Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  He closed the door behind me. “I’ll walk over to Doozy’s in a while and pick up some eggs and toast. I do that a lot. They have great ice cream, too.”

  The store was crowded but adorable. Along the walls were sheets made into art with pressed flowers and leaves. Petals formed a mountain with deer grazing at the top of one. A sea of little tables covered the floor, each boasting baskets of goods. Fancy paper and envelopes had been decorated with dried flowers along the bottom at one table, and another held bottles of natural shampoo. Notebooks had flowers on the covers and picture frames had them around the edges. I picked up a fat yellow candle with flowers somehow printed on the sides. “These are beautiful.”

  “I’m sure it is, whatever you’re looking at!” Zakia yelled. I followed his voice to the back room, where he was surveying towers of boxes by a door and blowing out his lips. “Surly new deliveryman yesterday. The store had a crunch of customers so Nateso didn’t catch him in time, just came back and found this.” Many of the boxes had FRAGILE and DON’T STACK printed plainly on the sides. One box wedged into the middle of a stack was far smaller than those loaded above it, and the weight had caused its sides to collapse. The room smelled strongly of herbs and alcohol.

  “You should complain,” I said.

  “If anything is broken, and I’m pretty sure a few things are, I will,” Zakia grunted. He was pulling a box off the top of a stack. “Nateso busted his wrist playing football with the kids the other day, so he couldn’t dismantle this himself.” Carrying the box to a long wooden table, he set it down. “Hey, thanks for the ride.”

  I wasn’t eager to get back to the house and be on my own. And I also had the sneaking suspicion that Nash might be calling for a chat. “Could I help?”

  “Sure, if you want. Why don’t you be quality assurance? I’ll bring them over to the table and you slit the top and see how much is destroyed.”

  Picking up a pair of scissors, I opened the box. There were more of those lovely candles inside, each placed into a groove of a cardboard holder. I checked the layers under the first. “Your candles are fine.”

  “One point to the surly deliveryman,” Zakia said. He dumped another box onto the table. There was a wet spot on the bottom.

  “One point taken away,” I said. He opened up the box while I inspected the final layer of candles and deemed them in good health. I looked over into his box, which was full of shampoos and conditioners. None of the bottles was cracked, but one had opened and leaked all over everything.

  “Oh, no, if we have to clean anything, it’s minus two points. That brings us to negative one point now,” Zakia said. He brought up a bucket from under the table and dumped the bottles into it. Then he set it into the industrial sized sink behind us. The open bottle he dumped into the trash. Wiping off his hands, he said, “You can set those on the candle table out there, if you’d like. I’m going to spray these down.”

  Arranging the candles was a peaceful task, one that I completed in five minutes. I returned with the inventory slip, which I placed on a desk by the computer at Zakia’s request. A fresh box with a wet spot on the top was waiting for me upon the table. The water turned on and off as Zakia cleaned bottles with graceful speed and placed them on a towel to dry.

  I slit the tape and looked inside with trepidation. The wetness had gone through and damaged a notebook, but only one. I unloaded the contents and checked them over thoroughly. “Should I put these out there? The notebooks?”

  “No, those are for Christmas. That’s why they’re only red and green on the covers. Just plop them in the empty candle box and put it by the desk. Someone will deal with it later. Put the damaged one by the computer. How bad is it?”

  The wet stain on the red cover hadn’t sunk through to the pages. “Insides are fine, but I think the cover is likely to dry off-color. If you’ve got a discount bin or something, someone might still want it.”

  He examined the stain dubiously. “This is pretty big. Lotus might want it. She could use this for plant notes and research.”

  We dismantled the entire first stack of boxes and started on the second. A woman came in through the back with a hurried greeting and went out front to get everything in order for the day. Saying that that had been Neala, Zakia sent me out after her with more candles to be arranged. She was setting up the register and didn’t want to talk, so I didn’t say anything to disturb her.

  Once the box was empty, I carried it to the back and put the inventory slip on top of the first. Zakia had whipped through more of the stack. The smaller crushed box was nowhere to be found. Whatever was inside had leaked onto the box below it. “What was in that one?” I asked.

