so many years having to hide, having the option feels like freedom? “It’s your choice.”
She can feel the tendons in his neck flex. A nod. “Not be praetorian for a night.”
“Not to be…” She trails off, but what she's said is enough. “Not to be.”
Another nod. The hand on her back goes further, wrapping around her waist. Their fingers entwine.
On any other day, they’d be watched. Examined. But that’s the point of Squashtime: letting the line between what you are and what you want blur a little. Existing behind a mask that allows you not to hide.
They stand and sway together long after the music and the party fade, hand in hand, chest to chest, masked and unmasked.