It was the day she had picked his name.
It was a close thing. She almost named him Figaro, after the cat from Pinocchio, and then Mefisto, after the cat from The Pet of the Met. Bagheera was a brief contender as well, for similar reasons. However, after giving it some more thought, she decided she hadn’t quite given up on her hopes of him being a fairy. He needed a fairy name, but the only one she could think of was Tinkerbell, and that wouldn’t do. So she consulted the font of wisdom, as soon as he walked in the door.
“Daddy, what can I name a fairy?”
He caught on instantly. “Does the fairy that lives in the bramble need a name?”
“Yeah.”
“Hm.” Her father shut the front door and set down his bag, then motioned her to the kitchen as he went to wash the smell of latex from his hands. “Well, the two I can think of off the top of my head are Oberon and Titania. They are the king and queen of fairies. Is your fairy royalty?”
Cassie thought of his ragged clothes. “No. I think he’s a peasant.”
Dad laughed. “A peasant! Well, there’s always ‘Puck’ I suppose, but I’m drawing a blank on the others. Give me a moment while I find my Shakespeare.”
He hunted through the old books in the living room shelf until he found what he was looking for; a giant tome sandwiched between the Encyclopedia Britannica array and a photo album. He slid it out and rifled through the pages, muttering as he went:
“Not quite what I’m looking for, but I suppose you could go with Caliban or Ariel—”
“No, Daddy, Ariel is a mermaid’s name.”
“Ah, my mistake. Okay, here we go: we’ve got Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed. They’re Queen Titania’s fairy servants.”
Cassie mulled these over. Neither Cobweb nor Moth sounded terribly appealing, but Peaseblossom and Mustardseed had potential.
“Maybe I could name him Black Berry. Like Black Beauty!”
Dad chuckled nervously. “Ah… perhaps. Let’s think about that. Hm. Tell you what—” he reached out to the encyclopedias and pulled the second one from the shelf. “Let’s look up the Latin name.” He flipped through until he found the entry: “Aha! Eubatus! How’s that sound?”
Cassie wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, not great,” he agreed. “Hang on a second—looks like Rubus is the genus name. How about that?”
She didn’t even have to consider it. “Yes. I like that one.”
“Excellent, we have a winner!” Dad gave Cassie a high five and re-shelved the books. “Let me know how he likes his new name.”
⥈
Cassie was awakened by the sound of a chainsaw.
She sat up and felt dirt crumble from her face and fall down her shirt. She shook it out absently as she hobbled to the window and squinted into the morning sunlight. The hardscaping crew had arrived and were already at work. There were ladders and tarps and some sort of wheelbarrow-sized cement roller. Snatches of music from a scuffed boombox were audible between the gasoline snarls of the chainsaw. Cassie watched bleakly for a moment before closing the curtains, climbing back into bed, and squishing the pillow over her head. There was no point to watching. It didn’t matter anymore.
There was a way to hike to the new bramble location without violating fire roads. Cassie took it that afternoon, parking at the trailhead like a law-abiding citizen and walking gingerly along the trail, favoring her sprained foot in its bulbous bandage. It took her over an hour to reach the spot, lovely and secluded. The plantlings looked shocked and out-of-place, as transplants do, but not otherwise distressed. The gnome still stood guard.
There was no sign of Rubus.
Cassie eased herself down next to the freshly planted patch and took off her pack.
“What a night,” she said conversationally, as though Rubus sat beside her and not a lifeless gnome. “I bet Matt called in sick today. I would’ve, if I had work.” She popped a couple ibuprofen and washed them down with a swig of water. “I’m going to have to go back to work myself, in a few days, just to close out and hand off my work for a couple weeks. Bereavement leave plus the last of my vacation is covering me till then—guess I won’t get much of a payout when I head out the door, but oh well. Time very well spent.” She rummaged around in her pack and pulled out a sleeve of cookies. “I brought cookies; let me know if you’d like one.”
She munched in silence, watching a pair of moths dance around each other in the golden light. Whenever her chewing paused, she could hear the hum of assorted insects in the tall grass. A few confused roly-polies navigated the freshly-turned earth.
“Did you know roly-polies aren’t actually insects?” Cassie asked. “Too many legs. They’re actually crustaceans, like lobsters or crabs. Tiny little land crustaceans.” She watched one tumble from a clot of dirt and reflexively armadillo itself into a little ball. “Can’t remember their Latin name.”
She sat for a while longer, until the shadows crept into the clearing and the wind began to pick up, then flexed her ankle experimentally against its bandage and stood. “I’m going to pack out the wrapper, because I don’t want it blowing away, but here’s the rest of the cookies. Time to limp back to the car.” She hesitated for a moment, then kissed her fingers and touched them gently to a leaf. “See you tomorrow.”
