LoveBites || #NONC2022

2.2 Ghosts

The stranger shot me a half-irritated, half-accosted frown before waving me off. Her friends laughed breathily as they returned to their conversation and pulled her away. Even without their side-eyed glances and half-smiles, my skin still hummed with a live-wire pulse. Run. Run. Run. It was stupid and irrational to feel endangered in the nondescript crowd of a farmer's market, but I couldn't make my heart slow. My ribs snared each breath until the only thing that left was strangled and hollow. There had been someone else at that shipyard. Something was stalking me, hunting me. I wasn't safe. I needed to run. To flee.

A breath of the sun-soaked breeze swelled and caught me. It smelled like sweet grass and sage. Like memories. I could taste the smoke as my grandmother promised to ward off bad dreams and evil spirits. The surge of adrenaline eased. It could not exist next to that near-forgotten peace of my childhood.

Tiny chalkboard signs boasted of soaps and candles made from sweet grass and lavender and cedar. With each scent, I could see the crinkles in my grandmother's eyes, the blanket on the back of the chair, the garden in the yard.

"Are you alright?"

I turned. The vendor could have been one of my cousins. Stocky, grinning, and with the same dark eyes and hair that favored my maternal grandmother's side. My black sheep mother included.

"I'm fine," I said. My smile felt less forced. "Do you sell smudge sticks?"

In world where neopaganism was stylish, I'm sure my question seemed woefully close to appropriation. He took a closer look at me.

"Chumash?" he asked. The Chumash reservation in Santa Ynez was one of the larger reservations in Southern California. As a medical student, I'd entertained the idea of volunteering at their clinic before chickening out. I hadn't been a part of that community since before I could string complete sentences together. Said black sheep mother could never settle in one place for long, much less Montana, and it left me feeling just as outsider as every other person who claimed some fraction of Native American blood.

I shook my head. "Crow. My mom's side."

He smiled encouragingly. "I get it. I'm mixed too. My mom never really figured out how to live on the reservation." He bent beneath the table to retrieve a small packet of bundled herbs and gestured towards an older woman who was wrapping a candle in tissue paper for another customer. "Don't tell my auntie, but I don't think it's so wrong sell smudge sticks to hipsters. We all have to find peace somewhere, you know?"

I thanked him for the smudge stick and waved off his offer to include feathers and abalone. I already felt like I was encroaching on traditions I had no right to, but where hundreds of coping mechanisms had failed, a whiff of white sage had cut straight through my panic. It was irrational, but I felt safer, grounded, for having that tiny tied bundle of herbs in my purse.

All of the feelings of misplaced anxiety and terror gone, I smiled genuinely when I returned to pick up the bags and boxes of vegetables. I double checked Anna's list for the odd assortment of ingredients as I packed them into the trunk of my car. The fruits and veggies, along with the combination of chicken liver and oysters, suddenly made sense.

It'd been years since I'd taken a course in nutrition, but the theme of this menu was iron. Apricots and broccoli greens and and even a dash of citrusy vitamin C to increase heme absorption. In a world of keto and gluten-free and paleo, maybe iron-rich was the latest fad. I shot Anna a text with my hypothesis: either iron-laden foods were the newest nutrition trend, or this dinner she was catering was for a contingent of art-loving anemics.

As I pulled out of the busy lot, the sun just beginning to set, I heard the ping of her reply. Although I reminded myself to check it when I arrived at the gallery, traffic made the thirty minute trip into something closer to ninety. Anna had asked for a quick twenty minute window for me to pop in and take photos of the venue. The LA sky's polluted orange-and-pink sunset faded to dusky purple. My phone chirped with another flurry of text messages. Anna was probably wondering where the photos were. The twenty minute window had long since passed.