#aravi

Sometimes, I wake up before the evil man gets to me. I would try to cry quietly so I wouldn’t wake up aba or dad. Sometimes, either one, or both, would notice something wrong and come hug me until I fell asleep again. Dad always gave the best hugs—they were warm like baked bread. And aba smelled like flowers and sang me sylvan songs. It made me upset to bother them like that, because they would want to know what I saw in my nightmare, but back then I couldn’t explain them without explaining Nouille, and I didn’t want them to know about Nouille because they might have hated him and wanted to get rid of him…

This time, in my nightmare, I was trying to call for aba and dad. The evil man was getting closer to me, his eyes glowing, that crazy look on his face. He said, "Your parents won’t save you. They left you. They’re never coming back." And I couldn’t help but cry and cry and cry—

"Hey, hey, wake up!" a voice called out, and my eyes opened.

I was breathing hard and fast. I could also feel tears on my face. A woman crouched next to my bed, looking a bit worried. I almost thought she was aba— because of her black hair and sharp eyes—but her eyes were green, not grey, and her mind wasn’t full of love for me like aba's. This was Iosi. She lived in the house while aba went looking for dad.

"Are you okay?" Iosi asked. "You were having a nightmare, I think."

She didn’t seem very comfortable saying this. I also didn’t want to talk about my problems to her, so I kept quiet and stared at my blanket. Aba had sewn flowers on it. It was soft and smelled good, so I wrapped it up tighter around me. The silence then stretched awkwardly for a while.

"So…" Iosi began. "Man, I’m terrible at this kind of stuff."

“Why are you awake?” I asked her telepathically.

"Oh shit! Fuck, I mean shoot! I really need to get used to this. Uh, so I was working on new poisons and didn’t keep track of the time. Your mom has a pretty sweet setup, by the way.”

"Not my mom. They’re my aba," I corrected her.

"Alright, alright, your 'aba.' So how did that even work? Is that why you have weird mind powers?"

"Dad found me. My old parents are gone.”

"Oh. This makes wayyyy more sense."

I then asked Iosi:

"Can I watch you make poisons?"

"Don’t you need to sleep?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Aba would let me watch them make potions. I like the sounds. They’re safe sounds," I explained.

"…I see. Sure, why not. It’s not more dangerous than letting you use a knife."

Iosi stood up and walked to the kitchen. Keeping my blanket wrapped around me, I followed her.

In the kitchen, I saw a lot of glassware, tools and ingredient out on the counters everywhere.

“You need to clean up after. Aba doesn’t like messes,” I projected my thoughts to Iosi.

“I’ll clean up before they come back. It doesn’t make a difference if I do it now or later,” Iosi replied.

I frowned. Aba trusted me with taking care of the house. So I would.

“I can feel you glaring me. Man, you’re such a goody-two-shoes,” Iosi complained. “You’d think little kids wouldn’t give a shit about making a mess.”

“I’m a big girl.”

“You sure are, squirt.”

She was grinding stuff in the mortar and boiling some liquid on the side. The noises of the stone grinding against stone and small bubbles popping soothed me. If I closed my eyes and listened, I could almost imagine aba working in the kitchen and dad cuddling with me on the couch. When was the last time we had dinner together? I missed dad’s smiles and aba’s laugh, the games of hide-and-seek we played, making flower crowns in the garden and walking in the woods…