Little Happy Thoughts [Gilly/Finley]

[Deleted]

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Gillian Imberline

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Your father called you the Gillymonster.

He said it was a play on a type of animal they used to see before all the factories went up; a type of lizard that could fend for itself but mostly lounged about in the sun. Some men had apparently taken to frying them up and eating them as a delicacy (this was a lie, but you believed it because you were eight and didn’t know any better). You didn’t think he was wrong, on account of the fact that you liked to sass your father (unless he said ‘Gilly’ in that way you knew you were supposed to put your hands behind your back and not say another word), and you especially liked to lounge in the light of the afternoon sun.

So you spent that afternoon on your stomach, along a long hallway that led toward the bowels of the training center, soaking up the sun from the floor to ceiling windows and leafing through your journal. You wanted to make sure you hadn’t dropped any of your memories—rather, the bits and pieces of dried flowers you had pressed into your journal. There were little violets, a rose or two, tulip petals, even a fern leaf (you could have stood to lose that but, a memory was a memory). There was the occasional shadow, but folks around here more of less left you to your own devices.

Do you remember the first time we pressed flowers?

You had been no more than six, half as high as you are now—we’d taken flowers from the grove, just a half-mile from the laundry. You walked by a bush of hydrangeas and stopped, marveling at how some were white and some were blue. Are they the same? You said, but you didn’t wait for an answer. I want them both, I want—can we take one, momma? They smell so nice. There was nothing special to that day, nothing more than the moments that followed. We plucked two for your hair, and tucked them behind your ears. At home, drawn up on the windowsill of the big bay window, you sat in my lap and drank in the sun. And I showed you how we could keep the flowers better—because nothing was forever—and took an old empty leather book to press them into.

You held the same little dried out hydrangea between your fingers then, here and there—the buzz of the training center so very far away.

You flipped page by page, wrapping yourself in sunlight and memories, until—a shadow cut you in half.

“If you want to see you can just come around, you don't have to just stand there.” You rolled over onto your back to stare up at the boy who’s name you didn’t know. “Oh.” You managed. He was handsome, with sad eyes. “Are you looking for someone?” Because he hadn’t meant to find you—you don’t think.

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