Rosemary Thornwick's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Morning light crept across the counter and laid itself over the dead woman's hand. The locket inside her fingers had gone cold. Rosemary felt the chill through her own palm when she touched it. She sat back on the stool and pressed her hands flat to the wood. Something old moved up under her ribs. A memory she had never said out loud, not once, not even to herself in the dark. Her mother's kitchen. A cup. A small girl watching her mother drink and not wake up. Rosemary's breath caught. She had not been brewing a cure. She had been brewing the thing that had taken her mother. She had been brewing it her whole life. Rosemary stood. Her legs shook but they held. She crossed to the shelf where three glass jars sat in a row, the dried stems and small white flowers inside catching the morning light. She had kept these jars since she was a child. They had been her mother's. She lifted the one with the pale blooms and held it against her chest. Then she set it down and took the rotted cup from the shelf. She walked to the back step and emptied the brown petals into the dirt. She would not brew that tea again. Whatever healing she made from here on, it would start clean, and it would start with the truth she had just spoken to herself. She carried the cold locket out to the carved stone altar behind the workroom. She set it in the center of the worn slab. She placed the rotted cup beside it. The chain pooled around the gold like a small dark river. Rosemary stepped back and made herself look. The work she had thought was hers was older than her. It had passed from her mother's hand to her own without a word. She would not pass it on the same way. She turned back toward the shop. Inside, the dead woman still waited, and the jars on the shelf still held what her mother had left her. The brewing she did next would have a different shape. She walked past the workroom to the weathered post where her records hung. Years of notebooks were nailed there in stacks, pages curled by rain, each one a list of plants she had killed and brews she had thrown out. Beside the post sat the metal bin where she dumped her failed bottles. Rosemary took down the top notebook and turned to a blank page. She wrote one line in pencil. No more lilac. She hung it back on the nail. The bin lid clanged shut under her hand. The old work was finished. The next work, whatever it would be, had just begun.