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an impractical flame on millstone lake (or, of an age)

Summary:

Qifrey runs a home school out of his slightly rickety but charming Victorian. His newish neighbor won't stop burning scraps from his pristine garden.

A love letter to WHA, Practical Magic, The Secret History, to writing, to cooking, to upstate New York, to living in community, to growing up and growing old.

Notes:

Hello!! I have been working on this story for quite some time and I'm even rewriting a chapter (unfortunately it is the next chapter so it will be a hot second). I did an outline, character descriptions, I consulted a friend. I'm writing from POVs who aren't Olruggio (though there is some Olruggio as a treat). I really wanted to exist in this world full of long little nothings in a dreamy rural house with a found family for a little while. I told my friend "I want this to have Secret History vibes but not actually be sad at all", but I can't hold back all the sadness.

Chapter 1: Coco, early April

Notes:

I'm restructuring and re-uploading these chapters with edits, new chapters, and just general Betterment.

Chapter Text

               It was April and across the glade hearts were opening up like lilies do, how they unfurl pinky-nail shaped and pearly from their drooping green stems like the white forearm of a shy lady dropping a trinket into one’s hand. Neighbors poked their heads out of their burrows, afraid to let loose of their winter routines until it had not snowed, had not rained, had not for days. These neighbors had forgotten, though, the important adage of rain; every nasty mis-step in a mud puddle meant scores of dandelions and gladioluses in the next month, surely, and the promise was, as it was every year, kept.

               Coco could hardly believe it could be so beautiful outside, though this would be her fifth spring living at the big house (named, aptly, Atelier, by its owner, her professor). Having come from farmland, the quaint yet sprawling nature of upstate was both similar and as different as could be to her mother’s gold-green fields, which rotated soybeans, sunflowers, and wheat to keep richness in the soil. This was her favorite clock-mark of her favorite time of the year; golden hour in spring on an afternoon in which it had rained earlier, so everything was still dropleted in dew but if she chose to sit and draw or write, as she often did, her skirt would not soak through. The golden motes of pollen lazing through the cool, thick air, as refreshing as a glass of water, reminded her of home as she sat with her back against a willow and took out her pencils to capture the sudden green of the gardens and the grey gravel paths, the dark wood of mailboxes, the brown-yellow of cobblestones leading to the rusted bridge to the old factory, itself rust red and standing out against the verdant green of the woods.

               If she had finished lessons for the day, which she had, and if it were not too rainy and if she was not helping Tetia study or if Qifrey had not requested help in the kitchen preparing that night’s dinner, Coco would often pass late afternoons in this way. She had become quite adept at telling time with nothing besides the slow set of the sun behind the dark, thick trees at the edge of the horizon. The more time she spent outside, the more in tune, it seemed to Coco, that she was with her own body. When she first began studying with Qifrey at twelve, she had been more nervous; her wrists shaky when drawing, her mind wandering and impatient. It was he that suggested lessons outside, which both helped and hurt the girls’ concentration in different combinations and intervals, but Coco had found it immensely calming; much easier to learn parabolas when one could watch a pair of cardinals card through the shimmering pale undersides of leaves, or multiply when one ant became four became sixteen little soldiers marching down the ash-brown rivulets of wood on an oak. Richeh would become obstinate and either get intensely focused on frog-catching or fully tune out; Tetia would be happy to be outside but not quite be able to unmoor her mind from the tight leash on which she kept her anxiety; and Agott, of course, would be juxtaposed against the crook of some tree, her long legs dangling in her pressed trousers as she presented disinterest yet still attain perfect marks on whatever quiz Qifrey gave at the end of the month on the subject.

               In fact, on this late afternoon in late April, one petal off a forget-me-not dropping off the calendar of its stem to join the others, Coco could see down the slope of her little clearing and up the hill on which the Atelier, a surprisingly tall and pointed nouveau-Victorian farmhouse in maroons and browns and all dark wood inside that took on a petrichor scent year-round, sat, could see the almost-perpetual glow from the kitchen window, yellow and orange toward the center with the dark shadow of Qifrey’s bent head at its core, that signaled dinner was beginning. She could also see something new, which was welcome but surprising. Coco was anxious, but not incurious; she had not yet experienced the craving of novelty that came with aging. To her, boredom was still a gift. Summers stretched on, but were delicious in their length. She bent forward to look at what had caught her eye; yes, it was a second glow, this one orange too but rawer, more unpredictable, flickering, and smaller. Perhaps a campfire, past the kitchen and down the hill? Dusk was setting harder now, the cornflower blue of the sky bleeding into the rich velvet navy of night. She took out her sketchbook and a few pastels and jotted this down, these two twin fires.

               “I must tell the others,” she said to herself, as soon as she had rubbed the pastels with a tortillon to capture the haziness of the scene, the stand-out of yellow against the wide swath of blue, and wiped her fingers with a handkerchief, and stowed her supplies in her basket. Then, a boost off the grass with her other hand, now clean and only a tad dirtied and damp from the ground; a sweep-off of her skirts, and the trek down the hill towards home.

               Coco loved much about her life now. She could not really be accused of not loving life, or of being ungrateful or displeased with her life as a girl, but in youth she craved the ability to come and go as she wished like she used to watch the barn cats do: this freedom. Picking her way down the hill each night never failed to elicit contentment from her as it was always slightly different. Some nights the reeds and clover were dry, gold, and crackly to the touch like a wheat breakfast biscuit Qifrey made sometimes. Other times she slipped down the hill, tremulous and unsteady, and it was a contest between her ankles and the mud. The sky could be lavender or deep red, but the light always looked the same to her once she was inside; concentrated gold, poured lavish over each wood and metal surface, glinting with dust in the slats of light from the window and gold, gold, gold over Tetia and Aggott and the pale blonde hairs on the back of Coco’s wrists, but silvering on Qifrey and Richeh, who tended to dress in stark blacks and whites. Before she had come to the Atelier, and perhaps long before Qifrey had bought the house, someone had set in a cobblestone path from the house to the glade that was more of a suggestion, or perhaps nature had started to take it back. Either way, it somehow glowed, and not just with the refraction from the setting sun. It seemed to alight at sunset and keep, handily, for long after.

               Up to the porch, which was only a little saggy and not from the weight of the large squashy orange divan to one side, on which someone, probably Tetia, had scattered a blanket and several paperbacks. As she always did, Coco put one hand on the doorframe (made of solid wood beams softened with wood oil at first and then by many hands) as she took off her boots, paused, breathed in one last lungful of outside air, and pushed open the door.

               She picked her way down the hallway; not that it was busy or crowded with things, but, with four teen girls, one man, and an ever-changing number of white ferrets in a narrow Victorian house, it was straining to remain not so. Past the shiny wooden banister she and Richeh had slid down exclusively instead of taking the stairs only five years ago, all the dark wood hutches carved with woodland-animals. Qifrey was making a stew, as he usually did on penultimate cool nights before summer kicked into season. Coco could taste the pepper and woody herbs on the air, something with yams and mushrooms. She dropped her bag of art supplies on the hope chest that held all their sweaters affixed before the kitchen door and poked her head in.

               “Coco,” Qifrey said, smiling, not even looking up at her, as was his wont. He was busy peering at the kale he was at once de-stemming and inspecting for grubs. It must have come from their garden; he must have spelled it early. “Come and help me chop?”

               “Sure,” she said, already at the sink, washing the pastels off her hands. Slight murmurs came from the round kitchen table, where Richeh and Aggott sat bent tersely over hands full of cards. Coco slid into place beside Qifrey, on his sighted side, to take over, and he navigated around her, pulling a long loaf of seeded bread from some high shelf.

               “This is going in the stew?’ she asked.

               “No,” he called back across his shoulder, indicating with his head the polished walnut bowl they used for salads. “In there, please. Be so kind as to add dates and cheese when you’re done?”

               Richeh perked up. “Date salad!!!” she said.

               “Yes,” Qifrey said. “I know it’s, ah, perhaps ‘favorite’ would be a reach,-”

               “It is good,” Richeh said, then returned to her cards. And a couple beats later, “-especially with the bread and the fancy butter.”

               Coco couldn’t see Qifrey’s face, but she knew he was smiling. He always was. It actually sort of alarmed Coco sometimes, how he could keep cool pleasantry up at all times. But. She was his ward, not anything else. She knew she could ask, and that he would always answer anything, but it scared her a little to have that kind of communication available at any time. Like how space in its alien vastness was not that far away after all from her comfortable little pasture.

               Qifrey turned back with the bread sliced generously, a little pot of wrapped butter he must have made earlier at its side on the long platter.

               “You must have read my mind, Richeh,” he said, going to place the bread on the table, to retorts from Richeh and Agott, who nevertheless good-naturedly understood that was the sign it was time to eat.

               Coco was picking at her last bites of stew and salad when she could sense on Qifrey’s bated breath that he was waiting to ask about school. He had been watching her across the table for some time, silent, as Richeh and Agott talked about who had won (Qifrey called it a draw for ruining it), and squabbled about boyfriend this, dating that. Coco spooned the last of her stew and salad (she ate it all on one deep plate; she liked when things mixed, especially if they were of a season to another, which Qifrey’s cooking almost always was, and the earthy, peanutty stew complimented the dark-green and tender kale perfectly) into her mouth and chewed, using her lashes to shield herself from Qifrey’s watchful eye.

               But “Good?” was all he said.

               “Yes, as always,” Richeh mumbled through a mouthful of bread.

               Agott stood, tall suddenly against the glow of the blue-black night redolent with cicadas, brushing (imaginary?) crumbs from her lap.

               “I’d like to be excused to my room,” she said, and, three beats later, “Thank you, Qifrey,” and strode off without an answer.

               The three left watched her go, then Qifrey turned back to them, smiling. Spit it out! Coco wanted to say. Things around school and graduating made her testy.

               “I was just looking at you two and thinking about what talents you are,” he said. He nodded towards Richeh, who was wearing a long-sleeved shirt she had pressed with a block design then spray painted over, with big, baggy black pants adorned with many buckles she had made herself (on Coco’s machine, with her supervision). Coco herself was wearing a silk shirt (brave on stew night) and a long skirt she had sewed from scraps and fashioned so it could be worn as overalls also. “Not only clothes-wise, of course,” he said. “But in your studies, your whole person as well.”

               Richeh rolled her eyes a little.

               “Professor’s getting nostalgic,” she said. But she grinned, barely perceptibly.

               Coco met his gaze then; he looked back at her evenly. Her heart clenched a little.

               “Wherever you go,” he said, “I will support you.”

               At that moment, Tetia flew through the door, bringing a whiff of wildflower and loam and a cacophony of keys jangling, bags dumping, the clatter of her field tools against some hutch or the other, along with a grand sense of relief to Coco.

               “Hi!!” she said, coming around the corner, already barefoot but still almost as tall as Qifrey. The pink of her hair glowed against the lamplight as she scrubbed the soil from under her nails at the farmhouse sink. “Is that the peanut stew? Grand.”

               Qifrey looked one more moment at Coco, then made to stand.

               “I saw a fire,” Coco blurted. Blurted? Who was she? She thought. “When I was up at the hill.”

               Tetia whipped around, stew narrowly avoiding flying out of her bowl.

               “Like a wildfire?”

               “Heavens, no,” Qifrey said. “That is, I imagine…?”

               “…that’s right,” Coco said, standing abruptly and peering through the kitchen window. “A neighbor’s or something. Maybe it’s still going. It was quite big.”

               Qifrey joined her, stooping at his great height to see through the little window.

               “That would explain the slight burning I’ve been smelling lately,” he said. “Not that that’s a problem. One can do as they do with their property.”

               Tetia plonked down at the table next to Qifrey.

               “As long as they do so responsibly,” she said.

               Qifrey looked down at Tetia fondly. Richeh gazed out at the fireflies frothing up outside under the lanterns.

               “Yes,” he said. “Well, we have had a neighbor.”

               “We have?” Coco said. This was the first she had heard of it.

               “Why, yes,” Qifrey said. “Granted, in the country like this, the acres make it, pun intended, quite a stretch.”

               Richeh and Coco cut eyes at each other. Richeh also knew Coco scoffed internally when Qifrey referred to the glade as “the country”.

               “Why have we not heard about this man?” Tetia said through a mouthful of stew, her school bag spilling over with cramped, thin tomes against one of Coco’s legs.

               “Well, he just moved in several months ago,” Qifrey said.

               “What?? And the first thing he does is burn shit---I mean crap---in the back?” Richeh interjected, sliding her pointed chin out of her hand.

               Qifrey smiled, placing his spoon and knife in his pristine bowl, then motioning to clasp her shoulder on his way out of the kitchen, but as per usual, not quite doing so.

               “Yes, somewhat inconsiderate, isn’t it?” he said, tilting his head. “However, from what little I’ve seen, he looks like he might be quite the gardener. Perhaps I’ll have him over sometime to consult. But for now…” he considered, then drifted off, the white of his apron against his black jeans and black turtleneck making him ghostlike in the wake of his sentence. The three girls looked at each other; the trailing was a common experience. They all upheld a somber moment, then shared a giggle (Richeh snorted), and Tetia got up to start clearing the table.

Chapter 2: Olruggio, mid-April

Chapter Text

               It was another damp, cool night on the laden string of pearls of many of the same, but Olruggio couldn’t wait anymore. It was time to dig up that damn honeysuckle vine from the old trellis out back, and, though he had waited for the opportune time to surface, something still overcast and cool but maybe a bit drier, some day when the man next door or one of his many daughters wasn’t out in their yard casting their laughter down the glade at him. Some time when he could concentrate, be in his thoughts. Rain distracted him, and the laughter, and occasionally the savory smell of something delicious roasting wafting from that fellow’s kitchen. At least the roots might be easier to break up, he thought glumly, before gathering his pad to kneel on and the bucket with his trowel and shouldering through the back door to the yard.

               The yard itself was pristine; he wouldn’t have it any other way. Yeah, the house might be a tad ramshackle. He had only just moved in, after all, and the yard already looked great. All the stuff worked, though, the sinks and the door hinges and the new shower he’d built with artist tile, very satisfying to grout. So what if he left his shirts on the washer-boards a little long, consequently having to rewash them on occasion? Letting a few dishes pile up here or there was the great boon of livin’ alone. His mechanical things may function by way of his career, his handiness, but the yard was his art: verdant grass, only a little, with local ferns and ivies heaped up with black-green bushes, edged carefully with rounded terra cotta tiles. The topiaries had recently begun to include an awful lot of rosemary. He couldn’t seem to stop it growing, so he’d had to get fancy with the shapes. He’d broken down and started neat black and grey planters of basil, oregano, and lavender and lemon thyme as well, mostly to keep down the aphids and moths. A shame that most of it went into his fires, though he couldn’t help but think it at least made the burns smell nicer. The rectangle herb planters lined each side of a straight, hand-paved cobblestone path that he had spelled with his personal favorite spell of everlight, making the stones pulse gold with warmth at all hours of the night.

               Olruggio put the knee pad down in front of the trellis, frowning as he knelt, catching the sun on its way down and the clouds of little black flies careening over each other in the din of the crickets. Everything was blue-tinged; dusk. He’d gotten caught up in somethin’ or other. What was it about doing the things you loved that made you reluctant to do them at all? Either way, he was at least out here, he reckoned, starting to dig with some effort at the dry honeysuckle’s base. The soil was surprisingly dry; rain careening off it. Hydrophobic. Something about this plant was unhealthy for the entirety of its surroundings.

