Mademoiselle Cocoa Beans's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

By the third day, Cocoa Beans could barely lift her copper pot. Each guest she cured left their grief inside her chest. The thin man's wife. A widow's silence. A boy's missing father. The sorrows stacked one on another until she moved slow as an old woman. She sat behind her marble counter and stared at the glowing lantern. If she cured one more stranger, she would not be able to stand. Her shop would go dark by nightfall. The brass bell rang. Casandra Videncia stepped in, her dark blue robes trailing over the floor. The clockwork stars in her grey hair caught the window light. She was the medium who had lent Cocoa Beans the lantern, the one who first warned her that curing others would cost her own heart. She stopped mid-step and tilted her head, as if listening to someone Cocoa Beans could not see. Then she laughed softly at the empty air. "You carry them all," Casandra said. She set her tarot deck on the counter. "I can see them on you like coats. Too many coats, querida." "I can't take another," Cocoa Beans said. "They don't leave. They just gather." Casandra touched the lantern. She studied the amber crystals, quiet for a long moment. "You have been keeping their grief," she said. "But grief was never meant to be kept. Not by you. The chocolate holds it. You are only the door it passes through." She turned a card face up without looking. "A door that stays shut will break." Cocoa Beans frowned. "How do I open it?" "Give it back to the lantern." Casandra pressed Cocoa Beans's palm flat against the warm glass. "You breathed their sorrow in to fill the chocolate. Now breathe it out the same way. Let the light take what you no longer need to hold." Cocoa Beans closed her eyes. She thought of the thin man's wife, the widow, the lost father. She let each weight rise in her chest. Then she leaned close and breathed out, long and slow, toward the crystals. The amber trembled. The light flared bright gold, then deep, then bright again. One by one the coats lifted off her shoulders. Her chest loosened. Her hands stopped shaking. When she opened her eyes, she stood straight for the first time in three days. Casandra smiled and gathered her deck. "There. The door works both ways now." But the lantern kept glowing, brighter than before. It held every grief Cocoa Beans had released, stacked and swirling inside the glass. She could work again. She could cure a hundred strangers. Yet all their sorrow now lived in one small lantern on her counter, growing heavier with each cure. She stared at the churning light and understood. She was no longer the vessel. The lantern was. And a lantern could only hold so much before it cracked.