sunkissed, worldless

02

It's odd hearing an extra set of wheels, because Adele always makes this trip alone.

If her own daughter stops long before things went south, a grandchild's effort weighed like a duty she should uphold. Even underneath all her cherishment and summer days where she wakes up to eggs sunny side up, she can't help giving the slightest pity.

Her grandma Anya lived three towns away in Rosburg, with robust cobblestone streets next to Lake Jade's countryside dirt paths. Ironic how her fresh graduate mother first moved here so the trip home for the holidays wouldn't be such a long drive away. It's an uninvolved downgrade but the university is intact and the almost hobbyist farming is the credit to why she's still alive after the whole mess.

Anya passed in a fainting spell, a concussion when she fell and no one to call the ambulance. Her neighbors noticed because her lights were never turned off, because those three days were quieter than usual.

Adele remembers weeping by her coffin and later the dirt caked under her nails from where she scraped the sod by her grave to calm down. She tries to visit every year since, and the months when she really needed to. 

She's not the only one to do it, it's those same relatives who offer her a ride into the city but these days there's rarely any fresh flowers waiting when she gets there.

It's three days to the anniversary. She's sure there's a word for it, a word that's not 'death anniversary' because that just seems mildly deceptive.

Olivia insisted she wants to come along this time around. She cites escaping the bathhouse as her primary reason. Adele had rolled her eyes and asked, "Not because you love me?"

"That too."

It's the afternoon when the sun seems high enough. Adele peers up into the clouds where she sees the outline of the sun somewhere between the translucency. "It's like 12 by now, isn't it?"

Olivia copies her to scowl up at the sky. "Probably," she murmurs.

They make a stop, where the woods open up to lush endless reaches of a meadow. A large tree sits not far from the road and their bikes unceremoniously parked wheels up in the grass. Olivia makes sure to set the lantern aside, wrestles lunch out of the basket and digs around her bag for something.

"We should make the stick and rock clock," she says, slurring her words a little and catches herself. "Rock clock, rock clock. Rock clock."

Wait, no, that's not even what she meant. The rock clock finds north, not tell the time. Even if they stab a stick in the ground and call it a sundial, it doesn't actually help much. Olivia doesn't seem to notice this.

"It takes too much time," she whines and Adele thinks the pun isn't intentional, but she chooses to chuckle to herself instead of asking.

The sky sweeps open. Everything is yellow, almost. She feels the heat glancing off her skin and gets to cover.

Adele scrutinizes the roots, how it coils above ground, vaguely remembering this tree from the past year she passed by it, thinks it looks the same. It calls to her in a familiar tone, image burned into her mind until it plays out again and she stares into the trunk waiting for the dizzying feeling to pass her by.

"Adele!"

She turns around and is mildly relieved when she's smiling out of reflex. Olivia's holding her camera to her eyes and snaps a photo. She grins from behind it and pulls out the polaroid, inspecting it before the picture even develops.

Olivia was a stickler for keeping everything candid and resorted from asking her to pretend to do something else to simply catching her off guard. Adele used to cover up her face with her hands, pointedly worried if she's caught with a less than flattering expression permanently printed and preserved.