               He touched the trellis; its crumbling white paint reminded him of eggshells. It was lattice, as most trellises tend to be, and the honeysuckle had wound its way through the inch-wide holes so intricately, and then dried, effectively creating an obstinate, sorta pretty-ugly thorn bush. It simply would not do were he to wish to peruse the garden from the other side; at the moment, one could not even walk through the trellis without fear of losing one’s hat, although Olruggio was not the tallest of men. As he kept digging around the roots, he started to wonder if he could even save it. He tugged and tugged, but the honeysuckle seemed to mock him. I’ve been here longer than you have even lived, it said, and Olruggio believed it. The roots might go all the way to the house’s foundation. He might need to hire a truck, or…

               “None of that,” he said to himself, sternly. Why, he could solve any problem, and this was simply another challenge, a puzzle to work at. Perhaps he could start from the top and cut…? The flame that always licked at the back of his mind supplied a helpful and why not fire? But he really did want to save the damn trellis. He was a fixer, a saver. He didn’t even throw out plastic bags.

               Olruggio worked in this way, fetching a stout ladder and balancing as solidly as he could, snip, snip, snip, sawing through the calcified vines, on occasion loosing whole knots, sometimes backing himself into more work, for as long as the dusk light crept in, and then for several more hours of time in which, with his everlight path to guide his eyes, he lost himself in the work. Finally his stomach reminded him he probably hadn’t had a bite to eat since eleven or so, and he wiped his sweaty brow and jumped, oooooh, perhaps not the best idea, off the ladder.

               He surveyed his work. A scant quarter of the top of the trellis was done, its sort of hopeful white top poking through like a man beginning to bald. He heaved a big sigh and looked at his watch, a big square sensible thing blinking 12:36.

               Midnight?? He thought, breathing in just as sharply as he’d just breathed out. Then, a cock of his head, a shrug of his shoulders, which he often did while alone, a sorta little joke to himself. What did it matter? His time past six and on weekends was purely his own. Not his work’s, not…anyone else’s, either.  He padded inside, leaving his tools in a neat pile by the mud room door.

Heating up a couple slices of yesterday’s pizza, standing post-shower with one socked foot on his smarting knee, he thought about what he would replace the honeysuckle with if, no, when he saved the trellis. Maybe something lush and new and soft with verdant curling leaves, sweet-smelling blooms. Something to keep him company, to tell the passage of time.

 

Chapter 3: Richeh, late April

Chapter Text

               If pressed, Richeh would not describe herself as a people person. If really pressed, squeezed like one of the fresh oranges or rolled with the flat of a palm or a knife like Qifrey would do with herbs before he chiffonaded them with a flurry of his quick pale hands (which might, Richeh always privately thought, feel great, if you were the herb or the orange), Richeh would perhaps not even go so far as to describe herself as a “person” or a “she”. Why must one be anything, she reasoned, perfectly reasonably. It was enough to simply go out to the old factory trail in her necessary yet uncomfortable waders and hunker down for the day, face close to the pluff as she could get, and listen to and watch the frogs at dusk. Frog calls were calming, anchoring. Richeh was particularly fond of the rare Boreal Chorus Frog or two that sometimes ventured down from the upper peninsula, whose calls sounded like plastic combs being whirred down by a fingernail.

               All that to say, to herself Richeh was adamant she could spend her days alone, like Qifrey seemed sure he was doing, despite having a chorusful of girls and ferrets and apparently neighbors careening around him in orbit at all times. She was sure she could do it alone alone, like in the wilderness if she had to, TV and books be damned. Even spells; they didn’t come very naturally to her, though the ones that did, did. Maybe she was confusing natural with practice. Anyway. She could live alone, and maybe she would, when she was older, but that didn’t mean that what she had, right now, in this house that was at once too big and too small and too full and had too many smells and textures and temperatures but at times was also cozy as a flannel blanket on a fall night on the glade, wasn’t perfect. She was deeply present in herself, now, at fifteen, despite her tendency to sit back and observe to herself, sometimes. Huddling into her blanket with a large, comfortingly heavy cup of tea or hot chocolate balanced on her knees. It’s not like everyone else in this house isn’t doing the very same, she often thought, and thought so now.

               But these were great nights, these. The girls had their own rooms, sort of-Richeh bunked with Agott and Coco with Tetia-but they had this long sort of play room with daybeds that Qifrey seemed at a loss with which to do. Once you got that man out of the kitchen, his need for, and remembrance, of personal belongings dwindled, though he did always manage to scrape through at the grocer’s for the week for a cohort of the five humans (Richeh suspected Tetia made his lists). The girls would turn the yellow lamplight low, the windows open to catch the great rolling breezes that came through with the thunder, the deep wet-leaf-basil smell of the grass and the lake and probably that guy’s garden when the wind carried. Coalescence. Or not; sometimes no one used the play room. It was magnetic, the tug of their souls like a line with paper cups attached; Richeh loved that, the squirmy, shy, sugarspun feeling of needing or wanting to talk, the offering of staying up deep into the night and listening to the cicadas and the bats, the fluttering and light tics of moths or questing sparrows bonking against the slats of the siding. Trading secrets, advice, helping each other with homework, waiting for late-night baking experiments, or simply reading, listening to music, or doing nothing at all.

               Tonight they were listening to lo-fi beats, piped tinnily in from one of Agott’s speakers. Agott herself was resting on the sill, silhouetted in her black sweater and shorts, her pencil-shaving smell cast sharply across the room from the open window. Tetia was upside-down on the bed with a book on environmental sustainability in her hands, her pink double-puffs gently grazing the floor. Coco was sitting and laughing with Agott about something, turning a little pink in the false-kerosene lamplight; Richeh strained to hear.

               “Noooo, I’m not,” she said.

               “Listen,” Agott said, looking cool and unruffled as hell as she worked at a bit of darning. Not hers, obviously, as her clothes never seemed to tear, but likely Coco’s, for whom she had a soft spot. “All I’m saying is that boy has been around quite often this spring.”

               “Why are you saying that boy like you’re her dad?” said Tetia.

               Agott, if possible, looked further down her nose at her fine hand, cramped with the needle.

               “I just never got the appeal,” she said huffily, to which Tetia grinned toothily.

               Coco, at this point, had left Blush Station and fallen full-tilt into Flushtown.

.              “He’s not anything,” she said shrilly. “We work together sometimes in the shop.”

               Tetia tilted her head. “The seamster’s shop?” she said.

               “Yeah, I mean, it’s a studio, so there’s all sorts of art stuff,” Coco said hurriedly.

               “And what is he working on?” said Richeh.

               Coco smoothed her pajamas, a prim set of striped linens, out on her lap.

               “He’s working on a blend of apothecary herbs and tinctures and figuring out how to translate them into paint, then painting, and vice versa,” she said. “Actually I think Tetia would find it cool.”

               “I do!” Tetia piped. “So like he’s grinding up pollen, or?”

               Coco smiled shyly. “You’ll have to ask him,” met with a chorus ranging from ooooo’s to groans.

               “Who’s going to assist Professor Qifrey when you move in with your new husband?” teased Agott, but it was kind of not a tease, not really, or at least Richeh caught a whiff of seriousness, which she had always kind of thought was in all teasing.

               A short silence, then;

               “He’ll be fine,” said Coco. “We can do a lot to the house to help. Or one of us can stay…anyway, I don’t want to talk about that now. I want to,” and she leaned closer over her day-bed, beckoning in the girls, “-talk about the neighbor he mentioned at dinner a few nights ago.”

               “Oh?” said Agott, taking the bait. “I missed that.”

               “Yeah!! Neighbor!!” said Tetia. “Haven’t you noticed the burning-leaves-and-herbs smell like every other morning and weekend night?”

               Agott tilted her head. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I thought it was just, you know. The spring.”

               “The spring,” Tetia said sotto voce.

               “Very strange Qifrey hasn’t mentioned it until now, until we noticed,” said Coco. “Though really, city people don’t talk to, or about, their neighbors.”

               Richeh didn’t think it was that strange. Qifrey had noticed that they noticed, then simply illuminated on it. Qifrey liked to examine things at a granular level, but he very much was his own person, and could probably most gladly entertain himself in his own mind for the rest of his life.

               “…probably for the better,” Tetia was saying. “How awkward, to have to go meet your neighbor then say, hey, can you stop burning stuff? It’s drifting onto my linens!”

               “Well, we all know once Qifrey has a spark of an idea, he doesn’t stop,” said Coco. “So, I spent the day peeping on Mr. Next Door. To vet him.”

               Gasps from the room, tinged slightly with admiration from Agott, slight admonishment from Tetia.

               “And,” Coco said dramatically, “-he’s hot.”

               Richeh went blegggh, blegh, bleeghhhh. Agott blinked; Tetia rifled amongst her copious paperbacks.

               “I mean, were I a man of that age-“

               “All right, we get it,” Agott said hastily. “He’s Qifrey’s age. There could be something there.”

               “Maybe even just in friendship?” Tetia suggested.

The thought pinked, greened and took root to blue-black, wisped away in the grey-black air.

               “So what do you propose we do?” said Richeh. “He will probably venture over there, once, because. You know.” They knew. Qifrey liked to pose as the ultimate put-together neighbor, tenant, father, professor, man, chef…it went on. He tried one time to imbue a picture-perfect impression on a person, then drifted away.

               Coco leaned close conspirationally.

               “He can have his moment,” she said. “Or, we can engineer it. We know the neighbor has been burning yard waste fires like, all the time. But how to get them to connect a second time?”

               “Scones,” burbled out of Richeh, and the girls turned to look at her.

               “…well, we had fresh bread a few nights ago, which means Qifrey made up a batch of starter a week prior, and used some of it for the bread, and then had sourdough discard leftover. I know we’re getting sourdough waffles tomorrow, but after the yeasted breads he always likes to do a quick bread, and it’s the end of winter, and the time for soda bread has already passed, so he’ll want to do a short bake,” said Richeh. “…plus he’s been really into fancy butter lately and it’s strawberry season soon, for jam.”

               “Damn, okay,” said Agott.

               “All that to say,” Richeh continued, “He’s been grinding a lot of flours out of non-glutenous material, perfect for scones, and his hands are tired, so he’ll throw them into triangles and bring the nice basket and checked linens out of the cupboard, and he’ll want to have someone to give them to, ergo our mystery man.”

               “So we should leave the butter, the linens, the basket out,” said Coco as it dawned on her.

               “Check yes,” Richeh said.

               Coco smiled, a brief blonde-and-tan glimpse into her future, were she taut and unworried, yet here she was in this universe, cramped with love and ink.

               “Thanks, Richeh,” she said. “If you all don’t mind, there is one more thing on the agenda, if you please.” Then, quietly, barely a murmur: “-swear to something.”

               “Swear to what?” said Tetia, her bony knee thonking against Agott’s, who had suddenly appeared closer and more intensely.

               “Swear,” said Coco, and the lights guttered, the moths whispered in the thin veil created by air conditioning, calendars, windowscreens. “That we will do three things.”

               “Whoa, are you spelling right now?” said Richeh, impressed, but also a little scared.

               “Auuughhh,” said Coco, distantly, and Agott gripped her elbow. She started. “Ahhh, no, no. Just normal!” she said brightly.

               The girls all knew what it was to shepherd away a spell.

               Richeh got up; she registered that no one clocked her doing so. She knelt on the boards by where Coco sat, framed by Tetia and Agott. From her correctly-deigned pocket she pulled a square of paper and a pen, and drew for a second, then smoothed the paper on the floor for all to see.

               “Been working on it,” she said. “Spell to negate accidental spells.”

               All the girls peered over it and murmured appreciatively, checking the lines, the size, the meaning, but Richeh was adept and precise.

               “Okay,” said Coco. “If we’re all in agreement and with Richeh’s protection, can I proceed?”

               “Aye,” said Agott, giving her a mocking little salute.

               “Aye!” said Tetia, eager to go to bed.

               “Aye,” said Richeh, somewhere else entirely.

               “We do three things,” Coco said again. “One: we do not abandon Qifrey when we go away to school, if we go, or wherever we go. Two: we explore this neighbor thing and see if there’s potential there for him to find a friend. Three: we do not break our sisterhood.”

               The lights, suddenly akin to flame, whooshed and spurted in their bulbs. The wind whispered in clefs, the one black cat that frequented leapt from gabled roof to fence in search of prey, which squeaked and burrowed, and the many mandibles of insects jawed at the soil, and seeds germinated and split and crept towards the surface, to be trod out by some rubber sole. 

               “I’m in,” said Richeh, and Tetia and Agott nodded their assent.

               “I hate to say it,” said Coco. “I really do, but I think this must be done in blood or ink.”

               “You mean that you would like it down in such,” said Aggott.

               Coco blushed. “I guess? It’s just what I feel right now.”

               “Influenced by nothing,” said Richeh quietly, overwrought by a surprising “I’m in!” from Tetia.

               “I mean,” said Tetia, “Blood is so clean, right? It’s just our own earth-water. And. What could come of it?” she said, but then clearly went to a place where she pictured every possibility pertaining to what could come of it.

               “Let’s just do ink,” said Coco hastily. “Let’s sign.”

               “Let’s sign each others’ hands!” said Richeh in a spurt of inspiration.

               And so they did; Aggott’s deep blue fountain pen nib cutting into Richeh’s dry palm skin; Richeh’s silver-green gel pen showing lovelily on the back of Tetia’s warm hand and sickly on Agott’s and Coco’s; Coco’s no-nonsense black ballpoint in a neat, severe X on the meat of Agott and Richeh’s thumbs. The ink butter-melted into their skin, joining, Tetia pointed out unhelpfully, just a bucketload of microplastics that would warp and sever their bloodlines for generations.

               “Well, if it must,” said Agott, grinning her slight, crooked grin at the moon and the three of them.

An interlude

               It was later that night that Coco poked sleepily out of her bedroom on her way to get a fresh glass of water when Agott, seeming to have heard her moving from her half-alert, half-work state, exited the cupped warm glow of the play room in which she was still at work and met her in the hall.

               “Hey,” she said, arms crossed. After having the windows open near all night and all the doors for the cross-breezes, it was cold in the clean-cut late April night, and her loose-woven cardigan was not helping. Coco, of course, had planned for this and was wearing a plush sweater over her sleep set and in the hall with her little candle on its tray to catch drips, seemed only like she was lacking a nightcap.

               “Agott!” Coco said, seeming for all the world like a little Qifrey; pleasantly surprised, pleasantly earnest, always pleasant. Always a faint bit ruffled, but never unruffled. Someone always picking up to leave or on their way in for a moment, passing through. “What’s up?”

               Agott leaned in, the edges of trumpets and lo-fi and the flickering of candles trailing her from her room, pointed chin down.

               “I can imagine,” Agott said, “-that simply wanting to ‘hook Qifrey up-’”-here she mocked up quote-marks with her pointer and long fingers on each hand- “-was not your only, or purest, intention.”

               Coco looked up at her, the tips of her ears burning.

