Young Writers Society

Chapter 24

~1050 words

Ivy

Ivy left the Workshop that night reeling from all the information she’d learned and all the emotions she had grown so used to ignoring that had resurfaced. Nikki walked beside her in respectful silence until they reached Ivy’s flower shop.

“See you on Tuesday, then?” Nikki asked, concern still wrinkling her brow.

Ivy nodded distractedly and let herself in. “Thanks for coming with me,” she murmured.

“Any time you need me, I’m here,” Nikki said with a smile.

Ivy nodded again and closed the door. It was great to have a friend, but she needed time to process this. The father Ivy had so adored was most likely dead. The rational part of Ivy’s mind had suspected this all along, but there was still some part of her that had held onto hope. Now that hope had been dashed to pieces. Ivy hadn’t realized that sliver of hope had been holding back so much despair, but now she felt the sorrow wash over her shoulders.

She stood there for a while, in the front room of her flower shop, letting herself be swept away by sadness and a cocktail of other emotions like anger, guilt, and jealousy. Then, she felt a soft, reassuring presence at her feet. It was Ghost. He was rubbing up against her legs and purring. Ivy smiled through her tears and crouched down to pet him. He looked up at her with his lamp-like yellow eyes and mewed.

Ivy sat for some time on the floor of her flower shop, petting ghost who seemed like he couldn’t get enough. Petting him made her calm down, and soon she realized she was no longer crying. She sat a while more before realizing how tired she was and how much her lower back was aching from sitting on the hard wood floors for so long. When she stood up, Ghost protested with quiet meows, but Ivy just smiled down at him.

Her sleep that night was blissfully dreamless.

--

“Volcanoes, eh?” Ivy’s grandmother, Elle, said. “I must say it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. That Charlie always was a wild type. Every time he took my girl out on another adventure of his I feared I’d never see her again.” Elle laughed softly. Her voice was crackly, and her face was heavily lined, but her eyes always held a glimmer in them.

“It came as a surprise to me!” said Ivy. “He took me to all those places where there were volcanoes!” She was sitting on a chair next to Elle’s bed. Elle had a very hard time getting around anymore: her feet were always swollen and pained her much more than she let on. Ivy usually stopped by her house at least once a day to help with anything from cooking and cleaning to washing her grandmother’s feet and keeping her company. “Why didn’t he tell me?” Ivy continued. “I would have been terrified if I knew!”

“That’s probably why he never told you,” Elle said with a wink.

Ivy grunted, unwilling to admit Elle was right.

“Still, you say this workshop inventor fellow has all of Charlie’s old journals?”

“Yeah. He took really good care of them too. He practically worships them,” Ivy said, rearranging the flowers someone had brought over. It made Ivy glad to see she wasn’t the only person visiting Elle, but it was clear whoever had brought the flowers had no idea what good flower arranging was.

“If what you said is true—that he believes that the journals contain information about a cataclysmic eruption—then he may be right to practically worship them. He can worship whatever he wants if it means he’ll save the world from an ashen end.” Elle coughed a bit and took a sip of water from the glass on her bedside table. “I’m glad he found them for my own reasons as well. Out of all the things we had to sell from Charlie’s house, I’ve always regretted his journals the most. It didn’t cross my mind to save them, but by the time I remembered, they were already gone.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head, her fine, white hair floating around her like a cloud.

“I’m glad we ended up selling them. I don’t know if there’s any other person on Earth that could have made sense out of Dad’s old notes, not even me. But Alder’s the right kind of crazy.”

“He’d have to be if he thinks he can stop a volcano,” Elle said, then looked thoughtful. “He sounds like my kind of guy.”

Ivy gasped. “Grandma!”

But Elle was already rocking in her bed with silent laughter. The conversation devolved from there, with more usual talk about Ivy’s flower shop and the bluebirds outside Elle’s window.

Ivy bustled around Elle’s small house quickly doing the chores her grandmother couldn’t. She dusted shelves heavy with books and knick-knacks, swept the floor, and scrubbed the dirty dishes with a practiced hand. She noticed that someone else must have come by to wash Elle’s clothes, and Ivy wondered briefly if it was the same person who had brought the poorly-arranged flowers.

She poked her head back into Elle’s bedroom, but the old woman had nodded off in the pleasant warmth of the morning’s sun. Without saying a word, Ivy backed out of the room again, and left the house to go tend to the flower shop for the day.

Ivy's shop was closed on Sunday,so Ivy had most of the day to herself. She decided to have a bit of a day-off to refresh her spirit and start feeling normal again. She read a book full of fairy tales that her father used to tell her, played with Ghost some more, and finished a painting that had been gathering dust under her bed. It was a simple painting of a bouquet of flowers, but it would look very nice in the front room of her shop. She quickly pounded a nail into the wall and strung up the canvas. It looked right at home.