makeshiftDaisy.

Ellis sits with Basil on an old sofa with wooden feet. He looks at her as if in wonder and she looks at him and thinks his edges are fraying.

He offered her tea and she declined, and then she accepted and the china cup in her hand is only half-full and the windows are blocked by thick curtains

 

it wasn’t right.

It became this, instead (mind the first-draftyness of it, mkay?).

Chapter 7

Ellis sits cross-legged, her back into an uneven wall of dark brick. The bricks are so dark they’re almost black and she wonders if its soot but there’s no fireplace she can see, no chimney pressed into the side of the buildings that flank the square.

Basil sits with tea. Hers is untouched and he’s on his third cup. She ran out of things to say sometime after they left the little house on the rooftop and he led her here, to the small, off-set plaza, with its raised dais and uneven medley of mismatched iron chairs.

“It used to be a restaurant”, he says and she’s more familiar with vendors, men and women who push carts hanging heavy with dried meat and roasted nuts. Not here, but in Ferrule, where they weren’t a luxury but expectation. In the Seventh Tip it is, was, all foodStore, all rations. The bag of salty-cees she took would have used up four stamps.

She still smells like honey dust. She looks up at Basil and starts to speak when she notices him wavering, like his outsides are fading, or being erased.

She peers into her cup, lifts it with two hands and sniffs at the warm liquid.

“It’s not poison,” he says, as if that’s what she’s checking for and it’s all right that he says because she is.

As if she might be able to tell, as if the cup might give off an acrid, almond sent, smell of nightshade or salted jacks or tinsel leaves.

“It’s you’re dusted.” He offers as he empties his tea and tumbles the cup over to her in a somersault.

Dusted. She smells of honey and her mother told her the roseMilk changed things, bees to flowers, to pollen -

“I should be immune.” Ellis says, then she’s wide-eyed and Basil is laughing.

“Guess you’re not,” he says as he leans over and stretches out as long as he goes to hook the handle of his cup into his forefinger.

He stays like that a moment, belly to the cobblestone in his cotton candy trousers and hair as gold as gold.

“You’re fading,” she tells him, but now it doesn’t matter, now he’s just a tripped up rainbow, a faeryDoor trick. He’s why the Queen Bee was smiling.

“Take this,” he says, as he digs, awkward into his pocket and tosses her a small sealed packet.

Ellis palms it, turns it over in her hand. It’s muted, the colour of dried mustard. Flat.

Honey dust.

In a dream of a dream meant to stay in a dream and Ellis opens up the packet, licks her finger and dips to taste all the sticky sweet again.

She waits and Basil’s outsides become all strong again.

“Better?” he says as he rolls over and up, cross-legged as she is, elbows on his knees and watching her with the dust.

“The last dream I had the sewer pipe broke and the front window collapsed like a fish-tank might if the pressure was too much.”

She’d made somersaults of her own, over and under in the torrent of water, the current that carried her right through to the artery and under, lost to the black and the spiny, silver-spiked fish that skip along the edges of keelNests and wait by the moorDocks for someone to fall in, fall over.

Basil lifts an eyebrow. He seems unimpressed. Not bored. Somewhere in between.

It’s a while before he says anything, but when he speaks again, it all comes out as an insult.

“Spring is the middle, it’s neither here nor there, it’s not a place you go, it’s a place you end up.” and he reaches a hand out, palm open as if wanting the packet back. “It’s what opens and closes everything.”

Ellis leans into the cobblestone as if she might collapse herself.

She doesn’t.

Basil doesn’t.

She doesn’t hand the honey dust back and he doesn’t say another thing.

“I’m sorry.”

It comes out sounding like a question.

“You have to want to be here, Ellis. It won’t work if you don’t.”

She wonders what he means. If he means the dust or something worse. Remembers what her mother said about the roseMilk, how half of it was need and the other half was desire, to want a place that always smelled of raspberries, the heady drip of flowers, the soft and the velvet, the slip of ruby over your tongue and the pierce of thorn that always followed.

Like being in love, her mother said.

“I do,” she finally answers, fiddling with the package of honey dust.

Basil looks at her as if she might be lying, but he doesn’t speak, just lifts the cup and unfolds to standing and tilts his head in the direction they were going before he strangely stopped for tea.

–

and that’s better.

It also means I wrote 813 words. Thank the stars we’re into new words, I was so tired of the old ones.

Oh, also? 15, 744 words.

Go team Me.