               “What do you mean?” she said.

               Agott cut her eyes at her, overscored now by violins and theremin. She crossed her ankles and leaned back further on the sturdy doorframe.

               “You know what I mean,” she said.

               A terse, long moment between the two, like saltwater taffy pulling, or wool. A mother combing out her daughter’s long hair. Someone waiting “five minutes” for the train.

               “Okay!” Coco finally said, releasing, barometric, the pressure. “Okay. You’re right, I should have brought it up.”

               “Well, I didn’t say that,” said Agott idly.

               “Okay,” said Coco, compressing her confusion and annoyance, “then, you think, what? That I should keep to myself? How much he’s faltering?”

               Agott punctuated her point with a raise of the slash of her brows.

               “So you think someone needs to stay here to keep an eye on him?” she said.

               A pause from both. No one likes to consider their parents aging, needing. And neither of them could exactly argue. They had seen Qifrey bonk into the same corner in the den that had been there for precisely 200 million years that morning, though Richeh was always throwing her hands and legs into shit and developing a brilliant rainbow array of bruises, and no one had said anything about that.

               “I mean, I think we have a couple options,” Coco said, and they shared a glance. Options! Like they were at a used car lot. Granted, in their youth of only a few years before, they were a little less jaded. They used to love to work at problems, work as a team. Now they were growing into caregivers of their caregiver, perhaps it was allowable that they could take on a jade hue.

               “One,” Coco continued, “-is that someone stays here.” And she tried very hard not to look at Agott.  “Just because you’re the oldest doesn’t mean that’s on you,” Coco continued in a rush, but her pause was making room for a response. Aggott let her hang while she loped in the hallway, low.

               “I don’t know what I am planning on doing yet,” she said slowly. “Of course I could stay, for a while. I am not not at home here. I am not particularly fond of the thought of starting anew. But,” she said, looking out the window, “I want to know what’s out there. What the city would be like.”

               “We both do,” Coco said distantly, almost accidentally.

               Agott paused a minute, then put a hand on her elbow.

               “We will,” she said. “I don’t think…I don’t think we need to solve this. Right now, or ever. But you’re right…that we should consider it. That we should keep an eye on it. Because Qifrey certainly is not considering his needs.”

               “Right,” said Coco faintly. “Well,” and she looked up at Agott, smiling faintly. “Thanks for listening.”

               Agott thought it was a bit trite, or perhaps a bit innocent after all, that Coco had considered her cornering and confronting her in the hall in the early morning as listening. But she would take it.

               “Always,” Agott said instead, and with a final nod, gently closed the door, bisecting Coco out of the rest of her night.

 ∆

Chapter 4: Olruggio, late April

Chapter Text

               It was morning. Olruggio spent exactly 28 clock-marks past dawn in bed, waiting for either his body to acquiesce to its tiredness or to jump with alacrity out of bed and start attacking tasks with verve and aplomb. Neither happened. He was forced to decide on his own, reckon with his own ability to stand or to lie there, kinda sweaty. And no one likes that. So up he got, crackling his bedsheets down crisp, clean but not brand-new washed, and running a wet cloth over his neck and behind his ears, and a fresh one of his dad’s laundered workshirts over his pajamas and buttoned at the neck. It would have to do.

               Then, coffee from the cold mug leftover from yesterday and reheated in a steel pot, poured clumsily from the lip into a new mug. Olruggio owned an old, scratched press in which you measured the grounds while you waited for the water to heat by kettle, then poured over the grounds snail-slow, just bits at a time, until the grounds reached the top of the glass and had an inch of caramelly foam. This was daunting for him, in the casual way that greeting the day is. He had to break it down in fifths; boil the water and pour over the coffee, then strain it after waiting the requisite 7 clock-marks, then leaving the grounds to dry “for later” in the press while enjoying his cup, then dumping the grounds, then rinsing out the glass for the next morning. It took all day, but the enjoyment of the cup was worth the wait and usually made two servings, so and he slurped his for a while at the foot of the blasted trellis again.

               He had to remind himself that he gave himself the task of removing the honeysuckle. He could just as easily not do it. He could just as easily not do it as not live here, as not exist, as not love his father and building and campfires, Carhartt, whoever put the tiny meticulous screws in eyeglasses, pressed bolts out of metal. The honeysuckle was invasive, after all, whatever that meant, and anyway it was dry and dead and an eyesore besides and dangerous for damn kids if any ever came through this door. So he knelt with his pliers and his shears and was just starting to get focused again on the cramped, twisted stems, when he heard a helllaoueeee!

               Okay, maybe that wasn’t fair. Maybe it was a regular hello. It had been so long. Anyways, Olruggio looked up from his work, squinting, to see the tall, meticulous form of his neighbor, framed perfectly in whites and greys against the green-black of his hill and the lavender sky.

               “Hiya,” grunted Olruggio, then four moments later put down his shears and groaned, motioning to stand.

               The neighbor fluttered, motioning to kneel, thinking better of it.

               “Oh, don’t please get up on my account,” he said. His long arms were crossed and on the right he bore a wicker basket with some tantalizing wheat-and-confectionary scent that reminded Olruggio he had not, in fact, had breakfast, that breakfast was a perfectly reasonable meal to consume daily, in fact. The stranger smiled, maybe? Olruggio was still on the ground and not too keen at looking at faces, but the long arms gesticulated.

“You have a lovely garden,” he said.

               “Yeah?” said Olruggio absently, already filing away the backbreaking, intricate work on the trellis and where he would have to pick up.

“Oh yes,” said the man. “After looking at all this, mine seems to be quite disorderly.”

“Well, what’r you growing?” Olruggio said, finally looking up. The man was all in blue-black shadow, shaded by the solitary and idiosyncratic oak that fanned its leaves over the yard.

“This and that,” he said. “Some kale, tomatoes, some rosemary…though none so much as you.”

Olruggio grunted, “Outta season,” and in one fluid motion, he rose, hands on knees, praying for not a crack from a single bone (granted). “Thank you for the compliment anyway, Mr.…” he said, finally looking up at the man.

               Tall and built boxer-thin, not like a puff of smoke, but a whiff of steam, apt to vanish at any moment. White hair, either from blonde or grey, and long, swept over one eye and gathered like a fistful of pasta at the back of the neck. He was wearing a grey collared shirt tucked into expensive linen slacks and a white apron patterned with summer delicacies. The bright red blots of tomato, the cheery chips of yellow lemon, the sardines with little purple and blue sequins sewed in danced before Olruggio, dizzying this early. Huh. An apron. Olruggio always just wiped his hands on his shirt. Olruggio proffered a hand, and, after a moment, the stranger took it. The dirt under his nails stood out against the man’s pale hands, in which he could see the rivered veins on the back pulsing greenly, imagining almost the blood cells as little red and silver salmon swimming upstream.

               The man caught his eyes again, smiling faintly.

               “I am Qifrey,” he said.

               “Olruggio,” Olruggio echoed. “Say, what’s that you have?”

               Qifrey smiled, one dimple pressed absent-minded into the sparse dough of his cheek. Savored like a joke, an afterthought.

               “Might you have somewhere to sit?”

               Olruggio motioned to the entire garden, the copious ledges, the ground, and Qifrey laughed fully then, tossing the line of his throat upwards.              

               “Oh!” he said, charmed. “Oh, anywhere? You haven’t even given me the tour.”

               Olruggio’s head spun, and he, risking it, put his rightward two fingers on the wrist-bone of his new neighbor and hopefully, friend, who started barely perceptibly but kept his cool gaze locked with Olruggio’s.

               “Whatever you have in that basket, I must have,” he said. “I hate to be crass but it smells delicious and I…” he jerked his head back at his house, which had something decidedly nefarious growing up out of the dark soil by the foundation.

               Qifrey smiled warmly, taking Olruggio’s wristbone in turn, surprising him, then sitting abruptly on the ledge nearest the trellis, his long legs folding uncomfortably yet quickly like an umbrella being recalled.

               “I hear you, my friend,” he said, tugging Olruggio down. Olruggio sat. “I had a whole routine planned, but I am content to simply…share and eat. And look at this,” he said, looking at the trellis, then, as Olruggio began to speak, chuckling again and opening the basket, which was lined with checked linen in various shades of lavender and eggplant, and withdrawing two little blue-lined plates and a tiny jewel-like pot of jam, and bread of some kind. “Scones,” he said.

               Olruggio’s mouth watered.

               “I don’t care what they are, I just scone the day I didn’t know of them before,” he said, and Qifrey, surprised, laughed after a moment.

               “I don’t suppose you would like to go in and procure us some more coffee?” Qifrey said.

               “I could do that,” Olruggio said, and was surprised for the third time that day to find that his body did very much want and know how to do so.

Chapter 5: Qifrey, early May

Chapter Text

           Another day. In preparation for being alone, Qifrey took his customary breath, his last lungful of the day he shared with his wards, listening to their laughter, the tinge of the congee and sauteed spinach and soy-glazed eggs on the air, before he entered his small room. He took another breath as he quietly closed the door. As most rooms do, his smelled differently than the rest of the house. A little like wood floor and the dust and dusting of it, a little like the teas he took at his generous writing desk, a little of the lavender and lemon cleaning sprays he preferred to make on the stove rather than spell away. A lot, certainly, like old books, or more specifically, the unmaking of those books, how they were at different stages of their glue melting or hardening, the ink fading with its sharp clove-y smell, the threads unspooling from the bindings. And a little like ferret. He wrinkled his nose. He could not extricate himself from their fur, not really, a grievance something he and Aggott had in common. But it was worth it to see Richeh happy and thriving, and Coco and Tetia liked them too. More than once he’d awoken with his heart hammering in his throat to some ferret and its tiny claws pinpricking its way up his shirtsleeve. At least much of his clothing was white.

           He scanned the room left to right, as he did every day before retiring. The wastebasket next to the desk with writing or drawings to be recycled, the slim shelf he’d built (badly) under the desk to save space, filed neatly with paper and books. The lamp giving off a kerosene glow, the yellow he favored. Easier on his vision. A couple of white animal and plant prints framed in thick black, a few dried bundles of eucalyptus and lavender. And in the middle of the room, the bed, circular, he’d had custom-made in Norway and adjusted for his height (the circular nature was for his penchant toward inimitability), and the round of drapes around it, all white. Easy to see. The black leather journal he left in the middle of the small set of drawers at the bedside with a quill ready to go, though he rarely wrote anymore. Why not? He had the discipline. He could make the time. But…

           He disrobed, placing the sweater and worn-in chinos of the day in the hamper to be washed tomorrow, and into his soft silk pajamas, as close to the touch of bathwater as he could stomach. Then into bed; the cool, pleasing scent of linen. He reached for the journal and thumbed through it. He’d made this himself, when he was able to see well enough to complete the small intricacies of bookbinding, the cramped details along the spine.

           His very first entry, some years ago. Another thing he had made.

           Details of my perfect partner…

           Qifrey squirmed to read this, the discomfort sitting low in his back. But also, was he not a child then? Would he not wish the girls the very same, the ability to dream?

           Dark hair, dark blue eyes. Someone who could support me. Someone warm and kind.

           Dark hair, fine hands…

           Qifrey put the point of the nib of the pen to his lip, if only for something to do. When had he let this slip, this hopefulness, this naïve wish to be loved? After all, the journal was his alone. What was the harm in wishing? He tried very hard not to remember he could spell anything he wanted. He was not that kind; these were only the words of a child who existed solely in the past, the words imbued nothing. the sort. Yet, his hand hesitated.

           Do you truly believe you are so powerful you could create the perfect partner? His inner voice, such a quiet and private source of shame, mocked. Just by wishing? Or, worse, is it that you’ve wanted to…?

           He shut the book on the pen, a single drop of ink flying off the nib and onto the corner of a sheet. Well. Let it be sullied, then. Besides, he had the love of the girls, he imagined, in some small way. And that he had earned truthfully, and he would not trade it for anything. He would love them in his way, if they let him, if he could. No one needed a partner. And after, he would take care of himself. He sucked in a breath, then forced it, slow, through his nose. Each day was a gift; this is what he should be recording in his journal, not the candy-wrapped wishes of a child.

           Another day.

Chapter 6: Coco, late May

Notes:

New chapter!

Chapter Text

               Coco and Agott were sitting on the front stoop, watching the fireflies start to wink and dance around the pale green layer of sweetgrass that sat on top of the narrow strip of lawn like a beret. Coco had a sheaf of college brochures she was idly sorting through. Agott, her birdwatching guide open on her skinned knees, had her binoculars to her eyes, peering through the copse of pines at the end of the drive. The only conversation was the calls of the whip-poor-wills and swallows diving through the brittle, dark-green tops of the trees, interrupted slightly by the crunch of gravel under tire signaled Qifrey’s return from the market.

               Both girls’ ears perked up; Coco jumped up, but Agott placed her cool, dry hand on the back of Coco’s knee.

               “You know he’s got precisely one basket,” she said.

               “Yeah, and it could be, and probably is, heavy,” said Coco.

               “And will he let you carry it?”

               “There’s no use in not trying!” said Coco, who hurried to meet Qifrey at his beat-up old hatchback.

               Before she could meet him, the front door came flying open, and he hurried around to the other side to open the door.

               “Coco!” he said in passing, as pleased as ever to see her. “How was your evening?”

               “It’s been good,” she said. “…working on stuff. Do you need any help?”

               “Not at all,” he said effortfully, struggling to yank the long green boat basket he used for markets, now chock-full of zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, and bundles of green onions, off the passenger seat. A potato bounced down and rolled a couple times unenthusiastically down the drive. They both watched it.

               “Please let me,” she said. “You know I have to maintain my farm-girl strength.”

               “…Okay,” he said, going after the rogue potato and struggling for a moment to place it against the pale gravel. Coco hefted the basket (it was nothing, really, just awkward) and they headed up the walk.

               “Why do you buy all these veggies if we can simply grow them?” she said.

               “It’s the ritual,” Qifrey said. “Plus giving back to the local economy. And I’m always interested in seeing what people are selling, who’s new to the market, little treats I wouldn’t have thought of myself…oh, hello, Agott!” he said as they passed an unmoving Agott on the steps. Coco gave her a pert any help here? motion with her eyes, and Agott, rolling her eyes barely perceptibly, got up and, fox-fluid, navigated around the pair and through the front door to hold it open.

               “…lavender-gin-dark chocolate bar, I would have never thought!” continued Qifrey. “I got an extra for Olruggio. I think he likes dark chocolate.”

               “I think he’d like anything you brought him,” said Agott, too low for Qifrey to hear.

               Qifrey set the basket down momentarily on a hutch as the trio removed their shoes and put on their slides. Coco and Agott followed him to the kitchen, listening to him muse aloud about what he was going to make with various things, much like a swallow or a bittern himself. The stream of consciousness was interrupted suddenly by a light curse. Coco hurried ahead; he had kept a hold of the basket pretty well in the crook of his arm, but was resting his hand against the wall that divided the kitchen, that had always been pretty awkward to navigate around.

               “Ach, stubbed my toe,” he said.

               “Our neighbor is an architect, right?” Agott said, coming behind and taking the basket from Qifrey as he rubbed the front of his foot on his other calf.

               “Engineer, if I recall correctly,” Qifrey said, which Coco knew he always did.

