#also shoutout to the fact that the story assire is telling her

[takivvatanga]

sick day

“Mum? My head hurts.” Stella coughs as she pads into the lounge on her bare feet, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her little face flushed, blue eyes burning bright with fever. She’s stayed home sick today, same as yesterday, same as the day before. 

Whatever illness it is that is making its way around at school, it’s horrid. Neville has it too, apparently. Assire thinks about Mary, about how she must feel having a sick child to look after once again - even though this isn’t bad. Well, it is, but it’s nothing compared to… the horrible thing that happened. Assire remembers Mary’s little boy. Clever and quick and so very full of energy, full of life - until he began to fade, his body slowly but surely giving way to something dark, some insidious decay that got hold of him and would never let him go. 

Assire had kept her distance, hesitant to interfere in another woman’s grief. They barely knew each other, back then. To reach out would have been inappropriate, surely. But Assire can’t help but feel that she let her sister in law down. Better give her a call, later on tonight. See how she is, see how Neville is. Assire might not be able to make up for the missed opportunities of the past, but she has here and now, doesn’t she? Never too late to set things right, do things a little differently. Yes, she’ll do that. She’ll call.  “Mum!” Stella’s voice is thin and reedy, thick with congestion. She sounds much younger than what she is, when she’s unwell. Assire beckons her closer, and Stella doesn’t hesitate, climbing up onto the couch and curling up in her mother’s arms, blanket trailing behind. She coughs again, wipes her runny nose with a crinkled pyjama sleeve. Assire brushes a strand of dark hair out of her daughter’s face. Her skin is hot to touch, a little sticky. How bright her eyes are. Blue as the sky on a clear morning, blue as the ocean on a sunny day. Stella has her father’s eyes. Assire wishes Stella looked more like her, doesn’t realise that she is right there, reflected so clearly in the way Stella frowns, in the way she blinks her eyes in astonishment, in the restlessness in her little hands.   Sometimes I still don’t feel as if you’re truly mine. A part of me. You feel so far away, and at the same time you’re so close.  “Can I get a hot drink?” Stella shifts, pushing her bare feet against the armrest of the couch, pressing closely against her mother’s body. Assire pulls her close, presses her face to the crown of her daughter’s head, inhales deeply. Stella smells like green apples and Vick’s Vaporub, like wax crayons and unwashed pyjamas. She needs a shower, but Assire doesn’t want to force her to have one. Not when she’s unwell like this, not - Assire doesn’t want to force Stella to do anything. No. She wants her to choose, to make up her own mind, to walk her own path without restriction, without limitation. “She needs discipline”, Mary has told her, more times than Assire cares to remember. “She needs to learn how to cope with having rules. I understand what you’re trying to achieve, I really do, but it doesn’t work like that.” But Mary doesn’t understand, and as far as Assire is concerned, things are perfectly fine just the way they are. 

“I’ll make you some tea, alright?” Assire stirs. Stella clings to her. “No, Mum! Don’t get up!” Assire sighs, relents, settles back into the couch, tugging at the edges of Stella’s blanket. “No hot drink, then.” “But I’m thirsty”, Stella whines, in her sick-little-kid voice. “Can I just have some of yours?” “No, sweetheart. That’s black tea. It’s not for kids. And it’s gone cold anyhow, see?” She picks up her cup - with its chipped rim and its fading print of cavorting cats, her favourite - and presents it to her daughter. Stella holds it tightly, with both hands, the remnants of bright pink polish still noticeable on her little nails. Stella has lovely hands. Nothing like Assire’s own, their skin thin and sallow, already flecked like those of a much older woman, the nails bitten down almost to the quick. Stella’s hands are slim with long fingers, her nails fast-growing, strong, perfectly shaped. The hands of an artist or a musician, a clockmaker or a surgeon. What will she grow up to do with those hands? Assire worries about Stella. Stella still cannot read. She only pretends, guessing the words based on the letters she can make out, relying on her memory to replicate the texts of her story books. At Stella’s age, Assire had been reading fluently for quite some time. As a matter of fact, she cannot recall ever not being able to read. Not like there was much reading material available when she was small. She’d read street signs instead, street signs and work rosters and every now and again that rare treat of a discarded newspaper that the wind had carried over the fences of the compound. FLASH SALE DON’T MISS OUT! Weekend Weather Unemployment at Record Levels Stella sniffs at the dark liquid in the cup, pulls a face, glances up at her mother with her bright blue eyes. The little girl takes a sip, erupts in a violent coughing fit.  “It’s gross, Mum!” “I told you.” “I want a hot drink! Hot chocolate or milk with honey in it!” “Well, you’ll have to wait for me to make it then.” Another cough, smaller this time but twice as phlegmy. Stella spits into her pyjama sleeve.  “Alright. Can I play on your computer while I wait?” “No, sweetheart. Now let me get that drink for you, yeah?” “I don’t want a drink no more. I want a story instead. Can I have a story, Mum?”  Stella looks up at her mother with pleading eyes. As much as she sometimes resents her inability to be normal, like other mothers, her stories are the best. As far back as Stella can remember, Assire’s tales have taken her on a journey, deep into the centre of the earth or far beyond the skies, into other worlds, murky dreamscapes where nothing is ever quite as it seems.  “Any more”, Assire corrects her daughter sternly. “Speak properly please, Stella.” The little girl sighs, rolls her eyes. “You sound like auntie Mary! She always tells me to talk properly too. I don’t know why it’s so important. You know what I mean anyway.”  “You’ll understand someday. It’s complicated.” “You always say that when you don’t know how to explain something.”

