interludes. eden & gany

Post by lucius branwen / 10 — fox on Jan 14, 2023 19:24:26 GMT -5

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Time passes in the forest very softly. In the winter, everything is so quiet. She knits a square in her blanket everyday. She likes being able to hold time like this, in a way that feels real, plush and wrapped around her fingers. There's almost four hundred of them now, different colours of yarn, the shades speckling in between stitches. When she started, she'd thought she might stop after a year.

But now she can't seem to let go of it.

The weather warms as spring imbues the trees with green, dappled with sunlight and sweetness. As soon as the soil can be worked, she sows seeds in the garden. She plants fennel and lettuce in egg cartons and waits until they sprout large enough to be transplanted from the sill. There's a separate plot of land, behind the house, fenced with electric wire. She won't sow those seeds until late summer.

A transporter comes every week for the shipments, and she hands him three cardboard boxes packed with little pink capsules made in the basement.

It rains for six days. The soot from the factories turns into mud on the streets. She finds a whimpering dog at the side of the road going into the District. There's a chain that's been cut by pliers, still wrapped around her neck. There's a deep, red scar bleeding across her face. The dog follows her home. She never leaves her again when Gany feeds her a scrap of meat.

She calls her Daisy.

The days get longer. The strawberries are in season. She sits by the bank of the creek and pulls back the leaves, droplets of red hanging from the stalks in the loamy soil. She'd watched the five-petaled white flowers start to droop with fruit in early summer, crouched down to watch them change. They taste different. Like flowers. Like the earth.

Light pours into the kitchen very early in the mornings. It grows hot and muggy. She sleeps on the floor at night with Daisy, the ground humming with the motion of the electric fan. Sometimes, she'll sit by the creek in the clearing during the day and listen to the birds swoop overhead from tree to tree. Daisy chases the squirrels and tries to climb a tree.

Deep into the summer, she builds a birdhouse and feeds the warblers with leftover grain. She spends a full month training Daisy to leave the poor birds alone. The transporter brings her milk and eggs and food for her dog. She sends him away with the boxes of pills.

She's spent four seasons here.

It feels okay. Most days, she doesn't think about anything. She grows things, she makes things, she eats. She feels whole. The forest treats her tenderly. It feels like mourning and moving on.

A year passes like this.

She turns sixteen alone, with only Daisy. She spends two days making a cake, labouring over the recipe, until she wakes up on the morning of it and doesn't feel like getting out of bed.

It spoils on the counter.

Sometimes, no matter how much time has been smoothed out and worked through her hands, it still feels like something died only yesterday. It doesn't feel like living with the bones or the ashes. It's raw, weeping. It's fragile and new. It wakes her up at night and makes her startle at the slightest touch. She stays awake for three days and stares at the ceiling for hours. She sits in the bathtub until the water turns bone cold.

But then, the plants need tending to. The tomatoes look like little red suns, big and beautiful, growing between the sweet glossy leaves of basil. Daisy whines for her walk. The transporter comes again.

She keeps going.

The air feels so thick in late summer, she could swim in it. It thunderstorms when the heat finally becomes unbearable, clouds ripped apart in the heavens, and it rains and rains forever. The generator fails on the third night. So she lights candles, placing them high up where Daisy can't reach.

It isn't all bad. Nine looked cleaner after a storm, the ash and smoke washed into the drains, sunlight parting to a rare blue. But then, another layer of soot would always settle into the crevices of everything again. Sometimes it felt permanent, when there would be a period of dry weather, like that dust had always been beneath her nails, under her tongue, in her hair.

The shadows flicker on the walls as the wax drips. Daisy hides underneath the bed. She's a huge, fluffy thing. Like half-bear but still afraid of the booms of thunder.

So then, it's strange, when she suddenly comes out.

She pads quietly into the living room, staring very intently, ears perked up.

"What is it? Daisy?"

The door shakes with a loud bang. The transporter's not scheduled to come again until next week.

She thinks of the gun. All the peace laid in her dies. It's like she's fourteen again. That hard, unbreakable thing in her, a little shell of a bullet that presses on her windpipe and makes her hands tighten into fists. She can feel her chest calcify.

She left the city. But it doesn’t leave her.

There's a pistol in a lockbox underneath the bed, dusty with disuse. She slides the magazine in with a soft click. Muscle memory. The round chambers. The door doesn't shake again, but Daisy snaps at the air, barking. She keeps her hands steady.

She slides the lock back. Opens the door.

There's a billow of rain that blows into her. The drops are cool on her cheeks, and the wind howls through the house and swallows the flame of a candle. The air buzzes. A white vein of lightning bursts through the sky. The silhouettes are bleached in brightness, silver outline of the trees, the wheelbarrow, a man. The barrel is pointed at him, unwavering. Her chest is still tight.

He doesn't move.

She would've thought he was dead, but his chest rises and falls barely perceptibly. He lies on her doorstep, half-leaned against the wall. Daisy sniffs him.

She kicks him. Lightly.

He doesn't move.

He might die if she leaves him. And that's what she should do – leave him there until he dies or goes away. If nothing else, then the rain and the wind would take care of him. She wouldn't even need to do anything. She puts the pistol down and stares at the figure. The rain bounces off his unmoving form.

Daisy pulls on his arm and the motion shifts him slightly so she can see his face.

She doesn't like how he reminds her of someone she could've known. Because it makes her soft. It makes her realize how little time has changed her.

She drags him in, trailing mud on the floor, and dumps him on the couch.