13. Sam
13
SAM
I sat the box down on the table in front of Tim.
“I can’t believe you did this. It was very dangerous, Sam,” he scolded. “But also very brave. I think that’s what it takes to accomplish a quest.”
“Well, the cold moon is tomorrow, so time is…”
“Short?” Tim laughed. “Yes, I’ve been holding my children nonstop. If Medea’s plan happens and all magic goes out of the world, I would never be able to lift them up and hold them against me ever again. I’m not even sure what would happen to their fathers. Would the gods even exist?”
“Will I?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m a broken elemental with hardly any magic, but the rest of my kind… Would they survive, or would they just dissipate with the rest of the magic in the world? I’ve been scared to ask.”
“If you’re asking me, I don’t know. Fate has not given that info to me.” He sighed. “But it has shown me that this box is exactly what you say it is. It is not connected to The Truth. I had it wrong. These visions are confusing and not at all easy to read. What good is someone who sees the present and spouts prophetic futures if I can’t even read them? Why do they have to be in verse? It drives me crazy.”
“Where’s the kids now?”
“With Hy? He won’t leave them.”
“Thank you for coming. I know it’s not where you want to be.” I frowned.
“No. But it’s where I have to be. It’s my pleasure. I know that you have… I can tell that you think this box is important, and maybe it is… or maybe it’s just a present from your mom.” I heard what he was trying to tell me.
“Yeah… I know. But I have to open it just in case.”
“You have to open it because your mother took the time to send it to you. Go on…”
“I…” I let out the breath I had been holding. The build-up to what’s inside this box was killing me.
“I can leave if you want some privacy. I'm sorry.” He chuckled.
“Oh, no, it’s not that. I’m glad for your company. I’m just scared.”
“I’m terrified.” His admittance made me feel a little better.
“How did we get all slung up in this life? I mean, gods… We are in love with gods. It’s… unreal.”
“Tell me about it. I just thought Apollo had a god complex – not the real thing,” he snickered. “Go on. No time like the present, Sam. Let’s see what’s inside.”
I should have grabbed some scissors or something. Instead, I wrestled with the tape for what felt like minutes. Mom always made sure her packages couldn’t rip open in transit. The box was taped all the way around, and it was like trying to solve some kind of puzzle to open it.
Finally, I got a grip on a big piece and pulled and pulled as it peeled off from around the box.
“Mom really taped the shit out of this. She always does.”
“Reminds me of my grandmother. She once sent me a box of pictures, and I had to open up four boxes to get to the box they were in. She was afraid they would get wet or something.”
Tim was so easy to talk to. Maybe it was because I had known him a little before all of this happened. Maybe it was because he would one day be my brother-in-law if we survived the next twenty-four hours.
“Zeus!” I tried the expletive that I had heard Apollo use. “That feels weird.”
“Yeah… let’s not. I met him last summer, and he was a real piece of work.”
“Got it!” I exclaimed triumphantly. I mean, I didn’t save the world yet, but I did open a box.
I pulled back the flaps and reached inside. Sure enough, there were the seeds that I thought I might find.
Marigold
Cosmos
Moss rose
And then, the last packet. Morning Glories.
I fished the note out of the bottom.
Dear son,
I had the strangest dream the other night and couldn’t get it out of my head the next day.
It was one of those dreams where you know that it’s not real, but it feels like it to the point that it scares you more than a nightmare.
Is it the future? Probably not. But who am I to take any chances?
I know that you hate it when I send you bits of Earth and seeds for you to have at your place. I know that it bothers you to not have the connection to the green world that the rest of us have. But you are amazing, and you are perfect just as you are.
I also think that you fight your natural abilities. I know you hate it when I talk like this, but I think you need to know that the power of the Earth still lives inside you locked away for some reason.
I know it.
I think that if you reach down inside yourself and try with all your might – you will find that which is blocking you and can… perhaps… if you really want to – I think you can break through.
Anyway,
Your dad and I are doing just fine in OK. It’s a dust bowl, and the neighbors can’t understand how our place is so full of plants and how we get such beautiful vegetables and fruit from our trees.
We tell them we were born with a green thumb – but you know that already.
I love you so much and hope that you will come home to visit soon.
Any fella yet? I can’t wait to have grandbabies (remember that) HA!