               “Same thing,” Agott said, and, cutting off Qifrey’s welllll…, “-why don’t you ask him if he can get rid of this wall?”

               Qifrey turned to look at her like she had mildly suggested getting rid of eating as a necessity.

               “But, the house!” he said, patting the wall as if a fond old pet. “I couldn’t think of editing it in any way. Plus that’s where I hang all the pots! And the stove backs up to it, and what if it’s load-bearing?”

               “I think that’s what you would consult the engineer about,” said Coco.

               “Oh, well, it’s not fair if you two side against me,” said Qifrey petulantly. “Where’s Tetia?”

               “Doing field work until sundown-”

               “-So she can’t help you,” Coco said brightly and hastily, to override Agott’s like every weeknight.

                    “I’m here,” said Richeh in a monotone, poking her head up from seemingly nowhere, startling Agott, who was leaning on the (again, kind of weirdly-placed) wall jutting up where the dining table was.

               “How do you sleep on the wooden bench?”

               “Anyway,” continued Qifrey a little peevishly, “I could never ask him for something and offer nothing in return. And, why should I remove things from my life just for being a nuisance? Richeh, you or Tetia would never remove something from nature simply because it was inconvenient.”

               “Actually, scientists have been trying to eliminate the emerald ash borer from the east for decades,” Richeh said.

               “Deer hunting?” said Coco.

               “Also, viruses?”

Qifrey took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

               “Take in four girls of an age, they said, it will be fun, they said,” he teased gently.

               Richeh put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, looking at him expectantly.

               “Who’s they?”

               “You’ve made your point about the wall,” said Qifrey. “I will think about it. Now, who will help me prepare the zucchini for roll-ups and maybe some sweet bread for after dinner?”

               “Me!” said Richeh, and Coco was already washing her hands. She missed Agott slip from the kitchen, knowing, vulpine, that the kitchen could really only comfortably hold three.

Chapter 7: Coco, early June

Chapter Text

 

               It was one of the first lovely evenings of June, and the girls were all out on what served as the lawn, some two acres of mowed light grass down from the shallow escarpment of grass behind the kitchen window and shadowed by mature oaks, halfheartedly batting at a game of pickleball. Tetia noticed it first.

               “What’s that?” Tetia said, her fine nose wrinkling from the sideline, where she was cross-legged and creasing the spine of an old paperback on the picnic blanket.

               “My win,” grunted Agott, the pock of the paddle accentuating the easy lope of her arm as she sent the ball back over their badminton net.

               “Not quite,” said Richeh. She was out mid-court, looking cool but determined in a pair of long teal terrycloth shorts she’d shredded up. “We said we’d play to eleven. That was your eleven.”

               Agott dropped her paddle and looked up with some feigned disinterest at the chip in her off-black nails. “Well, now that there’s a natural disaster, perhaps we can call a draw.”

               “No way,” said Coco, smiling. “Rain check?”

               “More like fire check,” said Tetia. “He’s at it again.”

               All the girls sniffed experimentally at the air, toeing the line between danger and inconvenience.

               “I, for one, like my air a little toasty,” announced Richeh.

               “It doesn’t seem too plasticky,” said Tetia.

               “This is just normal? Isn’t this just normal?” wondered Coco, at the scent of burned, tinged slightly acrid, leaves on the air.

               The creak of the screen door to the kitchen alerted the girls of Qifrey’s exit. He always closed it with a neat click; today, it was a little shuttered, and he, coughing, was bleary in the distance and the wavering near-summer evening heat.

               Coco bounded up; she was conscious of Richeh and Tetia’s alarm, Agott’s barely-concealed conceit of trying not to be concerned.

               “Be right back,” she said, scaling up the winding ever-lit path to the back porch.

 ∆

               “I’m quite all right!” managed Qifrey, in between bouts of oily-sounding hacking. Coco fluttered around, trying to see if a pan of something was on fire, or dropped, or if some window were jammed, or, or---

               “Is it the smoke from that guy?” she said.

               Qifrey smiled, waving her off.

               “Not at all! This one’s on me,” he said. “In fact, the burning leaves smell is somewhat welcoming compared to my disaster.”

               Now that she stopped to listen, Coco could register the fire alarm blaring tinnily from inside. She opened the screen door, stepping inside to the slightly humid kitchen, turned off the oven, and fanned the alarm with a spare cookie sheet.

               Exiting after a few minutes, she could see Qifrey had caught his breath.

               “Seasoning the cast iron,” he said, his one dimple surfacing and as quickly, disappearing. “Not my favorite job. But it must be done.”

               “So all that and no dinner?” drawled Agott, whose shaggy head poked up from the bluff like a dark dandelion.

               Qifrey laughed.

               “Well, you’ve caught me,” he said. “I suppose this is what the freezer is for, after all.”

               “Anything you’ve frozen is bound to still be wonderful,” said Richeh, whose stout blue head bobbed alongside Agott’s.

               Coco looked over the bluff at the setting sun, which happened suddenly through the cornflower sky and then all at once set everything off in molten rose. The haphazard collections of planters in which Qifrey was trying to grow rosemary naturally (and not succeeding); the dark leaves of the pepper plants alongside the silvery, ornate leaves of the gourds, which were getting along fine. The circle of the brick of the deck, and the rich, caramelized-toast smell of burning leaves, golden and nostalgic, against Coco’s palate. Qifrey, too, took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

               “Almost like we should be paying for this, hm?” he said, leaning back against the bench. “Like one of Agott’s soy candles.”

               “Oh no,” said Richeh faintly.

               “What, am I not supposed to know about the candles?”

               “No,” said Agott, with a touch more fervor than warranted. Realizing this, she uncrossed her arms. “No,’ she tried again. “It’s just, we just saw that guy---’

               “Olruggio,” said Qifrey patiently.

               “…Olruggio,” repeated Agott. “And we told him to, politely, take his burning somewhere else. Well,” she said hastily. “It’s not like we told him where to take his burning.”

               “Like, not in a psychopath way,” said Richeh serenely.

               “Or a way that could start forest fires,” Tetia said quickly.

               Coco watched Qifrey, already in a fragile state of recuperation from fright, draw closer and closer to himself. A cleat delicately tightened.

               “Oh dear,” he said. “Well, this will not do.” He straightened up; despite it having been four years, Coco forgot again how tall he was. A single sapling that refused to bend in growing as reeds did.

               “Aw,” said Richeh, put out.

               “Have we done wrong?” said Coco, panicking somewhat inside.

               “No, no one has done anything incorrectly,” said Qifrey. “I just fear I should remedy this with our esteemed neighbor. After all, I don’t mind the scent. And…do any of you? For if that is true, we may have a case.”

               Agott and Coco stared down Richeh and Tetia; all four came to an unspoken agreement.

               “No?” said Qifrey, peering at them in turn.

               “No!” said all four, in unison timewise if not voice-wise.

               “Wonderful!” said Qifrey. “Certainly, I should hope he does not mind me calling on him again.”

               “I mean, would tonight be too soon?” pontificated Richeh, turning a wildflower over in her hands.

               “Perhaps tomorrow,” said Qifrey, “We have a mushroom galette to re-bake,” but no-one missed the quick beet blush on his cheek.

 

An interlude. Earlier that night

               Olruggio had just left the piles of the offshoots of herbs, the recalcitrant and woody cuttings from the trellis, and the spare, NOT hoarded, thank you, winter leaves to their burning when the faint HEY! Came down from the bluff. A girl’s voice, and the stampede of legs.

               He steeled himself, having just gone inside for the night, placing one hand on the doorframe and re-slipping on his mud shoes.

               “Can I help you?” he said, squinting into the distance. The summer heat rendered everything in lovely, if blurry, shades of green, blue, yellow, sage, but three shapes came barreling down the hill. Well, one galumphing, one striding purposefully, and one picking her way down. “Mind the trellis!” he said, as the tall one strode down to his backyard.

               She was one of Qifrey’s kids, the brunette. She looped easily inside the trellis, though seemed to take his half-late warning in stride. “Can you stop freaking burning your yard up like this? It’s getting into ours.”

               “Our caretaker needs accommodations and I doubt this is a regulated practice,” said the girl who was scaling the cliff like a goat.

               “Oh,” Olruggio said, charmed despite himself. “Well, if you’ll take a look, you’ll find I’m burning well within means,” he said, gesturing to the large, deep-bellied cast iron firepit off the side of his yard. And spelling besides, he thought to himself. But they don’t need to know.

               “Yeah, and it doesn’t NOT smell incredible,” said the frank, low voice of a small, blue-haired, squat girl in what looked like some sort of dungaree.

               “We’re divided on the morality of the smell,” said the goat-girl, all long limbs and hair in pink buns, in a long skirt and some environmental t-shirt, giving deeply into shrillness.

               “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m not usually in the business of arguing with teens. But. The problem is I have so many extra herbs, and yard waste besides. I don’t suppose you’d know anything to do with twenty metric tons of rosemary?” he wondered aloud, to the vibrating quarks of at least one of the kids.

               “I sincerely doubt it is that many tons,” said the blue-haired girl.

               “Or,” Olruggio continued, “All this rich, loamy…uhh…environment. Surely there could be no other use but burning,” he said.

               Not three seconds had passed before the girl with the pink buns coughed.

               “I’m actually looking for a project,” she said. “It would be…amazing…if you could just…leave the leaves. And I could…come over and inspect them? Every week…? They’re so…untouched,” she said dreamily.

               “Sounds like a plan, then,” said Olruggio.

               “So you’ll stop burning?” said the brunette. Shrewd kid.

               Olruggio leaned in.

               “Listen,” he said. “Again, I’m not in the business of dealing with teens. Why don’t you send your da over here so I can get an adult opine on the burnin’.”

               “You should really be saving the herbs for him,” said the faint voice of the blue-haired girl.

“He could use them,” said the pink-haired one.

               Olruggio coughed.

               “Why don’t you,” he said. “Fact. Why don’t I come up there tomorrow. I’ll bring herbs as a peace offering. You go and have your supper and I’ll put out the fire for tonight.”

               “Great, thanks, sir!” said the pink-haired girl, and they all, none but the brunette having crossed the threshold of the trellis, started their way back up the hill.

               It was only much later, after Olruggio had dumped water on the fire, releasing a fragrant puff of wet, heady smoke, and had started gathering the best heads of rosemary and basil, trimming them as were proper and stacking them as organized as shuffling a deck of cards, that he realized he hadn’t asked any of their names.

               Tomorrow, then, he promised himself.

Chapter 8: Qifrey, early June

Notes:

This should also be noted as a love letter to cooking and coffee.

Chapter Text

               Qifrey had always loved the morning. After he had sent the girls off to bed and attended to any missing glasses of water, loads of laundry, wishes for breakfast, the odd missing ferret, he, too, turned down the lights in his room, slid under the soft, crisp bedcovers of his circular bed, and perhaps read a little if he was feeling up to it, if it were not too quiet or too loud. And, in turning out his nightlamp, a happy thought remained: there would be, if nothing else, coffee to look forward to in several short, restful hours. If he could get the rest.

               Lately, though, he’d been sleeping better. Well, better and worse, somehow; he was sleeping a little longer, and he had been plagued by dreams right before waking. Stormy, tumultuous ones; spells, family, moons, water, flame. He had always been under the impression that dreams were good for oneself, though, so he took them in stride, padding to the bathroom in the morning and trying not to look too hard at the puffier, purpler circles under his eyes. He could go to Sinocia about it, were he really concerned; this is what he told himself, how he let himself off the hook of his health, a hook easily hung back up in the sparse mental closet where he stored his body.

               Olruggio was quite adept at making coffee. The man had figured how to wring it, spell-like, from an inexpensive ground, lulling its essence out until it was thick, caramel-like, and strong as turned dirt. Qifrey wished to ask him how he did it, wished almost to ask him to watch him while he made it one morning. But that felt so personal, so imposing on of business; Qifrey would feel as if he were asking a magician to reveal his last trick. He was happy enough to have the familiarity of Olruggio bringing him a fresh cup over the landline of their properties, to share it on his overhang or in Olruggio’s fine back garden.

               In any case, happily, it was morning again, a later, lazier one, within which Qifrey did not dream. He woke a few minutes later than usual and dressed in a cream linen button-down and a pair of green trousers. As usual, he had been turning over what to make for breakfast for the past day and a half, and was pleased to find the girls still asleep at this later hour, when the sun had already been almost at its height for some time, was beginning to warm the leaves of the kitchen plants. He had been out to the porch to pull more kale, its pleasing deep green contrasting with its crinoline blisters as he neatly chopped inches at his favorite, and only, cutting board. Tetia had made it for him after her first summer in the Atelier out of bisecting panels of oak, a healthy young one that had been felled in a storm in the glade. Now, almost three years later, the top half was getting soft with knife-marks, though he oiled it nightly. The back half was pristine. He would flip the board and start using the other side when he felt nearer the mid-point of his life.

               The kale done, he scraped into a silver bowl, already lined and fragrant with chopped fresh dill and crushed pepper drops. He’d made too many loaves of sourdough and had let one, diced, sit out overnight. This he scooped into the bowl as well and dredged the mixture with many cracked fresh blue eggs from a neighboring farm that he had whipped into a froth; this would bake into a strata and smell, if he did not say so himself, incredible. He cut his eyes at the clock. He had been holding off on brewing coffee himself. For no reason.

               Almost as if summoned, the back screen door banged open. Qifrey’s system did not know what to do; it cringed at the sound, for the girls---should I go up there?---for himself, for the having to settle his shoulders and skim an easy smile off his roiling insides.  But it was only his errant, lonesome, wayward neighbor, bearing two tall mugs of fresh coffee in one hand and the other sort of awkward, like it hadn’t expected not to be holding something; impossible to charge with anything.

               “Mornin’,” Olruggio said.

               “I’m surprised,” said Qifrey. “I’ve only just put the strata in the oven.”

               Olruggio shook some of his charming shaggy bowl-cut out of his eyes and smiled.

               “Was feeling particularly on it,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

               “Not at all,” said Qifrey. “Though I wouldn’t mind, perhaps, if next time you would call…?”

               Olruggio blinked, setting the mugs on the narrow island and scooting in noisily on one of the stools.

               “Will do,” he said easily, “T’would be easier if you gave me your number.”

               Qifrey felt himself flush, and wished he could busy himself with something else to make. There were only the dishes, though, so he got started on rinsing out the bowl with the dregs of the eggs.

               “Of course,” he said. “Just as soon as I finish these dishes.”

               “Why don’t you let me do those?” said Olruggio faintly from behind.

               Qifrey turned around, faintly annoyed, but still fond.

               “Olruggio, you don’t know where anything is or anything goes,” he said. “It will be faster if I do them; and, I mean it, it’s but four dishes besides.” Softening, he motioned toward the fridge. “You can measure out some cream and sugar if you wish.”

               “Do,” said Olruggio, bounding up. There was a pleasant pause, full of sounds of sudsing dishes and clattering of grains, stirring of spoons.

               “So,” said Olruggio. “You must be wondering why I’m here.”

               Qifrey paused to pick up a rag to dry the fresh dishes, looking out over the crisp sun alighting on the glade, so much of which was his and Olruggio’s to tend to, for now.

