Mademoiselle Cocoa Beans's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The lantern still glowed with Cocoa Beans's own grief. She could catch her sorrow. But her guests carried theirs locked inside their heads. She had no way to reach in and pull a stranger's heartbreak loose. All morning she stared at the amber crystals and found no answer. Her marble counter held twelve chocolates, each empty as glass. The brass bell rang. Aura Prisma stepped in, her old sandals quiet on the floor. She was the painter friend who caught ideas the instant they came. Once she had painted a door on her own arm to save it before wreckers arrived. Now she held her sketchbook against her chest. She smelled the melted chocolate and smiled. "You look like a canvas someone spilled," Aura said. "All grey and no color, querida." "I can hold my own grief," Cocoa Beans said. "Not a stranger's. I cannot open another person's mind." Aura set her sketchbook on the counter. She flipped it open. Page after page showed faces, hands, a blue door she never stopped drawing. "I never open a stranger's mind either," she said. "I ask them to look. Then I watch what their face does." Cocoa Beans frowned. "Watch?" "When a woman talks of her lost son, her hands remember him before her mouth does." Aura mimed folding cloth, slow and tender. "I draw the hands. The grief comes out through the body. She gives it to me without knowing." Cocoa Beans looked at the lantern, then at the sketchbook. The light did not read minds. It kept a feeling whole once it was felt out loud. She had been trying to steal the memory. She only had to help the guest remember it first. A thin man waited outside her window, hat in his hands. She had turned him away twice that week. Now she opened the door and drew him in. She asked no clever questions. She only asked, gently, who he missed. He spoke of his wife. His voice shook. His fingers pressed the brim of his hat the way Aura had shown, over and over, a small worn gesture. Cocoa Beans leaned close to the lantern and breathed the man's spoken grief toward the glass. The amber crystals trembled. The light dimmed to a deep, aching gold. She poured the glow into fresh chocolate and gave him a piece. He ate it. He wept. Then he laughed through the tears and pressed both her hands. "That was her," he whispered. "That was exactly her." When he left, Aura clapped once. But Cocoa Beans stood very still. She had felt his loss enter her chest as her own. It sat there now, heavy, and it did not fade. She looked at the empty morning ahead and the many strangers still to come. Her method worked. Each cure would leave a piece of someone else inside her.