To discourage any further visits, Rice leads Grandma back to the stables. In the meantime, I start surveying the garden. Yep. That is certainly a garden.

As a quick preface, I will admit that I have no idea how gardening works. I’ve lived in an apartment for the majority of my life, so the closest interaction I’ve had with gardening was mom’s annual reaping of various house plants. She had a way with killing plants, and I doubt I’ll be any different. Though, with the sheer amount of weeds I’m working with, inheriting her black thumb hardly seems like a bad thi—

“How did the talk go?”

I whirl to face Rice, finding her way too close for comfort. Defensively, I take a few steps back. One, two… that should be about right. Enough distance for a few stones to be put down. A stone walkway would look pretty nice. “The talk?”

“With… Holly, you said?”

The vines will need to go, can’t have kids tripping on them. Will they want to keep the creeping ones going up the side of the house? It can look pretty cool in the autumn, but it might harm some other types of plants. I do wonder what kind of plants are in Purgatory? Maybe there’ll be some cool ones I’ve never seen before. Hopefully, I won’t have to set out and find them on my own. How do you even get seeds from a plant that doesn’t have fruits? I guess I never thought about it before…

“Prince? Prince, are you alright?”

Bushes. Bushes are nice. Hedges? Do they have hedge mazes in purgatory? If not, I could revolutionize the field of pretentious gardening! Yes, I see it now. A big hedge maze for all the children to get lost in. Wouldn’t that be something? And we could have a statue of a dragon over here, and an anti-ghost crystal over there. Easy! Man, this gardening stuff is so simple, I’ll be sure to have it done within a few weeks at most. How quai—

“Prince!” Someone grabs me by the shoulders and begins shaking me violently, nearly dislocating my arms in the process. The world shudders around me. Rice is standing in front of me, gripping me tightly. “Prince, snap out of it!”

My eyes wander around the features of her face, finally falling on her wild and free mop of hair. “Where’s your hat?”

Face twisted in worry, it takes a moment for my words to sink in. Her head shakes mildly. “What do you—” Her hand moves from my shoulder to her head. “Oh, darn it—”

Leaning down, I pick it up from the ground, where it lay between twisted vines. I stand up and place it on her head. “Here,” I say.

“Th—thanks,” she replies, her hands pinching the brim. For a moment, I can only see her mouth under the hat’s shadow. Why is she biting her lower lip like that? Is there something wrong? “Prince…” By adjusting her hat, I can see all of her face again. Somehow, she looks younger than usual. Almost her age. “Did the talk go badly?”

My gaze slides past her face and to the garden. “A little,” my voice says. “But I’m sure it’ll all turn out just fine in the end. It always does.”

“And… if it doesn’t…?”

If it doesn’t?

I sway, the world flashes in black and white, and all of a sudden I’m in her arms again. My brain feels fuzzy, like I licked a battery. “Sorry,” I mumble up at her, attempting to clamber out of her arms only to find myself too weak to do so. Hm? My legs… Why can’t I…?

Oh, no. She’s looking at me oddly. What is this expression? Worry? Pity? Is that it? I don’t like that. “Sorry,” I say, even though I meant to say ‘stop looking at me like that.’ “Sorry,” again. Broken record.

Saying nothing, not bothering to grace me with a response, she leans down, letting me go down, lower and lower, until I’m lying on the weed-covered ground. Itchy. Prickly. Poking sticks, moist grass. Bugs? Bugs.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

She sits down next to me, legs crossed.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Sorry.” I don’t know what’s happening. Shouldn’t my paralysis resistance be undoing this? Or is this something else? Why can’t I move? This is stupid. “Nothing happened,” I tell her. “I’m fine.”

Face set in an expression I loathe more than anything, she reaches over to my chest.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

Her fingers find the hole in my shirt. There’s no blood, but the hole hasn’t completely healed yet. Pain flickers through her eyes, even though I haven’t done anything.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Nobody got hurt.”

“Does that include you?”

Itchy. Itchy back. Itchy chest. “I’m fine.” Another one. “Sorry.” Final one, now, all together. “Nothing happened.”

She sighs, softly, and now I’m very, very, very aware of just how much of a bother I’m being. What a great friend I am, huh? Once she realizes that there’s nothing she can do, she’ll leave. That’s how it goes. I’m not sure why I ever…

She’s holding her banjo now.

