myth for sundew

the season changed and the fields were brought to baldness. Sweetie got to wearing a knit hat and a neck warmer. Winter was was always hard but this was the first when they would eat nothing but bread and whatever meat could be salvaged by the hunters. Sweetie was staying in the quarry with her aunt and her grandmother. The sun fell into the space filling it like a bucket. It felt like there was nothing between dawn and dusk. She could have become a grass person. Afternoon was taken by work and during that time she put her mind aside. The only traces of that work were the aches in her muscles and the calluses on her fingers. Her grandmother counted to five as she looked at tea. “These are all the reasons we won’t survive.” Her grandmother said.

Each one stuck to sweetie like a curse. She believed them. She was beginning to feel ill: doubling down at the job.

One morning a bird flower grew up outside at the limestone quarry, which was rare. They were usually by the swamp or the river. When Sweetie put her hands to it in awe, they stuck. Sweetie realized, then, her hands were weeping with thick sticky tears. The flower, so perfect, so symmetrical, got stuck and withered and tore as she touched it, getting worse as she tried to right it. Throughout the day she couldn’t make them stop.

If someone were to ask, she would say she had no idea why her hands were so sticky, but in her heart she knew. She asked Rebecca to make her gloves because Rebecca was barely there at all and she kept secrets. But the goo continued to make its way through the fibers of the gloves. The substance got the flour wet. She knew if the grass men found out there would be consequences. She was terrified.

After many sleepless nights, she came to Pearl. Pearl was always up at midnight, which is why Sweetie approached her and asked her to do an impossible thing.

“You must chop off my hands and burn these gloves and make my hands new in the hearth.”

“But your fingers and wrists will not move.” Pearl replied.

“I will use them like knitting needles. Anything will be better than this.”

She could learn to work with stiff limbs. So Pearl cut her hands off while telling her a story about the moon that covered sweetie and soothed her wild pain a little. Sweetie threw her hands out the window where they remained beside the bird plants and became sundew. She could almost feel their velvet petals of their once-wings.

This is how Sweetie had to make do with hands that were made of ashes and briers. But the hands that were outside had not died. She could still feel them in the cool breeze beneath the bird flowers.