myth for passionflower

The town was broken apart in the absence of friends, neighbors, and family. People were trying to understand who they were without their companions.

All that was left of them were empty homes, still open from summer’s warmth, now, cold, singing songs with autumn’s wind. Red maple leaves grew brown and withered in the rooms hanging with towels and open bottles of sunscreen.

Lucinda was Sweetie’s grandmother. She aged ten years in the span of a month. Someone left with her pills. she was dying - or so everyone thought. She started keeping ants as pets. She’d dot her wrists and temples with honey and let them crawl all over her body.

“You never want to be alone.” She advised Sweetie - who visited her after work. Her hair was disheveled and sticking out all around - a grey and purple crown, only a crow or a granddaughter might bow to. Sweetie worked even harder: harvesting, cleaning, studying, organizing, mending, mostly in silence. She would often screw her eyes as If she was trying to learn an equation. So many of her peers were gone. Her stomach would sometimes cramp with a fury, and her head would ache. Her spine felt as if it was a brittle pine needle.

“You’re not eating enough.” Lucinda said one day. She baked bread that was speckled with ants. They sat under a tree and ate together. Sweetie fell asleep and dreamed she jumped over a flower and tripped into a river and everything was okay there, flowing and taking her to someplace beautiful.

When she woke she knew she had to find a river, but the corn had blight and she quickly forgot her dream for the sake of her work.