After some delicious dessert (it had raisins and honey and probably a high enough carbohydrate count to send people at nearby tables into a stupor: I shared it with Doloise) I waved at her rolled-up schematic.<\/p>\n
“What are you planning, or is it a surprise?” I asked, trying to sound far more nonchalant than the panic the idea occasionally put into me.<\/p>\n
She blinked at me slowly for a few minutes, which, I have to say, did not bring my heartrate down any.<\/p>\n
“I meant on the blueprint paper,” I referenced with a finger to what she had left rolled-up and standing next to her on the booth’s bench.<\/p>\n
“It is a declaration of independence.”<\/p>\n
It was my turn to blink.<\/p>\n
She went on eating, covering some of her portion with heavy cream.\u00a0 I decided that calories didn’t count in fairyland.<\/p>\n
“You know what I am,” she said.<\/p>\n
“In theory,” I hedged.<\/p>\n
“I am not a single leaf, nor even a branch, but the tree itself.”<\/p>\n
I tried following her analogy, if that’s what it was.\u00a0 Could have been a metaphor.\u00a0 I was still hazy on all of that, heck, it might have been an allegory, but really, that’s for every man to decide for himself.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I wasn’t very good with that, because my mind kept slipping back to the idea of how to do correspondence between animal life and plant life.\u00a0 Were leaves like hair, and the forests were nests made of their own pieces?\u00a0 No, because hair is a dead thing.\u00a0 Leaves are alive, they have function.\u00a0 Limbs and branches made even less sense, even if they were sometimes used as synonyms.\u00a0 (I know what synonyms are, thankyouverymuch.)\u00a0\u00a0 After all, a tree could regrow and thin sticks were less like arms.\u00a0 Maybe leaves were like thousands of tiny fingers.\u00a0 Or cilia, not that I was sure we had cilia.\u00a0 I was pretty sure we didn’t have flagella.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And roots?\u00a0 Were they like earth-tongues, licking delicately at nutrients and searching for water like some kind of mole beneath the surface?\u00a0 But without tastebuds?\u00a0 Maybe leaves were tastebuds?\u00a0 Drinking in sunlight.\u00a0 I wondered what sunlight tasted like.\u00a0 “Light,” probably – far fewer calories than in normal…um.\u00a0 Where was I going with this again?<\/p>\n
Doloise continued after I didn’t respond.<\/p>\n
“I believe that there is the possibility that there are viable seeds from this tree.”<\/p>\n
I opened my mouth without particular concern for my future and asked, “What kind of tree?\u00a0 I mean, is there a period of dormancy?\u00a0 Do you have to hold the seed in water and a little bit of charcoal like an avocado tree?”<\/p>\n
“You do not take me with all due concern.”<\/p>\n
“Seriously?”<\/p>\n
Heh.<\/p>\n
She didn’t respond.\u00a0 In fact, she put her fork down onto the plate and continued to stare at me from behind her dark shades.<\/p>\n
“Fine, fine.\u00a0 You want independent existence.\u00a0 How is that even possible?”<\/p>\n
“All good creations have independence,” she said.\u00a0 “A child is just the creation of the material and ephemeral of the parents.\u00a0 Why would I be any different?”<\/p>\n
“I don’t honestly know,” I said.\u00a0 I pulled out a raisin and chewed on it for a moment, thinking.\u00a0 “Everything that I do know is speculative, but it seems to me that you’re an active construct, meaning it continues to take power to keep you together, and that without the full interest and effort of those who formed you, you will dissipate.”<\/p>\n
“This dissipate – will it hurt?” she asked.<\/p>\n
“Well.”\u00a0 I stopped.\u00a0 “Realms can be made of places, too.\u00a0 And they don’t go away or have volition, right?\u00a0 But they have a link – they have limits to where they can go, and what they can be like, and they still cost some kind of\u00a0 energy.\u00a0 So maybe there’s a way to do some kind of exchange of rules.\u00a0 I don’t think it would hurt, though.\u00a0 You would just lack purpose until you faded away, maybe?\u00a0 Or maybe it would be instantaneous, like you were unsummoned.”<\/p>\n
She dropped her head for a moment.\u00a0 “You are not made of comfort.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t laugh.\u00a0 I was going to, but I didn’t.<\/p>\n
“I had thought perhaps you could close the connection between myself and my Family.”<\/p>\n
I dropped my fork.\u00a0 I took a moment of time to find it out from underneath the table and set it aside.\u00a0 I think she was serious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is a declaration of independence. A lot like those letters you write to your folks the first time you run away because they caught you at doing something and disapproved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-three"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}