aspen cutler ✚ d7 ✚ fin

When I was little, I wanted to grow up to be a dinosaur. If I had to settle-- which was never an option with my parents, but I always wanted back-up plans anyways-- I'd be okay with just being tall.

I didn't exactly get either wish. Sometimes my hands will get so chapped that it's like they have dinosaur scales, but no dinosaur and I'd stopped growing at a towering 5' 7". So much for being that "tall, dark and handsome" so many dream about.

Now that I'm almost an adult, I'd have hoped my idealism would be under control. No. It's still an infestation, harboring its hopes in the deepest reaches of my mind. That's a melodramatic way of saying I'm a hopeless romantic with my head in the clouds.

At least I know about it, though. My father? No clue. Doesn't realize he's as quiet as he is. That he'll trail off mid-sentence to chase one of his own thoughts that don't quite make it to his mouth. I love that about him though. The way those green eyes of his study you-- no fear, no judgement. He acts like I'm the most important person in the world when I'm talking to him.

That's probably why Mom married him. She likes to feel important. * She likes to feel listened to and heard. No doubt it's a product of a troubled childhood she never talks about. Or, it could be she was just spoiled rotten. I don't really know. She doesn't talk much about what her life was like before she met my father.

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Loralee's wrinkled, but so soft, hand shook as she picked up the pestle to begin crushing the cornflower blossoms into a pulp.

"Got a bad case of pink eye going around. Don't need any more kids catching it," she murmurs before starting in on the flowers. The wooden pestle barely makes a sound against the cracked-and-reglued-too-many-times gray mortar.

"Don't need you catching it," she says with a glance up and a smile at Aspen, who perched on a stool that just barely got him visibility into the crushing dish. "What will I do if my young protigee goes blind? How will I teach you about flowers and herbs, then?"

He thought for a moment, his brow furrowing, before saying, "Maybe by touch? Or smell? They all smell so different."

"That they do! Very good. It's better to tell the plants by their smell and feel than they're look. And why is that?"

"Because so many plants look the same!" he crows.

"Excellent!" She looks down into the mush at the bottom of the mortar. "What do you think? Is it ready to be boiled?"

He goes up onto his toe-tips, leaning over the table to peer into the dish. "Yeah. It's good."

"Perfect! Did you get the fire started like I asked you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You're such a good boy. Now, go fill this with some water from the basin," she says, poking at a thin metal pot with rings on either side. "Be quick about it! I don't want to beat you to the fire."

"Yes, ma'am!" he says before grabbing the pot and scampering out of the dilapidated green house. 

Loralee took a deep breath as she looked around her garden. A large portion of the polycarbonate tiles in the greenhouse, once meant for housing non-native plants and saplings, radiated with cracks that leaked water in the downpours that frequently dumped rain across District Seven.

It had been her special place for decades after it had been abandoned for a "better" section of dirt somewhere else in the district and she'd managed to continue cultivating a large majority of the trees left to her, harvesting their fruit and seeds to continue their growth after having to remove them. Her first gumbolimbo tree had nearly pushed out several of the roofing panels before she'd realized she'd need to regularly chop it down just to keep it manageable.

Of course, now she found her aging body, at one point in her life accustomed to the lumber work, rejecting her. Her right side wasn't as steady as it once was and her once ever-present strength was beginning to retire, if not fail entirely.

She looked towards her tiny eleven year old devotee as he came scampering back to the side door to poke his head in.

"Loralee! I put it on the fire all by myself! Are you coming?"

Her thin, wrinkled lips pursed into a smile, though she could feel it relaxing ever-so slightly on her left side. The palsy that got her own mother was coming for her. She could feel it deep in her seventy-two year old bones and she'd long since resigned herself to the possibility.

"Thank you, Aspen. You're such a help! I'll be right there."

She set the pestle aside, to be washed later, before taking the morter in her more-reliable left hand and stepping towards the small, crackling fire outside.

Loralee looks up at the sky, sniffing the air. "Smells like rain! Better get this decoction finished quick so you can run home."

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When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I'd wear bowties and a white coat and I'd heal everyone from hurting. When I'd told Mom, she snapped back, "Well then maybe you should have been born in Six, Aspen."