Love you with all my heart, Sam
Mom
“I… I really should visit,” I murmured. “Now maybe I’ll never get to again.”
“Don’t think like that. We have to. We have to fight and do everything that we can, Sam. It sounds like your mother believes in you. I do, too.”
“You do?”
“Prophecies aren’t given to those who can’t fulfill them, Sam. They’re only given to heroes. You are our hero, do you hear me?”
“I… How can I be a hero when I already know that I’m going to fail?”
“Then we’re all gonna die.”
“I…” I broke down. The sobs wracked out of me, and sweet Tim came over and put his arm around me.
“Shh… Let it out, Sam. I know you’re scared. I mean, hell, I am too. We all are. We’d be fools to be anything else. But we also have courage. Look at what you did. You, Tryke, and Kitty faced a very scary magical monster and survived.”
“I only survived because of them. It would have gotten me if I had gone there alone. I wouldn’t know what to do.” I sniffled loudly.
“See… That’s where I think you’re wrong. I think you do know, and I think your mom is right. Your magic is not gone, Sam, because you couldn’t live without it. The magic is what makes you… well, you.”
“I’m broken, Tim. I can’t hear the plants, and they can’t hear me. It’s like… we’re a world away. I can feel them… a little, but not enough.”
“What happened, Sam? You can say it was your sickness, and I'm sure that didn’t help. But something else happened, didn’t it?”
I nodded. It wasn’t something that I wanted to remember.
“And?” He gently rubbed his fingers through my hair.
I sniffed and took a deep breath.
“Death,” I whispered. “Death happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was just a kid.” I took a breath. Did I really want to remember this? It had scarred me so badly, and I remembered running to my mother and crying. I cried all night. I couldn’t sleep for days, and then I got so sick… I almost died.
But… If it could help me to… save Hermes, I had to, didn’t I? I was a bigger coward than any of them knew. I couldn’t even face what I had done as a child. I didn’t want to.
The end of the world. My mother had even had a dream so vivid, so bad, that she sent me seeds. The seeds that I needed – vines.
The prophecy… Earth… Vines… Save the trick – save my mate.
Save Tim’s children and make sure that he could hold them the way my mother had held me as I lay in her lap shamefully.
Death… To stop death, I might have to be death again.
If I could.
“I had a plant, my first one, that I had grown from a seed so I could learn how to control my power. Elementals can be dangerous if they don’t know how to keep their abilities in check. Mom told me a story that scared me; she would read it to me when I was a kid from the Grower’s Book of Secrets. It was about a man who let his power go unchecked. He made things grow until they couldn’t any longer, and he strangled a village with the plants. Children, women, and men all died because he relished his power. The plants strangled whoever they found, and the Earth became barren and hateful.”
“So, I had this plant that was my best friend. We would talk every night. It would nuzzle against my hands and stretch its stem as far as it could to make me laugh – to make me feel like it was growing strong. Plants can’t talk… Not like that. But they feel, and what I could feel was its emotion. There’s a reason that the old adage is to talk to your plants. Even nongrowers, just humans, have learned this.”
“One night, I wanted to see it flower. I knew that it was out of season, but it had such pretty flowers, and I was so proud of them whenever it had them. So was my plant, Lemony, I called it. It would make them open and close for me when I wanted. It was a kind of hellbore, a dwarf variety that my mother created especially for me. It bloomed all year off and on, and I would wait for it to blossom and tell it how excited I was. How much I loved it.”
“I pushed. I pushed hard because the last bloom had just fallen off a couple of nights before. It usually took a month for it to bring forth a new bud. But I really wanted to see the pretty blue flower, and it hated saying no to me. I pushed, and it grew. It grew so fast that the small stem widened and grew above my head. Its blossoms bloomed and fell off in a matter of seconds, over and over, until I was showered in petals, and then it withered in my hand, and it was no more. I felt its pain. I felt its death.”
“It was my only friend, and I killed it because I wanted to see the pretty flower.”
“You were a kid, Sam.”
“Would you say the same thing if I had killed a person?”
“Maybe not. No.”
“Plants are alive, and they are sentient. My kind understands this and cares for them with the same love and compassion that we give to our own family. It destroyed me. But I know it was the stupidity of a child. I know that I have to… I know what I have to do, Sam. I’ll do my best.”
“I think that’s all we’ve ever asked, Sam.”