Daisy Duke's Arc

Chapter 22 of 22

The cosmic rolls ran out on a Tuesday. Daisy shook the empty kelp wrapper and found only crumbs. Three tangled dreamers waited at her counter, and behind them, a whole line. The moth sat on the vanilla sprig, useless against knots. She could split hard dreams only with Lyra's rolls, and the rolls were gone. She told the first three to come back and shut the door early. By morning six waited outside. The pile grew. That night she knelt at the meltwater fall and called. "Lyra. I need more rolls." The water stayed dark a long time. Then Lyra rose, slower than before, her star-scales dimmed. She had swum deep, and the deep had worn on her. "No more rolls," she said. "I'm not coming up again until I find the star. It's forgetting itself down there." She said it flat, final, the way she closed any subject. "People are stacking up," Daisy said. "I can't read the tangled ones alone." Lyra studied her. She reached below the water and set something on the wet stone. Not rolls. A cluster of blue flowers, stems dripping. "Cornflowers from my grotto floor. They grow where the water untangles." She pushed them toward Daisy. "Bake them in. The flower splits the thread for you. You won't need me." "You're giving me the way to do it myself." "I have to go down," Lyra said. "For good, maybe." She did not soften it. "Learn this now." Daisy took the flowers. Their blue felt cold as the meltwater. "How do I bake them right?" "Bind them to something that stays," Lyra said. "You know how." Then she slid under, and the fall went still. Daisy carried the cornflowers to the star-flecked stove. She thought of Lyra swimming down alone, and anchored the flowers to that stubbornness, the refusal to leave a thing to rot. She folded the blue petals into honey batter and baked three small cakes, glaze crackling gold across their tops. At dawn the tangled dreamers filed in. She gave the first man a honey cake. He ate, and his knotted dream loosened on his palm, one thread joy, one thread an old shame he needed. Daisy saw both plain. She pulled the joy and baked it into shortbread. He left steady. The cornflower had done the work the rolls once did. One by one, the pile cleared. She split each tangled dream with a honey cake, then baked the safe thread alone. No moth needed. No Lyra. By noon the line moved smooth again. Daisy pressed one blue petal into a jar of water on the sill. It rooted by evening. She could grow her own now. The tangled dreamers would never stack up again. But the fall stayed dark, and Lyra did not rise, and Daisy did not know if her neighbor would ever surface from the deep.