As I Lay Pondering [Finished]

[Bee]

It was a bright kind of day and on days like this they liked to sneak up into Mom’s greenhouse, which was ordinarily off-limits to just about everyone on pain of death because Mom was insanely possessive of her plants and neighborhood rumor had it that she had killed people for daring to try to break in, but Thalia was a crafty sort of person and she didn’t believe half the things people said about her mother anyway because the thought of her mother violating someone with a radish for looking at her lilies the wrong way was just ridiculous and also a little gross; besides, such a place as Mom’s greenhouse was the perfect place for Iskra to come and have a nice warm nap and a nice warm nap sounded good to Thalia too so it occurred to her to come up here and try to get a little shut eye, which would be beneficial on a number of levels, not the least of which being that Thalia was a very busy person and sometimes even busy people needed a little bit of a break, and she could think of no one else she’d rather break with but Iskra—except Tosiek, but he wasn’t available at the moment, and she thought it might startle him to see her at peace instead of seeing her leap enthusiastically from one part of the day to the next; in this state of mind, she lay a small blanket down on the dirt in the greenhouse and sighed contentedly.

[Dark]

Iskra was rather hesitant about sneaking into Mnem’s garden—there were many unpleasant rumors floating around the neighborhood about Thalia’s mother, and though Thalia didn’t seem to pay them much mind, Iskra was loathe to discard them completely, having met Thalia’s mother in passing, and having had experienced the uncomfortable feeling of being in the presence of pure evil—but the thought of a nap in the warm, humid glass room that was Mnem’s garden was too tempting a proposition to turn down, and Mnem was out for the day, besides--though Iskra had an uneasy feeling that the woman was probably capable of knowing someone had entered her sanctuary through some sort of sixth-sense--so Iskra followed Thalia into the garden, hesitant as she was, and settled down in the moist soil; the heat soaked into her skin and bones, making her forget her earlier concerns, and she looked around the garden with lazy interest.

[Bee]

Mom really did have one of the loveliest gardens, though Thalia was somewhat amused and perplexed and worried by the thought that most of the things contained in this room were probably hazardous to one’s health once Mom worked a bit of magic on them; she knew, at the very least, that the beautiful violet flowers that resembled lilies were actually highly poisonous Yarrow plant that did not give off a deadly odor but when ground up turned into an tasteless infusion capable of being dissolved into just about any food conceivable—Thalia wondered for a moment just how many people Mom had managed to kill over the years, but stopped because it was not a thought conducive to sleep and she would much rather ponder the hard, practical yet pretty angles of greenhouse and how every line seemed perfectly drawn to give the right flowers just the right amount of sunlight, though Thalia didn’t ponder this for very long either because organization bored her and she would much rather imagine all of the flowers suddenly coming to life and dancing for her amusement while wearing cunning hats.

[Dark]

Iskra was deeply enjoying the warmth enveloping her, sinking in under her skin and warming her from the inside out, and she was enjoying her surroundings too—the glass was pretty to look at, and the flowers were, too, though she didn’t dare to touch any of the harmless (and not-so-harmless) looking plants that surrounded her; the Yarrow Gardens was known for its poisonous plants, and if that wasn’t enough to keep her curiosity at bay, the fact that these were Mnem’s plants was added incentive to avoid any sort of physical contact, as she was well aware of Mnem’s reputation--it actually reminded her of the first time she had met Thalia, in a greenhouse not unlike this (and at the same time, so very different, considering the nature of the plants here in Mnem’s garden); she would have been in a lot of trouble for napping there, if Thalia hadn’t come along and stood up for her, and Iskra was grateful for the interference, grateful that she could now call Thalia a friend, though she would never admit these thoughts out loud.

[Bee]

In Thalia’s head the little flowers had gained faces, shucked the pots that bound them, and were now dancing along every available surface in the greenhouse and also on top of it, singing some happy little ditty about how they were so sweet and pretty and would love to be your friend but would also poison you to death without hesitation if they felt like it, which seemed an awfully mean thing for the flowers in her head to be singing about; she was glad that in real life she didn’t have friends who were going to poison her, friends like Iskra who was happy to totter along with Thalia wherever she decided to roam, because friends like those were awfully hard to find and the only other people Thalia had really found were Monty and Tosiek, and Monty still liked to bite if you weren’t careful but mostly Monty was content to harass other people like everyone in the world though Thalia still doesn’t think it was Monty’s fault that Vishne got his fingers bitten off because really, everyone in the Family should know how to handle Monty though she was very sad it had given V additional Angst, because next to big brother Hadyn, big brother V was the last person in the world who needed another excuse to Angst--and with those thoughts, Thalia drifted off to sleep, to dream of Hadyn as a giant angry red flower.

[Dark]

Laying in the warm heat, Iskra drifted in a haze of lazy contentment, and thought about her friendship with Thalia; she honestly didn’t know where she would be without that fateful meeting, and she didn’t particularly care to think about the alternatives, as she hadn’t been headed in a good direction since long before they met, and if she was honest with herself, the only reason that had changed was because she had met Thalia; dear, absent-minded, klepto-Thalia, without whom Iskra would still be wallowing in depression and self-loathing, and though she was still prone to do so on occasion, Thalia never let her linger there for long—anything of a gloomy nature was obliterated by Thalia’s happy, sometimes naive optimism--and Iskra would never be able to fully expressed just how thankful she was for that, and Thalia’s friendship, and it was with this overall feeling of contentment that she drifted off to sleep.