Assire bites her lip, taken aback by the accuracy of her daughter’s observation. This is a discussion she is nowhere near prepared to enter into right now. “A story then. Alright. Are you comfortable?” Stella wriggles under her blanket, inching even closer, settling down to rest her head in her mother’s lap, her restless little hands tugging at the tassels on Assire’s scarf. She loves her fiercely, in this moment, with her messy hair and her sticky skin and her febrile eyes, in her unwashed pyjamas with her unbrushed teeth. Don’t grow up, she thinks. Or at least, don’t grow up too fast. “Am now.” Stella coughs again. Assire pushes a strand of hair out of her daughter’s face. “Let’s see. A story. Well, a long time ago, or maybe somewhere in the far distant future, far above in the High Wilderness Beyond The Skies, there was a girl. Only she wasn’t an ordinary girl. You see, instead of being born, she was made.” “Made? You mean she wasn’t a real girl?” “Oh, she was. She was just...where other people are made of skin and flesh and bone, she’d been put together from bronzewood and ivory and copper and steel and instead of a beating heart there was a clockwork contraption in her chest.” “Was she brave?” “She was. She was incredibly brave, actually. She-” “She was never afraid!” “No. She was afraid all the time. Of a lot of things.” “Then she wasn’t brave.” “She was. Because you see, being brave doesn’t mean never being afraid. Because if you’re never scared, that would make it easy to be brave, wouldn’t it now? But being brave isn’t supposed to be easy. It gets easier, though. What being brave means is being afraid and doing the right thing anyway.” Stella doesn’t reply. Assire can tell by the way she wrinkles her nose, by the way she purses her lips, that she is thinking very seriously about this. Good. Remember that, Stella. Remember that it is alright to be afraid. Because we’re all afraid, in our own way, and anyone who says they aren’t, well, they’re lying. “What did she do, in the Skies?” “She was a traveller. An explorer. She met a great many people on her journey, and if any of them were in need of help, she did whatever she could for them. Until one day…” Stella listens intently as Assire spins her tale, but soon her eyelids grow heavy, her curious questions and interjections become less frequent. Assire lowers her voice, little by little, and soon Stella’s breathing becomes slow and even, every now and again disrupted by a small cough. Assire begins to hum, deep and low in her throat, a strange melody that she cannot recall ever learning, but she has sung it to Stella for as long as she can remember. Stella’s Song, they call it. It’s something they share just between the two of them. She’ll be too old for it soon, just like she’ll be too old for bedtime stories. Assire wishes she could stop time, to keep her daughter here, like this, curled up in her lap, blissfully oblivious to life and all its hardships, its temptations, its wrong turns. Innocent. Where will you go, Stella? Who will you become? The thought fascinates and terrifies her at the same time. “We’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”, she whispers as she straightens out the blanket that covers the sleeping child. “We’ll have to find out.”

#vignette: assire #vignette: stella #i started this ages ago and abandoned it #then today i came back to it while trying to do sth else #funny how that goes but i'll take it tbh #nothing happens just a moment between these two #i love them so much #also i am so proud of assire actually being responsive to her kid #i think that was the time when their relationship was at the best #when stella is like primary school age #it deteriorated pretty rapidly once stella hit her teens #and had to be rebuilt when stella came home as an adult #it's not until the end of assire's life when stella moves back in to look after her parents #that they truly understand each other and see each other for who they really are #it's GROWTH (tm) #also shoutout to the fact that the story assire is telling her #is pretty much stella's sunless skies verse