               “I should think that easy enough,” he said. “You bring me coffee, I bring you breakfast.”

               “Is that all?” Olruggio said, pretend put-upon. “…Well. I mean, I’m happy to eat whatever you make. Including whatever that is,” and he jutted his chin at the oven, which was beginning to emit a faint buttery, yeasty, baked-greens scent.

               “And you’re always welcome,” Qifrey said. “In fact, I think I owe you something of an apology. I have word that the girls visited you last night and asked you to stop burning your yard clippings. I had no hand in that.”

               Olruggio scooted over so Qifrey, finally unavailed of dish duty and dried of hands, could sit in the neighboring stool at the island. Qifrey took his coffee---Olruggio had added a hint of cream and slightly more sugar than one would think, exactly perfect---and took a thoughtful sip.

               “Actually,” said Olruggio, “They did, but they were right. T’wasn’t very neighborly of me. At odd hours besides.”

               Qifrey turned; the stools were round, sort of pleather and new-agey and swiveled pleasantly but squeakily. A little out of place in the all-wood kitchen. Olruggio had taken the stool on the unsighted side; he remedied this by hooking one foot on the chrome edge and turning so the other man was in his sight.

               “Not to add another ‘actually’ to this conversation, but I actually quite like the smell,” smiled Qifrey, delighting in the genuine surprise on the other’s face.

               “Really?” he said. “…huh. So it’s OK if I keep burning? There’s no hour that’s too annoying?”

               “Well,” said Qifrey. “I’d shy away from say, four-thirty in the morning.”

               Olruggio laughed, taking a slurp of coffee.

               “Can do. Really only those few hours, though. Oh!” he said, rummaging in his jacket, a big, square Carhartt or Barbour thing, a little heavy for the season yet, Qifrey had to admit, handy for its inner pockets. “Brought you something.” He unearthed a well-loved plastic bag housing a crinkly, fragrant bouquet.

               “Rosemary!” said Qifrey, cracking the top of the bag open to inhale the scent. Olruggio’s rosemary smelled by far the best of any he had had the pleasure to encounter; almost dessert-like, with a hint of cream, somehow blue. “Hold on.” He got off the stool, opened the oven, and, gloved, brought the baking strata out, sending a silent spell to prevent it collapsing in the differing air. Inspired, he laid six latticing rosemary stems across the casserole and put it back in the oven.

               “Now you’ve helped me make it,” he said evenly. “So I’ll bring coffee to you next time?”             

               Olruggio smiled, the sweet dimples and laugh lines crinkling at the edge of his eyes, his forehead, the crease of his brows, but was spared an answer by the bounding of steps down the front stair.

               Agott first, as usual, dark head bent and serious, sleep not yet or really ever rubbed out of her eyes. Then Tetia, a twin, anxious spark, already dressed for work. Coco, sleepy and dear with the light glinting off her honey-colored bob, and Richeh, somehow always presenting the exact same level of energy in her level, short gaze.

               Agott cast one cool look over the scene.

               “So you didn’t bring enough for us?” she drawled.

               Qifrey laughed as he got up to unearth the ancient, rarely-used pot from the tall cabinet. The girls usually spelled one-off cups if they wanted coffee; it was rare they all got up as a cohort. The presence of Olruggio, he hypothesized, united them; the pea in the mattress of the princess. It was easy to sense when routine was broken in a house.

               I guess you’ll be able to get your wish sooner than you thought,” said Qifrey.

               “Wait, what are your names??” said Olruggio hastily, as the girls filtered out to all ends of the kitchen and living room.

Chapter 9: Coco, early June

Summary:

The girls trade notes about what the fuck is going on with Qifrey and Olruggio from the playroom, windows flung open, heavy humidity. Doing hair and nails when they should be, someone says, thinking about school. But how can they when two are stuck in the mud literally and two are stuck in the mud figuratively?

Notes:

Sorry I lost the plot a bit and also no one is teaching lmao and also that this is so ace lesbian and that everyone is midwestern in vibes it COMES WITH THE TERRITORY. Also should I be doing these little outline notes for every chapter?? Not necessarily posting them but it helped so much…

Chapter Text

 

               After they all had shared their names with Olruggio and the one to two requisite facts one must tell an elder about when one is a teenager (what’r you studyin’? School going well? College picked out?), the girls retreated to the playroom to debrief. Someone, probably Tetia, had earlier flung the double windows wide in the shade of the old oak with boughs close enough to climb. In a house as old as this one, any spare breeze was welcome; they had no air conditioning, not even window units, though they took turns spelling never-ending ice from the freezer and suspending it in front of the fans.

               Agott settled her pointed chin in her hands, lounging on a bed.

               “So,” she said. “That was weird.”

               “Was that weird?” wondered Tetia, working on some lab in a mottled notebook in the corner. “I thought it was sweet,” and Richeh muttered a faint secondedddd from her bed pushed in front of the other, shut, double windows.

               “I suppose it’s a bit strange to watch your caretaker flirt,” Coco said.

               “Yeah, I mean, you’d think he would have more game at this point,” said Agott, shortly before being heavily thwapped by a pillow. “Aughh, Richeh, why??”

               “They’re called throw pillows,” said Richeh, again in a no-nonsense sotto voce.

               “He probably has not had time to develop “game”,” said Coco carefully.

               “We could all hear the quotation marks.”

               “I mean, it’s true,” said Coco, a bit defensively. “He’s either teaching or caring for us all day. When does that leave time for anything?”

               “I mean,” posited Agott, using the newly-acquired throw pillow as a chin rest now, “-what was he doing before he took me in? Don’t you ever wonder?”

               A silence. Coco had to admit she hadn’t considered. Who does try to imagine their parents’ youth, their teachers’ lives once they exit the strange, small bubble of school? It just happened that she and her cohort lived with him. A small, strange bubble of residency and residence that Coco was fighting heavily against leaving, but also both trying to tear herself from and tearing away from its walls anyway like damp wallpaper. Wanting, wanting. Wanting desperately to keep what she had, and experience normalcy, city, change, growth, anything else.

               “I bet it was literally exactly the same,” said Richeh.

               “Yeah, he probably just took us in because he suddenly had time,” said Tetia. “And like, a degree, crumbling away in a drawer. ...Right…?”

               “What in Sam hell happens between thirty and forty?” wondered Agott, wrinkling her nose.

               “What happens between twenty and thirty?”

               “I’d be happy to debate these questions all day,” said Coco, and a pang went up in her heart as she realized she would. She would miss this, and she knew they would always be able to call each other, to transport even at the drop of a hat (or within one) to where the others were, but it wouldn’t be the same. And she didn’t know, even, if they would be welcome home. Here, in the Atelier. She had to imagine they would. But what if Qifrey took on another cohort? He hadn’t taken on another pupil since Richeh a year ago and didn’t seem to show sign of doing so again. What if he didn’t want alumni returning? That seemed fair. However, Coco also knew they could simply ask. There was so much they all could do; they all talked all day, but no one really asked, or communicated, anything.

               “…but,” Agott finished for her, pulling her out of her reverie.

               “But,” Coco said, glad for Agott’s assistance. “We called this meeting to get a vibe check. Which we did, a little bit. Should we push him again to actually ask him out?”

               “I can’t stand the them dancing around it,” said Agott. “I’m in favor.”

               Tetia returned from the bathroom and dumped her trove on a spare bed.

               “I don’t know what we’re voting on,” she said, “-but what about a good old-fashioned hair and nails night?”

               Agott caught a rolling bottle of polish under a slipper, fashioned to look (Coco thought a bit self-consciously) like a loafer.

               “I thought you were au natural and all,” she said. “Isn’t this basically just putting poison in our porous, poor little bodies?”

               “How can we do each others’ hair if our nails are wet?” said Richeh’s voice from the corner, where she somehow was still listening with the hugest set of headphones over her ears Coco had ever seen, with a Switch materialized in her hands.

               Tetia’s long arms somehow playfully rapped them both.

               “Shush,” she chided, handing Agott something. “Here’s your Thnks fr th Memries Black or whatever.”

               “What does that mean?” said Agott.

               “I don’t know, it just said that on the bottom.”

               Coco, a little reluctant at being set off track slightly from the task at hand (and really set off track of the Looming Problem of graduation and college), nevertheless, picked up a pearly pink color; her go-to. If she had time and it was dry, she’d do a manicure with a bone color on the tips of her nails, which were somehow growing out nicely.

               “Let’s try one more time,” Coco said. “To push them together. If it doesn’t work, we abandon it. They’re grown men.”

               “I really think it’ll happen without us,” said Tetia, opting for a bright, sparkly pink that clashed with her oatmeal sweater and wide black pants. “We’ve set the catalyst in motion. Now we wait.”

               “And we know you hate waiting,” said Agott.

               Coco flushed.

               “Not about me, but I hear you,” she said.

               Seized by a spurt of inspiration, Agott, nails freshly painted, bounded up.

               “I’m going to go down there right now,” she said.

               “Nooo, what if he’s not gone yet??” said Tetia worriedly, but the carrying of Qifrey’s laugh on the humid wind came through the window, the sound of two voices animatedly, intimately talking, as summer as anything else, betrayed Olruggio’s leaving. Agott waggled her eyebrows at Tetia and strode to the door.

               “Godspeed,” said Richeh, not looking up from her game.

               Later, Coco would think on this moment. Yes, that it had been a turning-point for someone she loved, a turning-point for them all, but also simply to live in the moment again, to tuck herself into the knit blanket of her past, young self. Where time was only just starting to have meaning. Where sisterhood, family, her own bright spark were unquestionable. Yes, it was routine and sometimes boring; yes, she was not at home with her own mother, who was still very much alive and whom she loved deeply. But she had a home; two of them, was as rich with homes as the fat running off a roasting duck.

There’s still so much time, she thought, fiercely. This she had to believe.

 

An interlude

 

               Agott surprised him with crossed arms in the foyer, the widest part of the house, as he was coming back in from seeing off Olruggio.

               Barely giving him a moment for his, she believed, slightly-manufactured oh!, she said,

               “So are you going to actually ask that man out on an actual date or what?”

               Qifrey flushed, shucking his weird floppy suede boots one by one with the shoe tool.

               “Heavens,” he said. “One would think you all were going to major in my affairs in school!”

               “I notice you didn’t say ohhhh, nooo, I’m not interested in him,” said Agott pointedly, staring at the bridge of Qifrey’s glasses, which was extra-wide to, as he said, give him more space to push them up his long nose, but which Agott thought was just extra surface area to cover the frequent flushing.

               “Have you perhaps considered personal investigation as a potential major?” said Qifrey, still smiling, albeit a bit strained. “If you’re going to stand here, perhaps you can help me fetch the canning equipment from the basement.”

               Agott would rather do almost anything else, including catching frogs at the river with Richeh or notating algae fluctuations with Tetia. But, she said measuredly,

               “Trade you. I’ll go get all that stuff if you ask him out.”

               “Hardly a fair trade,” said Qifrey.

               Agott cocked an eyebrow.

               “Isn’t it? There’s that huge enamel pot and like forty-seven million jars.”

               “You know how I dislike hyperbole,” chided Qifrey.

               Agott stared at him, arms crossed.

               “…Fine,” he said, humoring her. “If it will make you happy. I can’t believe you’re blackmailing an old, frail man…”

               Agott rolled her eyes, already opening the door to the narrow under-stairs basement.

               “We all know everything you say isn’t true,” she said, meaning she didn’t think he believed he was old or frail and how he could just spell everything up if he wanted besides, but it took until her return up from the basement, arms full, panting and with her shirt sticking to her back, to think that perhaps that was a bit harsh to say.

Chapter 10: Qifrey, mid-June

Chapter Text

 

               It had taken him longer than he would have cared to admit to program Olruggio’s number into his phone, and for Olruggio to text him, the other night, early evening as the sun was burnishing everything and turning the back of Olruggio’s head rust-red besides. That done, Qifrey had let it sit a few days before attempting a text of any sort. Still in bed, he pulled up the black expanse of the empty text field to Olruggio on his screen, and thought. And thought.

               It’s no use, he thought miserably. I am simply not of this world. I want to see people in person…!

               He imagined Beladruit’s pealing laughter at this.

               Is not the point of texting to see people in person? Qifrey imagined him saying.

               Have you seen how the girls text? He imagined his retort back. And now oh good, he was arguing with his imaginary father, the real version of whom would probably appreciate a call or better yet, a visit, in his head. Qifrey massaged his temples; his skin was oily and slightly creased from sleeping slightly later. At least he had done something good with his last eight hours.

               I desperately need some other friends, or some new hobbies, or something.

                    He had never thought this about himself before. Agott must have gotten in his head the other morning; all that about asking Olruggio out-the nerve!-and the iceberg under the surface of what that intoned, from all the girls, he imagined. Qifrey thought himself quite a well-rounded man. After all, he was raising-and teaching a full high-school load, if somewhat specialized in history and Latin-to four teens, and cooking, and keeping up with his water spelling, and visiting his father-yes, somewhat occasionally, but the occasions were marked. And his garden! How was he to keep up with anything else? And he had to buy so much ferret food and litter that mysteriously vanished as soon as it was bought. And there was always something to can.

               The tips of his ears burning, Qifrey turned over under his cool duvet. He supposed, when he put it to himself like that, he, perhaps, had some free time.

               However, isn’t it super capitalist to constantly be seeking to fill one’s time? A voice quite like Agott intoned.

               Yes, maybe you should finally be resting, another voice, somewhat reminiscent of Richeh, suggested.

               Maybe you should actually talk to us about these things, a third, Cocoish in origin, reasoned.

               Or you can just lie in bed all day, a Tetia-like sprite said hastily. No worries. Couldn’t be me.

“Augh,” said Qifrey, and slid around some words on his phone with his finger. And. Send.

 

               A tight forty-seven minutes later, Olruggio stood slightly further into the kitchen from the sliding double doors, scrubbing his (derusted) hair and gazing around the room, bemused, a pair of mugs clenched in one hand.

               “This the room you need help with?” he said.

               Qifrey had started slow-cooking groats on the stove, and was standing at the counter slicing peaches so ripe they were like layered silk.

               “Why don’t you sit, and I’ll tell you about it?” he said, gesturing to the stools across from him.

               Olruggio put the coffees on the island and took off his jacket, casting a wary eye to Qifrey before slinging it across the back of his stool.

               “There’s a coatrack by the door, and also a shoe rack,” Qifrey pointed out, and as Olruggio began to get up, continued, “-but there’s really no use in this house. We have one Biology major and one aspiriant. There’s pluff mud ground in all the grout forever.”

               Olruggio hastily sat back down.

               “It’d come right out with BKF,” he said.

               “I’m sure it would,” said Qifrey, adding a star anise and some cloves to the groats. “Or a spell. It’s interesting, don’t you think, what we choose to do, to not do, and to spell away with?”

               “…yeah,” said Olruggio, clearly somewhat at a loss. “Am…should I…?”

               Qifrey added a pat of strong yellow butter and some salt to the groats, turned them off heat, and in the same fluid motion reached across the counter and squeezed Olruggio’s hand, just briefly.

               “You should stay and wait for us to finish breakfast,” he said, “-while I tell you about the wall. And you can add sugar and cream to my coffee while you do so.”