…What?

“One moment,” she says as she begins tuning it. Twang, twang, twing… Once she’s happy with it, she does a scale. Do, re, mi, fa… “There,” she says. And then a few cords. I can’t tell the names, but they sound nice, even though they’re being played on a banjo. “Alrighy, then. What would you like to listen to?” Even though she clearly wants one, I can’t muster any response. “Right. If you want me to stop, blink three short, three long, three short times. Okay?”

Three short…? What?

“Good. In that case, here’s Wonderwall…”

Three short, three long, three—

She laughs at me, all smiles. “Just kidding, just kidding. I don’t even know how it goes! Instead, here’s Beer Barrel Polka…”

I listen to her play. It feels surreal, but not wrong. There are a lot of worse ways to spend a time like this, I guess. It helps that she’s weirdly good at the banjo. Really, it’s to the degree where it makes me wonder why she went with sharpshooting as her main skill. The two don’t even translate into each other! Ridiculous.

And right as I’m about to zone back out again, she starts singing. With the voice of a chain-smoking harpy, she squalls words I’ve never heard before with an accent that feels made up.

“The pity of the love I gave you,

My eyes, I'd cry today-hahahahahahaha!

My youth, it has fled like a dream,

I've all left of it, in my heart, just my memory!”

With her piece sung, she goes straight into a fast, playful banjo solo.

I take the moment to ask, very seriously, “What the hell was that?”

“That,” she says, still playing, “was the refrain!”

“There’s no way that’s what they actually sing. Didn’t you say the song was called Beer Barrel Polka? And why did you laugh?”

“Well, that’s…” She pauses briefly to focus on a particularly quick part, “Honestly, I don’t know the lyrics! My mom taught the Czech version to me, and I never bothered to figure out what it meant.”

“That was Czech?”

She smirks. “Well, what did I sing about?”

“Um…” I start counting on my fingers. “Giving up on love, leaving youth, deciding to cry…” I turn to her. “It was really heavy, actually.”

“Wow,” she says, leaning back. “And I had no idea! I’ve been playing this at family gatherings since I was five… I wonder what the rest of the song is about.”

I sit up to be face-to-face with her. “I don’t know. Did you never learn that part?”

“Nope! Only the refrain. I had to save some mental strength for the rest of the song, after all.”

I rub my chin. “Really? That’s…” I look down at my hand. My hand that’s moving. My hand, which I can move. “Huh.” At my side, I can see her smile, the joy going all the way up into her eyes. I turn to her, unsure whether I should prostrate myself or run away screaming. “What was…?”

“My uncle,” she says, letting her banjo rest in her lap. “He used to have fits of… Well, something like that. They usually only lasted a few minutes, but sometimes, it could go on for hours. My dad would carry him to his bed and leave him there to let him rest, but… At some point, I figured that, well, if I was all mute and immovable, stuck like that… I wouldn’t much like to be alone, you know?”

“...I guess so, yeah.”

Her face leans into my view, serious and collected. “But if you don’t want me to, please tell me. I’ll leave. And don’t think I mind or anything—I really don’t. To me, what matters is that you’re alright.”

“I appreciate it, but…” I clench my hands. It helps hide the tremble. “Hopefully, this shouldn’t happen again. I’m sure it was only a one-time thing.”

“However, presuming that it wasn’t, and assuming that it will happen again…” Her hands clasp around my bundled fist. Warm. “What do you want me to do to help you?”

My eyes linger on her hands. Scarred, but steadfast. She isn’t trembling. I let my hands soften, and now, I’m holding her hands, too. I can feel the indentations on her fingers left from pressing the strings of the banjo. My fingers trace the lines across her fingers. “If… if it isn’t too much of a bother…”

“It isn’t,” she promises.

“Then… I’d love it if you did what you did just now again. Although, maybe put me on a bed or something, the insects were really bothering me. And…” I break into a smile. “Please don’t sing the next time?”

“Hey!”

“Or—or maybe do. I don’t know, maybe hearing horrible singing will let me get out of it easier?”

“Horrible singi—now you’re being terrible, Prince! It wasn’t that bad, was it?”

I grin at her teasingly. Her pleas are music to my ears. Never shall she know the answer.