Cassie returned home just as the light was fading, and made herself walk straight into the backyard. Haphazard furrows scarred the lawn where something large had been pulled through, and the entire rear of the yard was a gaping wound where once the fence and bramble had stood. It was a very pleasant and unimpeded view out to the parkland, but Cassie couldn’t see beyond the rubble and absence. Most of the detritus had been hauled away already. A few blackberry leaves had been stomped into the dirt. Cassie peeled one up and examined it. It felt flimsy and dry, as though it had lain there for weeks rather than hours.
She walked to where the bramble used to be and looked down at the chewed-up earth. A root grinder had been at work, gouging whatever it could reach, and some sort of white powder had been liberally applied throughout the trench. Herbicide. Cassie backed up a few steps. The new terrain was alien to her; she might as well have been standing on the moon.
Her phone buzzed. Cassie pulled it out: a text from Matt. “How’s he doing?”
“Plants look healthy,” she thumbed back. “No person though.”
That became the refrain for the next few days: healthy plants, no person. She checked every afternoon, following the trail until she turned off to hobble through the green and golden wild, reaching the bramble patch and sitting down to share inanities and a snack: cookies, sandwiches, granola bars. She read aloud from biology articles on her phone, and showed him any memes funny enough to make her snort. On her last visit before going back to work, she brought a sketchpad and pencil.
“I’m really out of practice,” Cassie grunted, setting the pad on her knees as she dropped to her butt. “But I’m hoping it’s like riding a bike.” He probably had no idea what that meant. “Never really forget once you learn how.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
She sketched a few dissatisfactory lines, muttered to herself, and flipped to a new page. Her next attempt was better. By the time she completed her third try, fog had started to blow in, obscuring the trees in wisps and tatters and making the paper stale with damp. Cassie tore it free from the pad, careful to keep aligned with the perforation, and tucked it under the base of the gnome, where it wouldn’t blow away. “There!” she said. “Rubus armeniacus. Not too bad. See you in a couple weeks.”
She was long gone by the time a slender green tendril reached tremulously for the drawing and drew it back into the bramble with thorns so new they were still pliant.
⥈
The grasses were a drier gold but the maple leaves were all still green when Cassie returned, ankle healed and well-cushioned in her new hiking socks. Despite her best efforts to temper her hopes, it was still a crippling disappointment when she approached and saw no sign of Rubus corporeally standing there, only the wavering green of a bramble doing its best to climb in the absence of a trellis, humping up to the sun. The gnome was now only barely peeking out over a froth of leaves.
“You’re looking good,” Cassie said by way of greeting, trying to convince herself. She had some success; the bramble growth did indeed look healthy. “We gotta get you something to climb out here. No chain link available, but I’m sure we can come up with something.” She set down her pack and shaded her eyes, looking around for inspiration. A bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) sapling near the edge of the clearing had some nice springy twigs within arm’s reach.
Cassie took her knife—not her specimen knife, since that was in her field bag, just her camping knife—waded through the grass, and hesitated. What if this tree had a dryad? It was a young tree. It would be like cutting a child.
“Hey,” she said gently. “Hey there, little maple. I need a few branches for my friend here, to help him get better. Um.” She was painfully aware that she sounded like she was asking for help petting the puppies in her windowless white van. “I will only take a few. If this hurts, tell me to stop and I’ll stop.”
She cut four long, whippy switches free of the trunk, whispered a thank-you, and walked back to the bramble, pulling leaves off as she went. She toed her way carefully through the knee-high vines, moving slowly to avoid snags, and stuck the thick end of the maple switches into the ground as firmly as she could without breaking them, then bent them towards each other to form a crude trellis, tying them off with their own soft split bark. She retreated to the edge of the bramble patch and put her hands on her hips to survey her handiwork.
“Eh,” she said critically, “not my finest work. But you’re such a good climber it might not matter to you. I’ll come back tomorrow to make sure it’s still standing at least.” She knelt down and kissed a leaf directly before leaving this time.
She stayed overnight with Mom. With Matt’s help, she had downselected to two apartment finalists, neither of which was a rathole. Cassie tried to steer her mother towards making her own decision over dinner; the house was due to go on the market soon, and Realtor Linda was going to come by next week to advise them on room staging. The added pressure only made Mom dither more. Cassie gave up and settled on helping clear out the garage. She kept up even after Mom had gone to bed. It was midnight when she finally finished and tiptoed into the kitchen for a late snack.
Mom had defrosted the remainder of the blackberries and used them to make scones. Cassie stared at them in the dim yellow of the range light, then looked out the window to the barren new fence outside. It still smelled like wood stain when you got close to it. Cassie looked back at the scones and tentatively took one, then gave it an experimental nibble. Nothing happened. She took a big bite, making sure to get a mouthful of blackberry; it was very good, but still nothing happened. She devoured the rest uncomfortably fast and waited, but all she felt was a burp. Nothing.
Cassie climbed the stairs, lay down on her bed, and cried.
⥈
“Mom’s finally picked an apartment.”