               “…Okay!” said Olruggio, happy to have a task. Qifrey added two generous servings of oatmeal to two flat bowls and topped them with the peach slices and a tablespoon of cream, which mingled with the juice of the fruit. He sat at the other stool, and sighed, and nodded at the wall and the stove which bisected the room, and took a long sip of coffee, which was, as expected, wonderful.

               “That the wall?” said Olruggio through a mouthful of oatmeal. Well, really it was more like tht th waurllr? “Damn, Qifrey, this is amazing. Never thought about doing the fruit in it. And the little spices! Well, they’re kinda crunchy, but good.”

               “Yes,” said Qifrey, smiling despite himself. The girls were always saying he smiled too much, but he felt he did too little. “The girls tell me it’s becoming a bit dangerous for everyone, laid out as is.”

               Olruggio peered at him over his becoming, chunky glasses, taking a sip of his own coffee.

               “The girls think that?” he said critically.

               “They want to know if your expert opinion agrees,” Qifrey said.

               Olruggio looked at him some more, then looked at the wall, then ate some more oatmeal, looked at him, looked at the wall again.

               “Need my tools,” he said, and without a second thought, boosted up off the stool, grabbed his jacket, and headed home.

               Qifrey passed a serene several minutes eating his own breakfast, wishing he had made eggs or sausage or something in addition but enjoying it nonetheless, before Olruggio came bustling back in with a hint of the morning sun on him, sweet sweat and pine in the turn of his collar.

               “Got ‘em,” he said unnecessarily, and hunkered down on the ground by the wall, tape measurer and level out. “You know the house was tilted?”

               “I can’t imagine how anyone makes anything straight in this place,” deadpanned Qifrey.

               “Guh,” coughed Olruggio, then busied himself with some other arcane engineering tool for a solid ten minutes of work in silence.

               Finally, he hefted himself up to sit at the counter for a little while with some paper, a sharp pencil, some scales, and a little brush that at points he would use to busily scrape eraser bits off. This went on for perhaps thirty-five minutes. Suddenly he heaved a great breath and out again, stirring the paper, but not, Qifrey noted, any eraser bits.

               “And…?” pressed Qifrey, taking one last cold sip of his coffee. Not even any grounds in the dregs.

               “Yeah, it sucks,” said Olruggio bluntly, causing Qifrey to start, then laugh.

               “Did you even do any real math, or was that all just jokes?”

               “My profession a joke to you?” said Olruggio, smiling. Qifrey raised his hands.

               “Not at all,” he said. “Certainly, it’s why I called.”

               Olruggio slid the paper over, which did have a very real, very detailed elevation of some kind of the wall mocked up.

               “Didn’t really need to draw it out to know it isn’t great,” he said. “And there’s not even, like, a hood on the stove.”

               “That’s why we have the double-door porch,” protested Qifrey.

               “Even so,” said Olruggio, “-I’d redo the whole thing. Someday. Sorry, I just would. Counters aren’t even high enough! You had to special order this island!”

               “I-,” said Qifrey, then realizing he was right. “I…did. We work with what we have in this house.”

               “You don’t have to,” said Olruggio, easily and quickly. Then, hasty again, “I don’t mean to overstep or anythin’. I can just…see how it all would go so much better.”

               Qifrey sat there a few moments, picturing. A kitchen easier to navigate. Yes, one different than he, than the girls had known. But they had only been there at their longest, four years. The kitchen itself had been there for who knew how many years, made for someone that was not them. What would it be, to remake? To repaint all the moss-green, the accents from his youth? And besides, he had gotten used to the kitchen; had spent almost a quarter of his life there. Now that he was losing his sight entirely, wasn’t it better to have it how it always was, so his body could remember?

               But instead of saying that, he said,

               “Well, the rest of the house mirrors the beauty of this random stove wall.” And then they stared at each other for a time.

               “I’ve really only ever seen the kitchen,” said Olruggio pointedly.

               Qifrey laughed, thinking of all the time he had spent in the house, how much of it was at this stove, at the table, pruning the garden, washing the dishes.

               “What else is there to see?” he said, then, realizing he was being a bit doltish, “-Why don’t you come see what else might need your professional eye?”

               He was two lengths down the hallway before he realized Olruggio was not following. Turning back around, he laughed a little and, from the doorframe, went,

               “Are you coming?”

               “…S’pose,” said Olruggio, standing dragging his stool under the island. He crossed the length of the kitchen and, instead of trying to breeze past Qifrey, looked him in the eye. “Listen, Qifrey, I don’t want anything misconstrued here.”

               “Whatever could you mean?” said Qifrey, whose insides were twisting into roughly six million electric white eels.

               Olruggio muttered something that sounded like “Gonna make me do it, huh,” and, after one deep breath and a curt sigh, “-Are we flirting? Because this feels like flirting.”

               “…oh,” said Qifrey, now experiencing a strange maelstrom of relief and fear.

               “-not easy for me to understand other people’s intentions, and you’re, no offense, a little harder to understand than most, but to most, I feel,-” continued Olruggio, starting to get a handsome flush at his temples and neck.

               Qifrey stopped him with a hand to the chest, surprising them both. He wasn’t really a physical person, but from almost the moment he met Olruggio, he felt comfortable, like he was picking up an old mantle, and should probably discuss this with him.

               “I understand,” said Qifrey. “I’m…I understand how hard it is to read me. I mean, I haven’t done it,” he said, a fluttery laugh escaping his traitorous chest. “I…I don’t really know what I feel for you. But I do. Feel. For you,” he said.

               Olruggio looked at him a moment longer, and he looked back.

               Oh my god, do I have to? Qifrey thought. Do I have to do the thing about the thing?

               But instead, Olruggio cocked his head slightly and ducked under Qifrey’s arm.

               “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see these other walls.”

               “Go out with me sometime,” Qifrey blurted, after Olruggio had walked a few paces down the hall. The other man turned, grinning.

               “Well, all you had to do was ask,” said Olruggio. “I’ve had ideas for months.”

Chapter 11: Coco, late June

Chapter Text

               In the time between the brilliant blaze of the last of the sun and its turndown into golden hour, Coco set out, again, for her favorite oak. She had packed her art supplies, a borrowed pair of headphones from Richeh, and the blasted college brochures. Sure, perhaps she was a bit early for applying, or deciding–it was Agott who should be sweating, and Tetia had already applied to several places super early decision-but she couldn’t help feeling like she couldn’t enjoy this summer, her last, even though it was already at its peak, sticky and hot, the humidity making everyone scout for burgeoning thunderheads on the horizon to bring down the heat. She had worn her best lace-up boots, hardy but with a Victorian kick to them, smooth and worn and dependable, and a smock over her dress. Every time she dressed, she wanted to feel sure; even if she didn’t feel surety at all in her mind, she could at least look prepared.

               A whole year, she thought. A whole year left to decide. But she couldn’t help but feel that this summer was going faster than in the past. There was a feeling, insistent, in her chest; it turned circles and mewed, demanded attention. She plunked her stuff down under the oak-the grass was dry but not too scratchy, and still smelled faintly of fresh dew-and sat down.

               What was it? The feeling panged. She’d felt like this before, when she was twelve and leaving home. A feeling of someone trusted being ripped away too soon, of being permanently gone, though she knew, with her logic brain, it wasn’t true. But twelve-year-old Coco didn’t feel like that; to her, she was leaving the care and schooling of her mother for some man’s unfamiliar home, based simply on the understanding that he was an excellent teacher. It was on Qifrey’s recommendation that many promising students were accepted to the best universities in the state, and Coco had her eye on one for design. Her mother had taught her a basis of art and sewing, but she had sped through what she knew too quickly; her brain and hands were thirsty for more, and Qifrey had seen potential. Coco knew she didn’t want to carry on her mother’s farm very early on; early mornings mucking the stalls and hauling hay bales did not impress favorably on her, she was too much a daydreamer. She liked her hands being busy with tasks, she liked the tactile nature of farming, how there was always a hoof to scrape out or a barn cat to scritch, but she wanted to make, not to help other things make. She wanted to paint with watercolors in some old building in a city with others her age for another golden set of years, suspended dreamily in the bubble of nonreality. She wanted to make friends, to date, to get out of the close set of peers she’d had. But she would be grounded, too; her degree would help her. She had to believe, at least. She was vying for a dream which logic-mind was telling her was almost impossible, but which both twelve- and seventeen-year-old Coco needed desperately to hold onto; that it was all worth it, that it all would be.

               She was envisioning the money she would make, her first check cut at some garment designer’s side, that she could send back to her mom so deeply that she forgot to check in about what exactly she was feeling in the first place. Her mom was only a call, or even a portal, away. She missed her passively all the time, but this feeling wasn’t that. No, this was…rawer, more urgent. The feeling was black-cat shaped, cool, a little feral, much like Agott. Agott–Coco realized she was going to miss her, when or if she left. Twelve-year-old Coco was feeling like she must prepare to be abandoned again.

               Coco put down her sketchbook in which she was doodling and put a hand on her heart, the other hand on her elbow.

               “It’s okay,” she said to herself. “It’s okay.”

               It was okay, now. Something was going to change, and that would be okay too. Strange, unfamiliar, but the shapes would settle.

               Coco picked up her sketchbook again and opened to a new page, picked up a pen. She made some lines describing the trees, the horizon, her own leg and the folds of her dress, then mixed some water into her color palette and went over them with moody purples and blues. She set it on the grass to dry and lay back against the oak. She liked to imagine she was starting to wear in a groove where she had sat over the seasons over the years, but the truth was, she hadn’t come out enough at all to make a lasting impression on something so ageless.

 

Chapter 12: Olruggio, early July

Chapter Text

               In any sense of the matter, here they now were, on Millstone Lake as it neared the zenith of its beauty, both in night and in season. The sunset as it downed was fiery red, though still with a streak of dark blue topped with a lighter one as in afterthought. It was with this sparse light and his phone Olruggio was using to navigate to the dock.

               “It’s not too much further,” he said, casting a glance back at Qifrey, who had insisted on carrying the picnic (which he insisted, also, on preparing), in a medium-sized icebox, as well as his own chair. Olruggio shouldered everything else, but was, at this moment, cursing his stupidity. The lakeside at dusk? For someone hard of sight? He was surprised Qifrey hadn’t said anything. He was surprised Qifrey wanted anything to do with him at all.

               It had been spur of the moment, the asking; that’s what Olruggio was trying to convince himself of. That that night, post the magnificent dinner, after the girls had (ostensibly, Olruggio remembered what it was like to be a teen) gone to bed, and he and Qifrey had stayed up talking and splitting the bottle of aged red which had turned to a second, darker, drier vintage, and they had bumped ankles but then kept them linked. It was all totally casual friendly, neighborly, and Olruggio had been proud and none too excited to share that he had a little-known spot on Millstone Lake that Qifrey had professed surprise at never nearing (at least, there was a glint of something like surprise in his pale blue eye).

               At this thought, Olruggio stopped where it was brightest, under a clearing with a lamp-post and where the dock was not too far. Qifrey almost bumped into him; it was too abrupt a stop.

               “Is everything all right?” Qifrey asked, tilting his head in that way he had, that way of an owl and a fox mixed, a curious cat.

               “I should be asking you,” Olruggio said. “Seems a little foolhardy of me, to, y’know. Suggest this. Are you okay? Can you…see?”

               Qifrey tilted his head a little further, smiling faintly.

               “Yes,” he said. “I don’t think it’s as dark as you imagine. You also forget we can both spell at any time,” he said, letting the icebox handle go for a second to flicker his hand midair, conjuring a whisper of fireflies, which then flew scattershot to their fate.

               “Where do they go…?” Olruggio chased his thought.

               Qifrey watched them, the pinpricks of light reflecting in his bright iris.

               “You know, I am not sure,” he said finally. “All I know is that the magic is returned to the earth. But maybe I should be more responsible,” he said, taking the handle of the icebox back up and with his other hand taking the crook of Olruggio’s elbow, “with flights of fancy I bring into being.”

               Olruggio chewed on that as they stood there, lit orange-and white-blue by the rolling dapples of light off the lamp and the sun from the lake.

               “Was that for me?” he said, which made Qifrey toss his head back and laugh. Olruggio would give up every coffee every morning to see and hear that laugh.

               “Heavens, no,” Qifrey said. “But you reminded me, the girls are always asking me to be less cryptic and say what I mean. I can’t help it. Beladruit was also a man of mystery, albeit a little more humorous than I tend to reach toward.”

               “I want to hear more about the girls,” Olruggio said. “And your da. But I also want to know if you’re genuinely okay to continue.”

               Qifrey favored him, or pinned him, with his glance; the bespoke one that featured either calculation or calculatedness mixed unto no small amount of mirth.

               “Yes,” he said. “I am okay. But,” and he gestured with the long line of his jaw over the sun scattering its hasty handful of firelight pips over the dark maw of the lake, “I’m not so much fond of water, if that’s where our destination might be.”

               Olruggio’s heart pumped. “Oh,” he managed.

               “You can still show me the dock,” Qifrey said. “I would love to see it. But might we leave our trappings somewhere…close…?”

               Olruggio swallowed, then nodded, and cast a grin to Qifrey, one he hoped was no-nonsense, charming.

               “Of course,” he said.

               “Here would be great,” Qifrey said, smiling still. How the man looked at peace and at home, with the now-fluorescent and otherworldly blue light dancing about in the lenses of his eyeglasses, was beyond Olruggio. They both looked up at the way-lamp, heard its faint buzzing, looked around at the matted grass in its guarded orb, temporarily neon.

               “I know a slightly better place,” said Olruggio hastily, and with a hup picked up his things and half of Qifrey’s. “It’s not too far. And I mean, like, steps.”

               “Grand,” said Qifrey.

               They traipsed a fair few feet through the light scrub of the woods, until Olruggio huffed his satisfaction and set down his load.

               “Here we are,” said Olruggio. It was quite a bit darker, the shadows hazarding towards chocolate-brown and flickering in the corners of their eyes.

               “Charming,” said Qifrey, “-I’m sure-” but he was too late, as Olruggio grabbed his hand. Qifrey loosed a faint hmmm as Olruggio tugged them along, leading them to the well-trod, yet sturdy, base of a small floating dock on the lake.

               Olruggio scratched the back of his head with his free hand.

               “Herewe’re,” he said. “Course, wouldn’t want to bring you out if you don’t want to.”

               Qifrey was looking out at the lake. The sun was still in its trajectory downward; it was not yet night, but threatening so, and the corona of orange was brilliant across the lake, the edge of the dock, the bridge of both mens’ noses.

               “Thank you,” he managed. “It’s lovely enough from back here, though I can imagine that sitting on that…woven square…out on a zero-gravity cross-cut of driftwood…might be nice…were one abject, I mean, perhaps, set to dreaming.”

               “Well, when you put it like that.” Olruggio smiled.

               Qifrey looked him in the eye, without leaning. Impressive for one who was at least four inches taller.

               “I appreciate the thought,” he said. “All your thoughts. I, in turn, want to hear what this dock means to you. But maybe let us set up somewhere landlocked?”

               “Yes!” Olruggio beamed, conscious suddenly of the slight growl of his stomach amongst his meandering flights of fancy.

