A Handful to Carry

The morning came clear and bright, and a trading boat put in at the harbour on the turning tide. It had been many weeks since the last had called, and word ran quickly through the village that there were goods to see and news to hear. Nyra walked down towards the quay with the girl at her side, past every doorway where the sun-coloured flowers now stood in pitchers and grew in the narrow beds along the lane. The woman who had sailed in was weather-worn and steady on her feet, and she was already unloading bundles onto the stones when they reached her.

The trader straightened and looked along the lane, and her eyes went wide at the blooms crowded bright against every wall. “I have sailed this coast for twenty years,” she said, “and I have never seen a village wear so much colour. What has happened here?” The girl stepped forward before Nyra could answer, her face lit with the question. “They were my sister’s flowers,” she said. “Now they belong to everyone.”

The trader crouched down to look more closely at the nearest bed, at the heavy heads gone to seed and the last of the season’s petals. Nyra told her the story then, of the one girl who had kept a few last seeds through her grief, and of how those seeds had gone from one small plot to every hearth along the lane. “They were meant to be given away,” Nyra said. “That is the only way a thing like this grows.” The trader listened, and something in her weathered face softened as she turned a dry seed-head over in her palm.

When Nyra held out a full pouch of seed-heads, the trader took it in both hands as though it were something far more precious than trade. “Carry them on,” Nyra told her. “There are other villages along this coast, other doorways with room for a little colour. Let them grow wherever you make land.” The trader nodded slowly, and she promised that she would plant them at every port she came to, and tell the story as it had been told to her. The girl watched the pouch disappear into the woman’s pack, and felt something open wide inside her chest.

The boat left on the falling tide, and they stood on the quay to watch it go, growing small against the bright water. The girl thought of her sister’s flowers carried now over the sea, taking root at doorways she would never see, in villages whose names she did not know. It was a strange and wonderful thing, to give a piece of someone you loved to the whole wide world and trust it to be kept. And as the sail dropped below the horizon, she understood that her sister’s flowers were no longer only the village’s now, but the coast’s, the sea’s, and everyone’s who would ever kneel to press a seed into the ground.