Sunlit

Sometimes she wondered if the old lady had been a spy or something.

Something ridiculous, and something that would explain all the weird little tricks she knew because a librarian (as far as she understood the requirements for such a job) did not rely on one’s ability to voice act or understand Rutherford backscattering spectrometry or how to counter magnetic locks.

Well, a once-a-librarian, now retired and… and now doing whatever she was also doing.

Stormy grey eyes glanced over at Planty and realized that the singeing desert sun that pooled on the far side of the table had shifted enough to fall on them. “Sorry, Planty,” she muttered as she pushed aside the long-empty plates from the middle of the table to make room for the little plant’s meringue tub-pot, closer to her and her laptop, and she tried to ignore the waitress’ own glance at her, the woman’s umpteenth glance since the three of them had entered the dinner.

It’s not like they could leave Planty in the car. The poor thing would be atomized by the time they finished breakfast despite the car having the smallest amount of shade from being in the mid-morning shadow of a great, old saguaro.

Readjusting her earbud, her attention fell back on the sketchbooks spread out around her and her laptop. The internet here was eeeehhh but she would take almost any byte of internet she could find. She checked her shop, her DM’s, the marketing subreddits, and as much news as she could stomach.

“How was Maine?” she asked as the old lady returned, speaking softly as despite the echoing sounds of cooking and a straining fan, the quiet steeping in the dinner made it feel like anything louder was a scream.

“… Oh?” The old lady smirked with a snort as she plopped into the pillowy booth. “Wonderfully cool, I’m sure.”

“Hm,” she noncommittally agreed, and she returned to studying her shop’s statistics.

As the sun drifted higher, she found herself more tapping on her notebook than truly writing. To be honest, nothing particularly useful was gurgling up from her thoughts now, and it just felt harder and harder and harder to think.

“I have to go back to the ‘real world’ eventually,” she muttered to the old lady just as the other brought her mug to her lips.

“… Stop that,” the old lady said softly.

***

That night they made camp by a ring of large rock pillars in a sparse grassland. The next morning after breakfast and dishes, they wandered by foot with a camera, idly collecting rocks. As the sun drifted down that following night, it burned on the horizon and inflamed the billowing clouds over the distant mountains.

She started up her laptop before the sun peeped over the horizon again and tried again and again to digitally recreate that moment, and then repeated this all again the next day.

***

In another diner in another hamlet—this one with peach pie and an outer building shell that didn’t gleam like chrome—she found the next byte of Wi-Fi.

Some of the pictures seemed good enough but still always missing was something.

She touched them up anyways to ready them for the shop. She could upload some of the smaller files, but the bigger ones were going to need a beefier broadband.

***

As she awoke, she had to pause to rub her eyes as the intense sunlight that reflected off the dashboard and refracted dreamily from the crystals hung from the rearview mirror immediately blinded her.

She groaned as she hid from the light. Leaning against the dashboard, she reached to her water bottle in the cupholder behind the one Planty sat in. She gave the little, tenacious “annoying lawn weed” a sad smile and tried to drink from the bottle despite her weird angle.

The old lady snorted at her but she mostly ignored the other.

***

Maybe librarian wasn’t the true word to describe the old lady’s past profession, she thinks as she cranes her head up again to look at the stars above. Maybe it had been something more like researcher where she had traveled even more extensively than they did now.

Something to explain why her brain kept telling her that this didn’t fit the definition.

The old lady had started talking again and she did a double-take, trying to fill in the gap of what she had said. She pulled closer the only source of warmth during this cold, still night—her mug—and watched as the thin moonlight made every crease of the years on the other’s face known.

“Sometimes rumination has a purpose—if it’s tempered. Kept in check. It makes ya think. Feeds your empathy,” the other said, and her smile flattened as she tried to hide behind her small mug.

There was no outward rhyme or reason to the tidbits that the old lady let tumble off her tongue. A couple times it was about how hate was like a toxic relationship, isolating and self-perpetuating, and how many who suffered in its burning thorns needed a gentler hand, and she wondered if the old lady was talking about her son again. Once it was something about how tools—be it machines or science or the something else that the old lady had implied that she couldn’t remember—needed a hand to guide it. And again and again, the old lady tried to explain something about categorical thinking.

Just more and more tidbits and it felt depressing. It felt desperate.

It felt desperate to make sure it was said, and that made her sad.

That night she dreamt of bedridden queens and screaming ogres and smirking faces.

***

This diner was a bit more old-fashioned, even more “old-fashioned” than the UFO-themed one from several nights ago, but the most important thing was that they had strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Any place with strawberry-rhubarb pie (and that allowed them to take in a small potted wildflower) was a good place.

… She wanted a little diner of her own, she thought about suddenly. Well, the more she thought about it, the more she felt she really wanted more of a café but still…

She was already saving as much as she could.

Maybe?

She’ll need to look over her budget.

***

“… Tenacious little thing,” she whispered, and the wind caught her small words and drifted them down into the valleys below to no ears.

She sighed again as she stared down at the little patch of disturbed dirt, shifting on her feet as they had begun to ache from standing so long.

Another sigh and another strange pang.

Who buries a plant save to make compost, her mind muttered but this still felt right to do. Planty had traveled far with them from that little house, the poor thing dragged along for countless miles from where it first tried to grow up among cracked concrete and moldering siding.

For some reason a small smile tweaked at the corners of her mouth again.

She shouldn’t smile but she couldn’t cry either.

Just a little lawn weed.

It was not safe to drive in the mountains as the sun went down or when tired so, finally, she turned and walked from the quiet pines and that little patch of dirt and sneering phantoms.

She looked back out among the pines as she slipped into the driver’s seat. Softly, again she sighed with a small smile, and turned up the radio as she pulled onto the road.

She chuckled as the old lady gave Planty a salute as they drove off.