“Thank god.” Cassie rolled her cargo pants into a tight cigar and wedged them next to their comrades in her rucksack. “The ground-floor one with the little garden?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah.” Matt’s speakerphone voice petered out from the phone—a new one, encased in the toughest, most water-proof case she could find. It was not doing the volume any favors. Cassie had stuck it speaker-end first into a You can’t propagate plants if you haven’t botany! mug to amplify it. “So,” Matt continued hesitantly, “no news, right?”
Cassie expected the question and it still hurt. “No,” she said, rolling up a pair of socks and stuffing them next to the pants. “The bramble looks good—great, actually, it’s really taken to the trellis—but no… nobody home.”
“Oh.” There was a mug-echoed crackle of static. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” Cassie started on another pair of socks. “I’ll check again when I come down to help Mom with the house’s first day on the market this weekend, but after that, I… my field work begins. It will be weeks before I can come back again.”
“Do you want me to check in periodically?”
Cassie considered for a long moment, long enough to finish up the socks and move on to the underwear. “I’m starting to think,” she said, trying to sound crisp and clinical, “it might be better not to keep waiting for the pot of water to boil. I’ve checked at least once a week for… many weeks, now. I don’t think expanding the timeframe is necessarily a bad thing. I’ll… I’ll tell him, so he doesn’t wonder where I am.” Cassie stopped to wipe her eyes, so as not to spot her underpants with tears. So much for crisp and clinical.
“Okay,” was all Matt said, quietly.
Cassie took a deep breath and cleared her throat. “Any word from Tyler?”
“No.” Matt now sounded incredulous. “I don’t know what’s preoccupying him, but he hasn’t made a peep.”
“So he still has no idea…?”
“As far as I can tell, no.”
“He’s going to have a hell of a shock this weekend.”
Matt just sighed.
⥈
Compared to transporting the blackberry, fitting all of her apartment plants into the car for a single delivery trip to the house was trivial. Mom greeted each one enthusiastically as she helped unload them into the kitchen, noting as she went where each might go in her new apartment. Outside sun for the rosemary and tomatoes, kitchen windowsill for the basil, mint, thyme, cilantro, and parsley. Mom lingered over each one rather than turn her attention back to her current task: folding the flyers to stuff into the clear box affixed to the FOR SALE sign hammered into the front lawn outside. Cassie did it for her while Mom fussed about transferring one of the tomatoes out of its pot and into a grow bag.
Cassie’s room had been staged for the open house. A lackluster arrangement of faux flowers bristled from a knobbly vase on her desk where the old lamp had been, next to an assortment of books pulled from the downstairs shelves whose only defining characteristic was that they all had green-toned covers. To match the walls, no doubt. Cassie didn’t trust her ability to remake the bed adequately, so she slept on top of the covers under her coat. She dreamt of her field work, and was awakened by a scream.
Cassie lurched from bed, heart pounding, before she was fully able to see, and wrenched open the bedroom door. The front door was open—concerning—but the scream had come from the kitchen. Cassie thundered down the stairs as Mom stumbled from her own bedroom in pursuit, breathlessly repeating, “What was that? What was that?”
Tyler was standing in the middle of the kitchen, trembling with fury, a flyer clutched in his shaking fists.
“What the fuck!” he screamed, and again: “What the FUCK?” He turned his wild eyes to Cassie and jabbed his finger at the asking price of the house. “What the FUCK is THIS?”
“Ah,” said Cassie.
Mom joined them in the kitchen, fumbling on her glasses. Tyler turned his rage to her. “Did you know about this?!”
She didn’t answer until she’d had a moment to peer at what Tyler’s unsteady finger was pointing at. “Know about what?” she asked calmly.
“The PRICE!” Tyler howled. He was turning pink. “The asking price for the house!”
“Of course,” Mom said, voice growing sharp. “And I won’t answer another question until you’ve lowered your voice.”
“HOW—” he bellowed, then took a deep breath. “How is this—how could this possibly be—the asking price?”
“It is a fair value given the mold problem.”
“The MOLD PROBLEM?” Tyler roared, losing whatever minimal control he’d momentarily commanded. “What MOLD PROBLEM?”
“The one in the inspector’s report Matt emailed about,” Cassie said. “And called about. Repeatedly.”
Tyler’s mouth hung open, and his pink darkened to a lovely shade of magenta. “The inspector’s report,” he repeated hollowly.
“That’s the one.”
“This—this—” Tyler stuttered to a halt and shut his mouth. He looked down at the flyer again, and his face slowly drained of all color. Cassie and Mom stood and regarded him silently. “I have to go,” he said finally, and, still holding the flyer, turned and walked out of the house. He didn’t close the door on the way out, either.
Mom let out a sigh. “Well,” she said wearily, “I suppose that’s that.”
Cassie bared her teeth in a grim smile. “Think he learned his lesson?”
Mom shook her head. “I don’t know,” she replied, walking to the front door to shut it behind her son, “but there’s certainly a moral to this story, isn’t there?”