 

               There was a little beach tucked in to the right of the dock; secret not so much to Olruggio, or anyone who knew of the dock on Millstone Lake, but secret enough in the feeling one got when on its sparse, white-sand-speckled-with-black shore, hit suddenly with the universal feeling when outside for a spare moment in deep, late June. Like the trees would cradle you. Like every remembered breath was a stolen gift. The beach was lined with ferns, scrubbed with wild fronds, verdant and silent and peach-sweet as if simply being there were akin to rolling a salt candy between your gums and teeth. But Olruggio was not so much a poet as all of that. He was here, often. So he knew the offerings of the beach, the lake. How rich the loam from the water was on his sandals. Share these things with Qifrey, his brain suggested, and he, suddenly bashful, turned away from it, an oyster shying from light, from air.

               Only to find Qifrey set up in a camp chair next to him and smiling, always smiling that half-smile, barely-caught, the nascent moment between starter and dough, between coffee and grounds. His long fingers toyed with the camper-cup of red Olruggio had poured a measure of for them both, his eyetooth flickering in the firelight, white then orange then blue.

               “Penny for your thoughts,” Qifrey said, and then, “well.” He hemmed, “-I hate when people say that. It’s so unoriginal. The penny is so beautifully composed, but going out anyway.”

               “So maybe they are worth a thought,” said Olruggio, surprising himself and eliciting nothing from Qifrey, but the latter mulled, turned the sentence over a few times.

               “Yes,” Qifrey said, seeming suddenly to motion towards Olruggio’s hand, but pulling back. “……I’ve been told by the girls that I should, hmmm, I should be more forward. Say what I mean, they say,” he said, smiling a bit wider but hiding it behind his hand as he took up a darkly-seeded cracker with a rich slice of brie that reminded Olruggio in all profiles of the foam off the lake. “So what I mean is, what was the thought you were just having?”

               “Uhhh,” orated Olruggio. Calculations occurred, and he remembered to focus in on Qifrey’s eye, giving him what he hoped was a rogueish smile. “Uh. Yes. I was just thinking about how beautiful this beach is. How much it’s always been here for me.”

               “Did you come here in your childhood?” asked Qifrey mildly.

               “Yeah,” Olruggio said, and leaned forward and scooped some brie off the plastic cutting-board on top the cooler onto a cracker for himself. “I mean, you know I only just moved back, but I used to come here with my family, and then by myself.”

               Qifrey tilted his head and looked out at the lake, wine-dark and inviting.

               “And you don’t have any contact with them,” he said, a statement which Olruggio acknowledged, again, with a tight nod.

               Another moment. They looked out again at the water, listening to the lap-back of the brightly sparkling waves. Blue and orange, orange and blue.

               “A shame,” Qifrey said, taking a sip from his cup. “They lost out on a man of substance.”

               Olruggio felt himself blushing again in the heat from the fire, and Qifrey’s cool hand alighting on his forearm startled him from the blush.

               “And what I mean by that,” Qifrey said evenly, “-is, a lot. In layman’s terms. And, ah, what I mean by that is, oh, Heavens, I meant to lay out all my thoughts and all the terms but I’m walking the tightrope between condescending and earnest-”

               And Olruggio leaned over and tightened that rope of thought and kissed him.

               He could feel the astonishment in the tension of Qifrey’s mouth, wider and more supple than he would have thought it might be. Everything about him, from the way he first sat in Olruggio’s garden to his slightly chapped lips tasting not unlike vanilla, was familiar in a way Olruggio had not before experienced. But Qifrey, whom Olruggio had known simply as a man who had a thin veneer of ice on top a frigid, tightly-held person, the chunks of peanut butter cup in an otherwise-smooth parchment-colored pint of ice cream, kissed him back. The depth, the sugar in the surprise, the salt in the hint of longing.

               Qifrey parted the kiss, as Olruggio had hoped he would not but had thought he might, and he softened the blow with a hand to cup the elbow.

               “My,” he said in a low voice. “That was nice. And I mean that word.”

               The cast-iron, mechanical guts of Olruggio kicked up, fire-started and trundling towards blue-hot.

               “Yeah?” he said, tilting his head, leaning in again, but Qifrey laughed a little and moved his long hand toward the hollow of his collarbone.

               “I would be honored,” he said, the out of nerds everywhere. “-But,” and the long winter eyelashes of his tilted down, “-Dating me. Would be a prospect of sorts.”

               Olruggio thought about everything he knew about Qifrey. His girls, who as he learned were not his daughters, not his wards, not his students, but a combination of the three. What they had told him. Of his disability. Of his magic. Of his laugh, of his guardedness, of the thin bare hollow of his throat where the pulse showed through, where Olruggio would very much like to press a kiss. And instead of barreling on, he waited for him to continue.

               Eyes meeting eye. Silence. The yearn toward, the muted crunching and sipping and lapping of the lake, toward which Qifrey now stared straight ahead.

               “Well,” said Olruggio. “Not that I want to be that guy, if people still say that, but does it have to be dating?” He spared a glance over at Qifrey, who seemed to sit straighter in his chair, working harder at projecting an air of calm.

               “No,” Qifrey said faintly. “No, I suppose you’re right. What’s a kiss between friends in the forest?”

               “All I mean,” said Olruggio hastily, “-is, if you’re uncomfortable, it doesn’t have t’ be anything. Maybe I was a little hasty myself.”

               “Not at all,” said Qifrey, who turned a shade more toward him. “I appreciate when anyone acts on a feeling instead of sitting on it. I’m trying to learn that myself,” he said, then paused. “Well, I am trying to want to learn.”

               “I can’t imagine you not wanting to learn anything,” said Olruggio. “Seems like you’re teaching all the time. Like you have a genuine love for life.”

               Qifrey nodded, considering. “All those things are different, but kind of the same, too. Of course I love to teach, to learn, to watch the girls learn and then bring their skills to others later in life. But I don’t love everything about life, or existence. Who does?”

               Olruggio thought about how much he hated getting up and also, how much he hated to fall asleep. His body recalcitrant to leave the warm nothingness of sleep, then being too wired with thoughts to ever find imagine again finding the experience enjoyable. The juxtapositions of life.

               “I hear you. I hate cleaning the coffee press,” he said, then cringed a little. Surely whatever Qifrey was going to say was worse. Then he admonished himself for trying to one-up someone in suffering. Simpler to be alone, really.

               “You do?” Qifrey said, eyes owl-like in the dark. “But…you make it every morning I come through.”

               Olruggio gave him a quick grin, enjoying the flush over Qifrey’s face as he thought about it.

               “Same as your love of cooking, I’d imagine,” he mumbled. “Easier to do something you hate if it’s for someone you…appreciate.”

               Both men smiled faintly at each other, looking out again at the lake.

               “I really hate water,” Qifrey said, one little ha falling from him, his arms crossing. “And I am not one who loves the word hate. My father always sort of imbued in me that it was an ugly word.”

               Olruggio smiled, thinking of what Qifrey had told him of Beladruit, then wiped the smile from his face in case the other man thought he was lordin’ it over him or something.

                “Granted. I excel at spelling it. Boiling for teas and stews and to boil pretzels and bagels and such. But being in it,” and he shivered, making Olruggio wish he had brought the heavier tartan from the back of his couch. “Being in it, bathing or swimming or even wading or the like. Feeling driftless, like a piece of lichen. It makes me feel like I’m drugged. Like I’m reaching out, waiting to be rescued.” He turned his eye up from shadow to Olruggio, as if testing him, asking, go on, and then went on. “Nothing prompted this. I just don’t like it. Makes it somewhat hellish to try and teach on the glade with the girls.” He crossed his arms and rested his fingers lightly on each elbow, making a little frame for himself.

               “That’s okay,” Olruggio said. “Not much of a water man myself. Like the fire, like the dirt.”

               From kitty-corner, from side-eye, Qifrey smiled slightly.

               “Those we agree on,” he said. “But it’s not just water. There’s all sorts of exacting things that make me unknowable, hard to love. Not that love is what we are angling towards,” he said hastily. “Dear me. I’m getting ahead of myself.”

               Olruggio understood.

               “I understand,” he said. “We’re of an age. Can’t exactly be wastin’ time puttering around with things that might not work out.”

               Qifrey stared again past the fire into the lake, the cheese and any heavier pickings forgotten. Olruggio wondered if he might prompt the other man. Surely there was a whole spatchcocked chicken in that cooler or something equally wonderful.

               “I appreciate that,” he said slowly. “And how flexible you are, have always been. I mean,” he laughed a little, “I’ve not known you for that long, even. Despite us being neighbors for what, years?”

               “Twenty, technically,” said Olruggio easily.

               Qifrey balked.

               “Well, no, I only just moved into the Atelier---my name for the house---some ten years ago. I guess I owned it a couple years before. And didn’t you just move in yourself?”

               Olruggio shrugged a shoulder.

               “Parents owned it,” he said. “Grew up there. Took it over this year. But technically, it’s been like, twelve years.”

               “Either way…a while,” Qifrey said. “It’s so hard. I’m not…one who generally gets to know their neighbors.”

               Olruggio nudged the cooler, which prompted Qifrey to flutter into action.

               “My! I almost forgot about dinner,” he said. “You must be famished.”

               “I could eat,” said Olruggio distantly.

               Qifrey laughed a rich, if thready, laugh. From the cooler, he withdrew several containers of cool marinated vegetables, and more---Olruggio thought he saw something like lemon wedges---and, indeed, a bird of some kind, done up with fresh herbs.

               “From your garden,” Qifrey said, noticing him watching. He dished them out portions of the veggies---green beans, the mystery yellow fruit, new potatoes with fresh peas and dill.

               “The bird?” said Olruggio, half astonished but half kidding.

               “The rosemary,” said Qifrey. “Pheasant was at the farmer’s market.”

               “Shopping?” teased Olruggio lightly. Qifrey had a habit of turning a passive phrase.

               Qifrey cut his eyes at him, then continued slicing portions off the pheasant onto paper plates.

               “I wouldn’t, either,” said Olruggio.

               “Hm?” said Qifrey.

               “Get to know your neighbors,” said Olruggio. He continued with no shred of jealousy or bitterness, “-you have the perfect little world in your home.”

               Qifrey turned toward him, percolating on the thought.

               “I do,” he said. “I worked hard to make it so. And the girls contribute so much.” He paused. “I am missing…something.”

               Olruggio hemmed, scratched the back of an ankle where a bug might’ve bit.

               “I want to hear more,” he said. “If you’ll tell me. What you’re looking for. But it’s also okay to leave it as is. For tonight.”

               Qifrey hummed again, favoring him again with that look, like Olruggio was a bright or surprising student.

               “I-thank you,” he said. “Sometimes I get ahead of myself. Let’s enjoy this meal and this night as it is, and next time, we can talk more.”

               Next time, Olruggio thought, half-dream, half stupor. I have a next time with someone.

Chapter 13: Agott, early to mid-July

Chapter Text

 

               Agott woke early; she always did, though her days had been less structured of late. Qifrey kept to a traditional schedule and did not teach during the summertime, though he could not resist a daily adage. She swung her legs over the side of her narrow bed and put on her slippers, the same Richeh and Coco ceaselessly ridiculed. There really is no reason to pressure myself, she thought. At least, not really. Not that I think Qifrey would kick me out. But she wouldn’t know until she asked.

               But what was she going to do? Live in the ramshackle Victorian through her twenties, her thirties, contributing not a can of skipjack to the pantry? And that would be fine too, she imagined Coco saying, though both of them fully knew the other girl would be accepted pronto, full-ride, into whatever design school she desired. She could take care of Qifrey, she reasoned. But she didn’t think it would be fun for either of them. Qifrey loved her, certainly, but he would rather teach Coco, cook with Richeh, go with Tetia to the field to sample damaged leaves. In his usual I’m-a-cool-mom way, Qifrey had toed the line between being overbearing and having too little rule; his teaching kept to an eight-month, fall-to-spring schedule; homework was due, classes were had. But he never really made it clear what happened when one reached the age others traditionally went on to college. And Agott was the eldest, and, though Tetia and Coco were pushing eighteen too and ambitious besides, it didn’t feel fair that Agott had to take that step into the real world first, and alone.

               She pulled on some beaten summer shorts and a shirt, a silky black band tee. Qifrey knew she liked her shirts soft and doused them in vinegar to keep them so. Who was going to think of her like that in her real adult life? She thought miserably. She made such a game of keeping to herself, of pretending she could do it all on her own, of pretending she liked it that way. Perhaps she had inherited something from Qifrey after all.

               Not even one foot out the door, she stumbled on an unfamiliar mass.

               “Augh!!” it went. Agott was proud she uttered not a syllable, though she did stumble and catch herself, heart pumping rabbit-fast, on the wall.

               Agott peered closer. The mass had rumpled black hair and what appeared to be a square.

               “…Olruggio??” she said, aghast. It was not even nine in the morning.

               The face of her neighbor, ruddy and rumpled, peered back. He wore a crisp flannel shirt and had a sharp pencil tucked behind his ear that Agott was surprised hadn’t pierced something or another.

               “…Agott?” he said, like they were meeting by chance on the street, and not in the hallway of her home for the past four years, scarcely a month after they had introduced themselves to one another.

               Giving her body a moment to quit reeling from the shock, she squatted down and then sat, relinquishing to the fact that Olruggio didn’t need to see her sitting flat on her ankles all cool.

               “So,” she said, voice gritty with sleep. “What’r we doing here?”

               He looked at her for a moment, seemed to forgo the command to say you don’t have to be here. Said instead,

               “Uh, your d-your- Qifrey said the moulding was all pitted and uneven. And I agree!” he said, tutting. “Can’t hardly put up a bookshelf against it. Takes inches outta this narrow hallway and makes it inaccessible besides. So I’m takin’ it up and then I’m just going to repaint the wall and fill in the gap.”

               “Oh,” said Agott, who had never once stopped to consider the millemeters of the moulding beyond occasionally noticing how badly it gathered ferret fur. “…well. Can I help?”

               She could see Olruggio about to protest, but then the man looked down the long, somber expanse of the hallway and thought better of it. He handed her a mini pry-bar and a face mask.

               “Can never be too careful in old places like these,” he grunted.

               Agott fitted the mask over her face and took the tool.

               “See you’re not wearing one,” she countered.

               Olruggio grinned faintly, nudging up the moulding with one hand, pausing to put his own mask on.

               “You’re right,” he said. “Thought I might be immune to it. Can’t be immune to silica and such. Never too late to try.”

               Agott grinned to herself behind her mask, already prying half a foot down.

               They worked this way in silence until it was near lunchtime, the watery light in the hall betraying only half-clock marks’ worth of time-telling. Agott only barely registered the hunger sitting low in her belly. The scrape, pry, slide was almost blissful, silencing her thoughts; it pleased her to watch her long fingers working, working, not at sums or translations but at something which would, she hoped, as counselled by a hopefully wiser elder, eventually help Qifrey and the future inhabitants of the house.

               Qifrey’s presence was always sudden, but this time it was even more surprising; at one point she was working the paint-key-like tool insistently into a troublesome bit of old wood, and the next, his six-foot shadow peaked over them both.

               “My,” he said. “What on earth could possibly be transgressing here?”

               Olruggio started, as if out of a trance.