  “Just some perfumes,” Zakia said, coming out of the little attached bathroom. It wasn’t a very nice smelling perfume. Although there was rosemary in it, the scent was heavy on the alcohol and vinegar.

  “Minus one for breakage, minus one for cleaning,” I said about the perfume. The box beneath it had glass ornaments with dried flowers inside. Two had shattered and the rest were slick with perfume. I carried them to the sink and pulled up a strainer to place them in to dry after spraying the oil off.

  It was better than being home alone, I reminded myself, and got started on the rather nasty task. This was painstaking work since I couldn’t allow any droplets to get inside the ornaments. Wetting paper towels, I washed off each surface until the slickness was gone. The deliveryman should be fired for gross incompetence. There was plenty of room in here to put down the boxes without stacking them.

  The front door opened repeatedly, shoppers filtering in. Pleasant music played and my mind strained after those chords I’d heard in the sky. It was going to be like this for eternity, every day of my life wanting to go back to hear that all-encompassing perfection. When it finally ended for me in death, Adriel would go on longing for it. Even as my body sank to bones, to dust, to atoms, to less than that, he would walk this earth cast off and in pain.

  It was beyond my grasp, trying to conceive of the true eternity he would witness upon this earth. And save the company of a few other fallen angels, he was going to do this alone.

  On occasion things happen in life that make a person feel very small, and this was one of them. It seemed silly to clean perfume off ornaments that would hang in windows for a blip in time, to break or disintegrate, or to be reformed into new objects to hang in other windows. So much was going to happen on this planet that I was never, ever going to see, since my body wouldn’t last that long. In less than a century, I’d be gone but this world would keep on turning without me. I’d get off the ride and other people climb aboard. Yet Adriel was always, always going to be on it. Everyone in his classes at school would one day be gone, and so would their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren beyond that. Cities rising into the air would fall to ashes, languages drift until they bore no resemblance to the tongues spoken now, the technology we knew as current would one day be old and then archaic and after that forgotten. But he would remember.

  The world was going to change and change and change until there was no longer anything recognizable to what I was seeing today. Yet still he would be here, having to find one new footing after another . . . and know that all he had right now at this moment was never going to come back. How much the world had changed from his fall, which in geologic time was nothing at all. He was over a hundred years old and still unbearably young for someone doomed to eternal life.

  If he had been beside me in this room, I would have taken his hand just to share in that pain for a few seconds. Living forever didn’t mean anything when you lived it alone. Unable to age, to marry or have children, to strive to make some mark on the world . . . he’d move from place to place, read hundreds of thousands of books, watch countless television shows and movies, meet millions or billions of people yet be caught in an existential stagnancy. So he came to school after school to listen to lectures and make acquaintances and kill time, the one thing he was never, ever going to run
out of having. What else was there for him to do?

  Lost in trying to grasp the enormity of this, I reached into the box for another glass ornament. Then I yanked out with a hiss, a shard having sliced my index finger. Zakia looked over and cried, “Jessa!”

  “I’m okay,” I said automatically, staring at my oozing finger. The shock diminished the pain. A large hand came around my wrist and extended my cut finger to the flow of water. After washing the blood away, Zakia checked my cut, wrapped my finger in a towel, and squeezed it tightly. “That’s not too deep.”

  His hand was so cool, even though he’d been working hard. I blurted, “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you apologizing? I didn’t assume you did that on purpose.”

  I didn’t know why I had apologized; perhaps it was for interrupting the fast pace of his work. Or it was just the shock. The white of the towel stained red slowly, transfixing me, and he tilted my face up to his with cool fingers. I looked into his eyes and saw Jaden bending down, asking sweetly where I needed to be. Even then, as young as I was, I was a little in love with him.

  Jaden. The eyes were the same. They were so alike, these two, but I didn’t remember that good earth smell from him. Would I have noticed that at seven years old? I didn’t think so. I must have swayed, since Zakia was swiftly bringing over the chair from the desk and seating me in it.

