myth for alpine wallflower

As kids, Bitter and Sweetie left passionfruit flesh for the cranes, that's how Bitter spoke to them, to tell Sweetie where she was, she does not know if the message passed. The happy memories from back then were short lived, once bitter, and her family were taken.

She scowls because she had been so silly when she was young — so weak. Now she is all sharp edges. Now, those are the same cranes that, dark-eyed and white, fly over the head of the snake who circles the city. The same serpent who crushes the blankets of kudzu, that strangle each other at the edges of the field of emmer. The place the grass men took over is a wasteland, but the snake still circles for days on end, and no one knows if it is a form of protection or predation. The sky is gray with threads of dodder.

Rebecca eats toast and tends to the queen, who, being a poison root, does not bloom at all. The grass men stand in the fields or peer out their windows, even Rebecca, long run down wanders to the window and wonders what a mess has been brought here.

The bronze emblem of the sun is covered in vines at the center of the city. Above, where the evening sun burns the horizon on the mountain, bitter carries with her a skin of water, as she sits on a fallen tree, overlooking the town. In her hair, she twined purple flowers, and she smiles, and she cracks her knuckles, thinking about how her and sweetie used to play.

There has not been laughter in the town made by children in months. But she wouldn't know that, she should be long destroyed for all she's been through, as she rises, she reaches her hair.

And plants a row of wallflowers with a prayer where she has been sitting along the slope, her clothing used to be torn, but she wears only roots and mosses now. She approaches the breach and realizing she can, she cannot get through the vines in a silent tongue she makes a deal with the dead.

At the outskirts of town where the leader of the grass man built his road. Where there used to be bread in a constant stream to and from flowing from the city to lands far and wide. Now the road exports a single loaf a day. There is no work but that of tearing away vines.

Returning home, Bitter does not recognize a single street or pathway. No building is the same except for that big old one, the one sweetie lived in at the edge of town. So that's where Bitter goes.