“Root me where I can hear her sing. Where she will sleep in my branches.”

“Take your place here, in the center, daughter. You will fill the clearing, and be my thorn-tree, my child-mother. You will shade the light of my eyes.”

Heather walked into the open space. She knelt at Estella’s side and whispered into the curling blossom of her daughter’s ear, “Dream now as I will dream of you, always.”

Tall grass clung to the soles of her feet as she took her place in the center of the clearing. She tipped her head back, and felt the bark cleave to her, felt her limbs stretch and twine. New sprouts grew from her in bright flashes and filled the space of the clearing, stole the sky of the grove.

Estella sang. Thorn-Heather’s leaves trembled.

Through Gravel

THROUGH GRAVEL

We twisted our bent backs and held our flowers up through the fine-grit gravel and soggy cigarette filters—up through the gaps and the spaces where things didn’t fit together anymore, and we waited.

Beth came to us that spring in her red cardigan, reaching down for the buttercup sprouting from the crack in the sidewalk. She pinched the stem, as delicate as her own little fingers, and she was gone before her guardian could turn to see why she had stopped. She slipped through the cracks of the busy world above, and was ours. The first child of the new spring. The first child in more than eight years.

In the dark of the understreets, by the light of the grates and drains overhead, she smiled nervously as we marveled at her small digits, at how the dimples in her knuckles were fading into lily-slim fingers, at how straight her spine had grown without the weight of the city pressing down from above. At the gap in her smile.

Many of us had gaps in our smiles that year, but none so fresh as hers. Our arthritic fingers grasped at her shining hair. Youth was a balm to eyes even as weak as ours.

We huddled in excited half-formed factions for the meeting where one of us would be blessed with her guardianship. When the hour came and the name was drawn—and it was mine, Aemon—I confess, I wept.

I had never dreamed that when I stooped to my own small flower in the pavement years ago, I would be given a new life, one far from the paths of those I’d lost aboveground.

A new child. My heart filled with love for her—filled the holes in the spaces where things didn’t fit together.