  Jaden hadn’t had a mole. I remembered him very well, and there hadn’t been any marks on his tanned arms. Hair could be dyed, but a mole? I grasped his arm to steady myself, unable to look away from that irregular spot. It wasn’t ink but a true mark. Adriel had to be wrong about this.

  “Do you want me to drive you home?” Zakia asked.

  I shook off the shock and smiled at his worry. “I just wasn’t expecting that. I’m really okay.”

  A smile broke across his face in reply. “No one expects that, Jessa. I’ll be right back; we’ve got some bandages under the register.”

  I sank into the chair while he got them. That had been dumb to reach into the box without checking, especially when I knew there was broken glass in it. Thinking of Adriel had distracted me. Forced to live with so much pain . . . my heart hurt for him.

  Zakia came back with a box and knelt to unwind the towel. The seepage had lightened. He was tearing the wrapping of a bandage when Neala called for help in the front. I took it out of his hand. “I’ll do it. You go.”

  “I won’t be long,” Zakia promised. “Coming!”

  A trickle of blood leaked down my finger. I got up and walked over to the towel dispenser at the sink but found it empty. Just as I decided to put the cut in my mouth, I spotted the bathroom. I let myself in and closed the door. The towel dispenser was full, so I pulled one out and wrapped up my finger again. Sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, I squeezed hard.

  The scent of rosemary was strong in here. I figured that I had gotten the perfume on my clothing until I spied the busted box high above me on a metal shelving unit. The other shelves held rolls of toilet paper, tissues and paper towels, and cleaning supplies. Zakia had made a mat of paper towels under the box to soak up any more wetness.

  That was an odd place for him to have put it! Forgetting about my finger, curiosity got the better of me. I stood up and pulled the box down. It was very light, a few ounces at most. Addressed to the store, the return address was in Montana and handwritten. I cracked open the lid and pulled out an inventory slip to see beneath. Tucked into a bed of shredded paper were four ampoules of a yellowish-green liquid banded together by twine. Tape ran along the side of each ampoule, and upon it was written Thryth.

  I sifted through the shreds. There were more four-packs of these ampoules tied together. Each four-pack had been filled to a different level than the others, Thryth with the least of all. The names on the others were equally as odd, one reading Adelia, one Sloane, and the last Embry. At the bottom of the box was the broken glass of an ampoule. I covered it up with the shreds and was about to place it back on the top shelf when I remembered the inventory slip. Getting the paper from the sink, I glanced over it to learn the name of the company that made such a weird, unpleasant perfume.

  It wasn’t an inventory slip. Addressed to Lotus, there was a list of jargon beneath it. Formulas for chemicals, plant names written in Latin, and beneath that was even more. Not understanding much of it except for rosemary, I skimmed down to the bottom. A note was written in horrific handwriting that I couldn’t decipher. Perhaps this was a perfume that Lotus was playing with, since she liked to work with creams and make tinctures. But the smell! I reread the list. Castor oil, diatomaceous earth, vinegar, salt, I stared at a formula and then felt like an idiot for not recognizing sugar. The rest I didn’t know.

  Barks, flowers, blossoms, fruits, resins and wood oils were what I should be seeing on this page if it were an ingredient list for perfume. I looked at that messy note at the bottom, taking in each scrawled letter until I knew what it was. Inject 1x/week into vein. Hearing Zakia call my name, I jammed the note back into the box and returned it to the shelf.

  “Are you okay? Haven’t fainted?” Zakia called through the door.

  “I’m keeping it together,” I replied. Putting on the bandage, I exited the bathroom. My hand was scooped into his cool one for an inspection.

  “We’re getting a rush of customers so the rest of the boxes can wait,” Zakia said. “Tell me what score the surly deliveryman has earned so far?”

  “I think it’s pretty bad,” I said.

  “Breakage, messes, even an injury, Neala will rip the company a new one for this,” Zakia said. “Take yourself home and put ice on that. I’ll see you at school on Monday afternoon?”

  “Zakia!” Neala called.

