Green

        The girl smooths her hand over the midnight green cloth, feeling the slick leather pass under her thin fingers. She traces her fingertips along the cracks and wears in the fabric. She grabs up fistfuls of the coat and brings it up to her face, feeling the cloth heat up as she exhales against it for a few moments before taking a deep breath in, smelling the earthly scents of her mother, the dirt and flowers and mud, bust most strikingly of all the sickeningly sweet smell of the tree sap her mother used to collect and process.

        She runs a shaking hand through her short, white-lilac hair, letting the coat fall into the other hand, choking back tears. She brings up the lapels of the coat to dry her eyes, and takes a few deep, trembling breaths before folding the coat neatly and placing it in its place in her bag, waiting a moment before changing her mind and wrapping herself in the coat instead.

        The girl then gropes around at her hip and pulls out her father’s falchion. She runs the heel of her palm along the cold length of the blade, feeling along where, on another blade, there might have been etchings. She recalls how her father was a simple man, who never felt the need to have a fancy blade; as long as it served his purpose, it didn’t need to look pretty. She picks along the razor-sharp edge of the blade, her fingertips playing at all the cracks, remembering how her father would come home from each battle and tell her the stories of each tiny chink in the blade.

        He’d pull on her onto his lap and start with, “Now Setha,” his pet name for her, and tell her a different story each time. Of how, this bit of the blade got lodged into another man’s right arm, or this piece broke off when I used my blade to parry against a skilled warrior. The stories were always different, and each was more excited and detailed than the last.

        She weeps openly, remembering those whom she had loved and lost.

        She replaces the falchion at her hip, once she has composed herself, and folds and puts away the coat.