Post by Liessel on Apr 22, 2024 19:10:57 GMT -5
Mary had earned back no teeth, but she'd only just started, and it was beautiful here. The sun was warm and the sky was blue, and before her bloomed half a field of brilliant red poppies with black hearts. The notion of the teeth, and the notion of the poppies, were there, but gently in the background, and the work was like needlework--meticulous--rather than any of the other things that might have been asked in return for things she needed but had lost. The baker to whom she owed the debt looked a little odd, but was kindly.
"Why hasn't anyone come for you, sweet?"
Just like that, the baker was behind her, and the day was over, and she was in a cave. The cave was full of poppies, red as blood, from end to end, and she couldn't know that and know anything else at the same time, unless the baker was near, in which case she could know him.
As if he had been there all along, as if it had been the cave and not the open field that was warmed by the sun, Mary pulled herself upright and turned her head toward the voice of the baker. Her fingers were heavy with poppy pollen, the soft stuff of it caught under her fingernails, staining them yellow. She was not aware of that, though, not as the baker called her attention to him.
The poppies disappeared, faded into the background until they were no more in her awareness than the walls of the cave which could have been made of air themselves for all that she knew of them. Her young brow pulled in, as she looked at the baker and shook her head, "Who would come for me, sir?" She asked, as if he were a gentleman. As if she had a mouth full of her own teeth. As if she hadn't been sitting among thousands of blood-red poppies just a moment ago.
"Is there something wrong with you?" he asked. He was so kind. Attentive caring could come with an edge.
The baker was the face of a stranger remembered. "I -- don't think so, but" the pull of her brow eased. Mary's young face was smudge covered with flecks of poppy pollen on her right cheek and across her brow right at the edge of her hairline where the yellow powder clumped and hung heavy against wispy strands of red, "I do feel strange. Maybe I am ill."
"Is that why they won't come for you? They've left you like a babe on a hillside, for the wolves?" He huffed and looked around them, tapping at his overgenerous teeth with one claw. "Do you like it here?" --He asked it suddenly, as if it had popped like a spark in his thoughts.
Who, the thought came to her again like smoke drifting in and out of her awareness, would come for me? She couldn't think of names, but the feeling in her heart said that there were those who would if they knew where she was. --Where she was... "Maybe they do not realize that I am here," she told the baker before her brow eased the rest of the way and she looked around as if considering. The world was a haze. She turned her eyes away, but he was there where her gaze had turned to as if she hadn't looked away at all.
He was very kind. And very attentive. "I --do like it here, I think."
Another tap of the claw on the tooth as the kindly baker contemplated. "I like having you," he told her.
That was a while ago, of course. At some point, between then and now, she'd returned to the poppy field under the blue sky.