  “I’ll see you there,” I said. We walked through the store, which had become quite crowded. A line of three people had formed at the register, and more customers were thick about the tables. Women talked about essential oils and a guy was rushing over to a stroller to stop his child from knocking over the candles. Bidding goodbye, Zakia opened the door for me. More people came in as I pushed out to the mail truck.

  It was hard to retrace my way home, not because I couldn’t find the way but for the memories. I felt like I kept catching glimpses of myself riding the scooter the night of the party at the reservoir. There I was pulling over for the squad car; bracing myself up the steep slope; weaving in the wind on the potholed curves. And there were the marks from where I’d gone flying into the night, and an angel had caught me.

  As good as Adriel was about reading people, he was wrong on this one. There wasn’t anything weird about Zakia except his bizarre family that accepted him living in a shed. Nothing about him gave me even a hint of soullessness. At the adjusted Butter Road sign I turned onto Jacobo and went the rest of the way home in bewilderment. Something else was going on, and as always, I was being left out.

  The house was quiet. I checked through the rooms to calm myself that no one was there, snapping window latches and doors along the way, even looking under the beds. Once I was certain I was alone, I settled in front of the television with a bag of vegetable chips. Grandpa Jack had eaten all of the potato and tomato ones, so it was uniformly spinach. The television played while I wrote a letter back to my parents. It was slow going, since I had no idea what to say. School was fine, my friends were nice, my injured leg had healed . . . it was hard to fill a paragraph with that, let alone a full page. Doing the best I could, I stuffed it into an envelope and looked over their itinerary for an address. They’d be staying at a hotel in a few weeks for some sightseeing and mail would be kept there for people on the cruise to pick up.

  My cut finger ached, so once I was done, I put an ice pack over my hand and flipped around for a show to watch. Something tapped upstairs repeatedly and I knew it was just a tree against the house. If I hadn’t looked everything over, it would have freaked me out. The phone rang and I let it go to answering machine, which had been a wise decision since it turned out to be N
ash. How was I doing? Did I want to hang out? Had I seen any good movies lately? He talked all the way to the beep.

  It was evening when I decided to fight with the Internet connection. A pleasant hour passed with celebrity news, although the loading of each page tried my patience to the limit. Once the computer finally accomplished a page, I read through it slowly to make it last longer before beginning the battle anew. I missed watching music videos online. The connection was just too shoddy to play them. That Grandpa Jack desired to get away from modern amenities when he barely had any . . . people were inexplicable. I didn’t know what kind of person would look at a baby and think to name it Bandit either, or who decided it was just fine that a twelve-year-old girl could go off camping all on her own. You only had to watch the news to know that wasn’t a good idea.

  I ran out of things to do and just surfed mindlessly at the kitchen table while I ate a dinner of scrambled eggs. Typing with a bandage on was annoying, the edge of it catching on keys I didn’t want to press, so I unpeeled it and inspected my cut. The skin was pale and shriveled around the laceration, but it was no longer bleeding. It didn’t hurt too much to type on it.

  The bandage smelled vaguely of that bizarre scent Zakia called a perfume. I entered the ingredients I recalled into the search engine, wondering if some company would come up in response. The first hits were recipes for rosemary pork chops and beef tenderloin with a balsamic reduction. Beneath those was a link to an article on natural food preservatives. I clicked on it and ate while it loaded.

  On the page, the list started with rosemary. Using rosemary extract was a very old-fashioned method of preserving food, made by the distillation of rosemary leaves. It preserved the color of a food by preventing oxidation.

  Underneath rosemary extract was vinegar, which contained acetic acid. It was the acid that killed microbes and hampered spoilage. Sugar inhibited the growth of bacteria and microorganisms by drawing out its water; salt had been used since ancient times to preserve meat. Like sugar, it also dehydrated bacteria and protected from molds and yeasts. Picking at my brain, I searched the other items from that note in the crushed box. Each one landed me on some variation of the same information. Prevents spoilage. Resists molds and moisture. Anti-fungal. Anti-bacterial. Anti-yeast. Promotes preservation.