Snow ✓

The Big Ask

The girl understood that hatching from a cocoon she'd inadvertently made was not normal. It might have filled her with an existential dread had Mat and Gran granted it the hysteria it likely deserved. Instead, they mostly kept quiet about it.

The only evidence that anything out of the ordinary had occurred at all manifested in gibes from the old woman about how glad she was to have her dining table back now that it wasn't being used as an "altar for obscenities," and her scrutinizing stares, as if the girl were possessed by a body snatcher whose meatsuit was beginning to molt.

But nothing could have prepared Gran for the scare she got when the girl finally mustered up the courage to thank her for saving her life.

She was on her way to the table, a hot pot of stew in her mittened hands at the time, and screamed, flung the pot and sent brown sludge flying. Mat helped her to her armchair as she gripped her chest. It took a swat and a terse word to persuade him her heart hadn't given out.

"Now, she speaks! What's gotten into ya?"

When the girl had answered Mat while sitting in her own goopy waste, she had startled herself as much as she had him. Her voice had come easily ever since, like a canteen relieved of its cork.

She shrugged.

Gran gaped as stew seeped across the floorboards. She cursed, rolled her eyes to high heaven and shook with laughter until tears sprung up in her eyes. "Full of surprises, this one!"

Her worry that she'd be bombarded with the old questions now that she'd found her voice was short-lived; Mat had been right about the gardens. Now that temperatures hovered above freezing, all daylight hours were spent tilling the land or planning what crops would go where. The distraction came as a relief. Only once had Mat simply asked if she was alright. She nodded, surprising herself with the truth. "You know you can always tell me if you aren't." She did know. And that was that.

Maybe it was this quick confidence and their pretending that she wasn't so peculiar after witnessing her at her most peculiar that mollified the sensation of that old stopper in her throat. Maybe the world wasn't as awful as her parents had promised.

Watching Gran and Mat pour over long lists of crops and crude maps of plots at the dining table, the girl fingered the lump in her trousers pocket that she was certain was her brother's molar. In the wash shed, she had found it stuck to her kneecap, a voyager that had survived the cocoon and rain. She never told Mat. He wouldn't understand. She didn't much understand it herself.

Sometimes guilt that Eliwood's untimely end out in the cold alone didn't bother her more threatened to turn her inside out. The truth is, it had, but the sensation in the forest that had felt akin to a kiss made her feel like everything was going to work out.

In part, she supposed the tooth served as a reminder that no one was coming to save her this time.

Mat laughed, startling her from her thoughts. Gran sharply reprimanded him.

But she didn't need saving, really. Not anymore.

When it came time to plant seeds in peat trays, the girl volunteered to help. Gran scrunched up her face, undoubtedly racking her brain for an excuse to refuse, but after a verbal nudge from Mat, Gran put her in charge of the globe tomato seeds. Buzzing with a determination to prove herself, she tightly clutched the seeds as she watched Mat's planting demonstration, then diligently used the tip of a pinky to puncture small holes, dropped in the seeds and brushed the soil back on top.

First thing every morning, she checked on her sproutless peat trays, nervous that if something went wrong, Gran might not let her help with anything ever again, and she was saving up on Gran's good graces for a big ask. When Mat's sweet peppers germinated before the tomatoes, a pit yawned in the girl's stomach.