               “Qifrey,” he said. “I…wanted it to be a surprise.”

               Qifrey cocked his head down the hallway, which had a ten-foot strip of moulding peeled away from the floor and wall, exposing a pink underside as if a raw wound.

               “Oh, I’m surprised,” he said. Agott had to stifle a little giggle, which was as much from humor as from a little bit of fear. Qifrey was at his most imposing when he was giving off the mildest energy.

               “I,” Olruggio said. “Let’s maybe talk about this outside of Agott’s ears.”

               “I can hear whatever you want to say,” said Agott suddenly, surprising herself, and Qifrey, from the looks of it.

               “…that’s true,” said Qifrey, acquiescing slowly. “Eighteen isn’t so small an age.”

               Olruggio sighed a bit, then stood, breathing in.

               “It’s just that you said I could be free to come and go as I please,” he said. “And that, should I see fit, I could do a small home repair here and there.”

               Qifrey considered this, light dancing in his eye.

               “True,” he allowed. “I meant more along the lines of ‘change a lightbulb’ or ‘fix the toaster’, but I can see how you would take that to mean ‘dishevel the hall’. And I know,” he said, more privately to Olruggio, “-that you can see how much you could fix about this place. And I love your passion, your skill. I just wish perhaps you would come to me first about larger scale things?” he said, and from behind his back, proffered two cups of coffee, both black, to Olruggio and Agott.

               Olruggio smiled, taking it, as did Agott.

               “Of course, Qif,” he said, as Agott thought to herself, Qif? It’s been like two months! And as both brunettes raised the coffee to their lips, Olruggio faster, spluttering,

               “Oh…this is so bad.”

               After Qifrey’s shocked silence and subsequent peals of laughter, after he had squatted good-naturedly and let Olruggio tell him about what he was doing and the plans for the hall, after Qifrey had gone back to the kitchen and started cooking some frittata with feta, bacon, and oregano, by the smell of it, after Agott and Olruggio had resumed their work and peeled the full first half of the moulding off, Olruggio had turned to Agott and sat fully down on the ground himself.

               “I could use your help with a project,” he said. Agott braced herself for him to ask her to help with Qifrey; she could see helping make the house more accessible, in her way, with wood, screws, proofing, drawing, silence. But she could not see them three as a family. Connecting. All the shivering parts of life.

               “You know my trellis in my garden…” she almost missed Olruggio saying, and smiled to herself, relieved, and a little scared at how relieved she was.

Chapter 14: Olruggio, late July

Chapter Text

               The girl and he had worked on the trellis all day, getting done twice and a half what he had been able to do on his own in a day when he had spanned months, forgetting. The honeysuckle was, in vain, trying still to grow; its white and green roots scrabbled naively for purchase, stronger in their flexibility, and it took a strong pair of scissors to gum through them. Agott, agile with the sure-footedness of youth, took the top, patiently untangling and sawing apart the thickly-gathered twigs while Olruggio worked from the bottom, hacking and relentless but still trying to preserve the frame. Come the first finger of dusk, Olruggio, panting, finally called a halt. His body, his mind, thrummed to just finish the damn thing today, but some logical part of his mind could tell that it would still be another day and a half’s work at least; the honeysuckle still left spanned almost as much as his open arms. He hated to leave the work; his body sung with needing to complete, but also with exhaustion, and he could tell the girl was tired too, though she was doing her best to act nonplussed, a hard glint in her eye, and he thought, I haven’t fed the youth, good lord.

               But it wasn’t too late to try. He stood up, groaning, and spotted her getting down the ladder, small as it was, and sat on the stoop of clay blocking in the garden.

               Agott sighed and took a long, welcome swig of her water.

               “Couldn’t find room for a picnic table?” she said, swinging her head around slowly at the large, careful gaps of landscape under the trees but before the herb beds.

               Olruggio considered, swigging his own coffee. He hadn’t thought to bring water, figuring coffee was water once, and he was starting to get jittery.

               “Not enough of an excuse to need one,” he said. “’Til now,” almost an afterthought, or just quiet, feeling Agott’s amusement beside him.

               “Well, it’s not like you can plan ahead for havin’ company,” he retorted, feeling perhaps ‘retort’ was a bit strong for the quiet amusement of a teen.

               “Explain Qifrey, then,” she said. “And Coco’s parents. Richeh’s parents. Everyone I know plans to plan.”

               “…fair,” conceded Olruggio, wondering if this was an opportunity for Agott to talk about her parents, not sure if he should ask. He settled for waiting quietly, enjoying the shade and the momentary rest, letting the acid settle in his calves. Noting the muted bite of hunger in his stomach.

               But Agott did not take him up on the pause, though perhaps she could tell he was half-distracted. Just like Qifrey, he thought, though the other man did talk fairly gladly of his father. Instead the girl gestured with her chin at his front door, arms crossed in her, he had to admit, sensible work coat.

               “’s that?” she said.

               Olruggio got up, heading toward his back door for water anyway. A bundle about the size of a baby in a red checked blanket sat, and something glass, glinting in the setting sun.

               He opened the blanket first; sandwiches on long swathes of French bread that he had to bet Qifrey baked, jeweled with butter, prosciutto, and arugula, and potato chips, fresh and so crunchy they looked like they would shatter, and two generous jars of sweet, cold tea. His mouth watered. Sandwiches were always the best after working in the garden.

               Water forgotten, he was just about to turn back with their prize when Agott gestured again to the other gift, smiling. Olruggio turned back to find a brand-new twelve-cup coffee-pot, glinting, emerald green and gold, with instructions in a careful pen laid on top, a jar of grounds so fresh he could smell them through the ridge of the jar cap. For Qifrey, and maybe Agott too, couldn’t bear to leave him with a step to accomplish in a gift; at least Agott couldn’t. Agott, he imagined, looking back at the twiney youth, so uncertain and so wanting to be cool settled, had a genuine good streak to her. It was probably her idea; though the grandiose scale was all Qifrey, it was surely Agott that put it in action. From the stars glinting in her smile, he reckoned he was right.

Chapter 15: Qifrey, late July

Notes:

not me projecting all my avoidant attachment onto Qifrey

Chapter Text

Chapter 14: Qifrey, late July

               Qifrey was running out of ways to think about how lovely the gusty, sighing summer nights were. How to describe the sky, its ever-onward stretch, bluer toward the horizon yet domed visibly like the globe of an eye. Olruggio had shown up to the Atelier late one night, huffing at the front door after knocking politely, yet insistently, for quite some time. The lights were out to the north, those strange, magical green lights that Qifrey thought might taste of grated peach and mint. And Olruggio wanted Qifrey to come see them, tugged his hand as he stood there in his pyjamas, his silk-enshrouded wrist reluctant to cross the threshold. But he did. Want. To see the lights, though he’d seen them several times before, in the north, in his youth, on the water. So he grinned, acquiesced, stepped into the closeness of Olruggio, the cinnamon and amber scent that clung near the back of his neck. And they were wonderful. It was wonderful, that night. He was trying very hard not to feel trapped.

               So here they were, another warm-breathed summer night having settled upon their shoulders like a comfortable mantle, smelling as much of sweet soap as of the bridled back of heads. They were sitting a little ways off Olruggio’s garden, just them two, though at some point Olruggio had set up chairs for six or eight in an ox-horn semi-circle around the handsome steel fire pit, for which he had also split a pile of wood. Olruggio had a sweating gin and tonic which shone iridescent blue, like some new mold, in the crepuscular fall of night perched under his chair; Qifrey nursed a Chianti in a steel cup which suffered for taste or indeed anything interesting about it but for the purple that clung to his tongue. His knees were at his chest, though comfortable under some knitted white-and-cream wool throw Olruggio had brought for him, its fibers fragrant and pleasing as they warmed near the fire Olruggio was stoking.

               Qifrey nodded his chin at the trellis, hazy in the distance.

               “How is the trellis going? I’ve noticed you’ve been borrowing Agott.”

               “That okay?” Olruggio said, sitting down after poking the fire. “Realized I hadn’t, uh, run it past you.”

               “She’s an adult now,” Qifrey said evenly. “And I trust both of you to make your own choices. I’m happy she’s found an activity, actually,” he confided. “For a while it’s just been tinny and esoteric grunge coming from her room.”

               Olruggio brightened.

               “Does she play anythin’? I’ve got tons of old stuff sittin’ around…”

               “Slow down,” Qifrey said, laughing a little. “I’m sure she could harbor a want to pick something up, but perhaps stick to one activity at a time.”

               “Fair,” conceded Olruggio, tipping back in his chair and taking a sip of his drink. “Trellis is goin’ good. She’s got a steady hand and an eye for delicate work. Way better than when it was just me, anyways, but imagine that’s pretty much true of anythin’.”

               “Well,” said Qifrey. “Too many cooks, you know.”

               “Have heard that,” Olruggio agreed, and they sat for a while in a comfortable silence.

               “So,” said Olruggio. “On the topic of the girls. Can’t be easy, havin’ four teens.”

               Qifrey turned his head slightly; Beladruit had always admonished him lightly for this. You’re not trying to loose water from your ears, you know.

               “It isn’t the easiest,” he said. “But it’s quite natural. It is not the ease I’m after. I imagine you’re quite the same,” he said, studying Olruggio, who scrubbed a hand behind an ear, suddenly uncomfortable in the flickering firelight. He bent forward again to stoke the flame.

               “I like a purpose,” he said haltingly. “Been strugglin’ a little myself with what I’m doin’. Sometimes I’m jealous of your job; it always looks so fun, but I know it can’t be all a box of roses.”

               “Yes,” Qifrey said finally, taking another uninspiring sip of wine. “Well, perhaps, as you say, it’s not so much natural as it is…ingratiating is also not quite right, though it is that. I enjoy it, and I think they enjoy being taught, being raised, if I can distract them so from that. It wasn’t random, and it was planned, not barely, but also not extensively. It is just…right. I have no say in how easy or hard it is. Nothing to base it against.”

               Having coaxed a hearty flame from the fire, Olruggio dropped the poker and raised his square, fine hands.

               “I wasn’t tryin’ to say anything,” he said, settling heavily back into his folding chair. “I don’t even think you need any observations of what I think. But if you’re takin’…” he looked, from under imploring lashes, at Qifrey, who melted a little.

               “Yes,” Qifrey said, acquiescing. “I’m…receiving feedback.” At this he bent forward and started unwrapping the crinkly and fine wrapping of the summer tart he had made. Duck eggs from a neighbor who owed him a favor, dates, furikake, the remainder of a roast chicken chopped and hand-shredded, and some of Olruggio’s rosemary, set in a buttery crust until solid, cool, and able to be split with surety into wedges.

               “I think they’re wonderful girls,” was all Olruggio said, and he leaned back in his chair on his heels, taking a swig of his drink. “…I don’t think I have any say in the matter. You’ve seen me,” he said, gesturing to his worn-in heather-grey tee, the black Carhartt again and the Levi’s jeans, though the glint of gold on the collar of the jacket didn’t escape Qifrey either. “Lived alone in the woods, if these count, all my life, more or less. Not raisin’ anyone.”

               “But yourself,” said Qifrey, handing him a slice of tart.

               “But myself…” said Olruggio, then, catching on, “-jokin’, are you?”

               “No!” said Qifrey, putting out a hand. “No, it’s quite something to raise a forty-something on your own, isn’t it?”

               Taken aback, Olruggio laughed, and Qifrey joined him. The pair dug in for a little bit; Qifrey wished he’d thought to make something warm, a curry or stew in a spelled tote, as the chill was starting to settle on the ground around them like a loyal dog.

               “I will miss them,” said Qifrey, looking straight ahead. “Four years is so long, but not enough to get but a glimpse of a life. Especially for a teen; that’s a hearty slice of their childhood and early adulthood. They’ll be completely different people in another four.”

               “Aw, no,” said Olruggio. “Can’t be. They’ll always have a soft spot.”

               “Certainly, a soft spot,” said Qifrey evenly. “But a spot for their old self, and my old self, as we were, this exact August. And I’ll remember them as they were now, as they grow older. And I’ll stay the same.”

               “…No,” said Olruggio, somehow even fainter and with less conviction than before. “…I know we’re older, so we change less, but. That can’t be true.”

               Qifrey smiled and looked down at his hands. They looked the same as how they looked when he was thirty; pale, with somehow more fine lines and cracks than he imagined he would have. Long-fingered, knobby but avoiding the worst parts of gangliness, the nails even but pale and flaking like croissants, as they were never resting, always burning through their chitin and calcium, scrabbling towards the next thing to learn, do, escape.

               “I don’t really know who or what they see me as,” he confessed. “I do know they see me…faltering, a little bit. And they’re worried about how much I’ll…need them. And they’re afraid to go.”

               They paused and watched the fire flicker, Olruggio cutting glances at him under his, albeit quite sweet, flop of dark hair.

               “Your eye?” Olruggio said.

               “Yes,” Qifrey said. “I am, of course, happy and able to get around as I am now.” He gazed off, watching the white tips of the flames flicker and throw ambery, peaty peals of smoke. “It’s not like I’ve always had an able body, so now it’s lacking. I’ve had the one gone as long as I can remember.” He paused again, drawing his arms around the tops of his knees, taking comfort in the pyramid of his body under the blanket.

“…The other is starting to go too. At first I thought I was just imagining things; you know, is it slightly darker? Was that floater always there? Did I always have this pain behind the socket, or did I just not drink enough water? Was I never able to see the leaves on the bough of the oak outside my window? But as time went on, it…decayed in a traceable way. I do not have the sight I had six months ago, two years ago, four. I don’t know that I would have taken on the girls had I known four years ago how badly it would start to leave me.” And Qifrey fell silent, waiting for judgement.

               Olruggio paused, gathering his thoughts, or simply not knowing what to say, or simply feeling it.

               “I can’t tell you that I know how you feel, either as someone losing their sight, as a teacher, or as a father. All I can say is that I’m…here for you. You know, if you need me. If you want that,” he finished, tapping the plastic armrest of his chair a little, Qifrey imagined, spooked.

               Qifrey thought. Part of him wanted to roil, to go, You are right. How could you know? You have no right to presume to understand what I want or need or have been through or could be through. How could you understand the cast-iron, potbellied fear I feel in potentially losing all my sight, to lose my girls at the same time as I lose my autonomy? Certainly, I could do it alone; make my house livable, with spells. Certainly you could visit and be pleasant as we while an hour. But I have made my own life myself. I relied on my own body, whip-smart, my own thoughts, my own whims, my own tastes have curated every corner and every thought and even shaped the minds of the youth I love. Who are you, to come in at this late hour? Who are you, with your body that works, that splits logs, that untangles dead thorns from dead wood, that coaxes life from dead things, that reaps improbable harvests, that seems to be so together yet so alone? But instead he said,

 “I just wanted my sight to be something you are aware of. That it will be a factor in anything between us going forward.”

               (How like Qifrey, Olruggio imagined Richeh or Coco or Agott saying. How like him to not ask for help or admit any feeling of need, or of wanting, but instead to present himself and his feelings, his needs like a statement and a contract.)

                 “’m aware,” was all Olruggio said, waiting for acquiescence, and scrubbing a hand along the flat pane of Qifrey’s cheek in finding it.