I learned quickly I didn't have any choice but to settle with being a healer. No fancy school-- in fact, I ended up skipping large portions of school, especially during flu season or large-scale accidents, in order to help Loralee once I began apprenticing with her.

My parents are masters of the silent disappointment routine, which they instantly put into practice when I'd come home at ten to tell them I'd started an apprenticeship with Loralee, the herbalist and healer who was only summoned from her hut by the abandoned greenhouse when someone was hurt, sick, or needing to be born.

Being ten, I didn't know that there were rumors stretching from years back that whispered about Loralee putting people to forever-sleep and by the time I heard the rumors for the first time, I'd already seen the flowers and berries she kept in a special spot behind her house.

By the time I understood the gravity of the rumors, she'd already explained to me why sometimes it was better people didn't suffer, and that if they were conscious enough, most of them would beg for death.

By the time the hut on the hill and the not-glass greenhouse and all of the whispers were mine, I'd seen enough people ask to die that I could ignore their side-eyes from their kitchens when I brought their snot-nosed asthmatic another packet of treatment.

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Winter was on its way.

Oranges mixed with the olives and emeralds of evergreen trees abounded in the woods near the small town Aspen called home. He knew it wouldn't be long before it was time to harvest as much as possible from the greenhouse to prepare for the cold and freezing season.

He carried a loaf of rough-crusted bread and a clean set of blankets with him in the bag he'd sewn from an old tarp to practice his stitching, along with the medical instruments kit he'd taken from Loralee a few months before when he found her, fallen over in her hut with one of the knives near her hand. It had been used only to try and save lives. Part of him worried her using it to end her life would curse it.

The falling was more common now, and so he'd help her shuffle her way from the hut to the chair wherever she'd asked him to move it, if he'd managed to understood her slurred and rasping speech. She spent less and less time in the greenhouse and more and more time in the garden he now silently referred to as the "eversleep garden."

"I thought we talked about this, Loralee," he'd chided her when for the fourth morning in a row, he'd arrived to find her laying on the floor of her hut, tipped out of her bed.

"But the sunrise is Rowan's favorite. If I could just--"

"Loralee. You are going to break something if you don't wait for me. You're lucky you've only gotten a few bruises."

"But I want to see Rowan!" she'd shouted. "I want to see Rowan! He's watching the sunrise!"

"I can't do that, Loralee," he'd said tiredly. "You know why I can't do that."

"It's because you're an asshole! You just want to keep me to yourself! You can't keep me here!"

Loralee had begun jerking about, her attempts at flailing and hitting him being cut short by her stiff tremors. He'd tried to grab hold of her arms to keep her from lashing out at him.

"Loralee! Loralee! Stop it!"

"No!" she'd yelled before she began screaming at him. "No!"

He'd managed to restrain her, picking her up and carrying her to the bed where he'd set her down in it quickly before leaning into her face.

"If you ever get out of this bed before I am here, you will never see Rowan again!" he'd shouted.

Loralee had gone still, her eyes filling with tears before she'd begun wailing.

Aspen shook his head to clear the memory. It had taken that to finally get her to stay in bed before he was there and thus their routine was established.

Every morning, he'd help her out of bed into her chair to see the sunrise and chatter a conversation with her dead husband into thin air, while he pulled the always-soiled sheets off the bed and took the tarp out to air out.

This morning was different, though. He could tell as soon as he entered the house and she wasn't looking at the door, waiting for him with chatter about how excited to see Rowan she was.

He kneeled by her bed, and smiled before murmuring, "Loraaaaleeeee! Come on sleepyhead. Let's go see Rowan."

She managed to turn her head towards him and half-way open her eyes. "Rowan's dead." Tears filled her eyes. "Rowan's dead and it hurts so much. Everything hurts. Please--"

Aspen took a deep breath. "Come on Loralee. You gotta get up."

"P-please," she murmured. "Just bring me some eversleep mixture. Please just let it stop."

"You're not--"

"Please!" she cried.

Aspen glanced to the back door and back at Loralee, before he rested his gaze on the handle.

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Seems like the whole town showed up for the burial.

Nobody said anything.

I'd thought being a healer was only about saving lives.

It had always been Loralee's responsibility. 

Now it's my job to replant the eversleep garden every spring.

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* written since entering 79th PaT 2018

1576 words