* 6:3 – Interlude – Llora
LLora
“You sold me for a handful of beans.”
Llora speaks to the letter she’s holding in two hands, pulling at either side of it until the center buckles from the pressure. She supposes that’s a metaphor or symbolic or something considering she’s kind of feeling stretched tight like taffy inside as she glares at the paper. She tosses it down on the coffee table and looks over at her foster mother, Nona.
“She sold me for a handful of beans.”
Nona looked at her over her lowered glasses, “She did.” She shrugs and gives a dismissive wave of a hand that has started to gnarl at the knuckles, “More a baggy of beans. You shouldn’t sell yourself short.”
Llora snorts. “It was at least the good stuff, right?”
“Like freakin’ gold, it was.”
Llora shrugs, kicks her legs out to cross her ankles on the coffee table, and slumps down on the couch, “I guess that’s something.”
Nona goes back to the count of pills on the table before her, looking up again over her glasses to mutter, “Stop slouching. It will ruin your posture.”
Llora kicks the letter from her mother off the coffee table. She watches as it drops to cover one of the giant roses on Nona’s prized Molamian carpet, then flips it the bird for good measure.
“I don’t get why she writes. What, she thinks I’ll slip her some shit on the side?” She scoffs. “Like that’ll happen. You’d beat me with a cuchare if I tried.”
Another slant of gaze. “I might beat you with one anyhow if you keep slouching.”
“Stop slouching. Wear a dress. Brush your hair; it’s too long to let it go like that. Seriously, you’d think anyone but you ever saw me.”
Nona lifts her brows and shakes her head dramatically. “Was there ever so ungrateful a child?”
LLora shrugs, “Eh?” She straightens her shoulders and pushes herself into a more perpendicular to the couch position. Kind of sitting up, if you squinted. “When are you going to let me Come Up?”
Nona pins her with a glare over her glasses. “Not happenin’. You’re meant for more than a clocker or bag man.”
“Then let me behind the scale.”
“No. “ She scoops up the pills she’s counted, slides them in a little tapestry bag, and cinches it shut before placing it in a pile of other bags. “You should go practice your singing.”
Llora flares her fingers in a gesture she’s seen Nona do at least a hundred times to express at least a hundred things. It was a good “eh” gesture in her mind.
“What’s the use? No one ever hears me but you.”
“And…?”
LLora buries her face in her hands for a moment and sighs then looks up and gives a tentative smile. “Sorry. It’s just… The damned letter. She’s keep trying to connect and all I want to do is scream and punch her in the face. But that would mean seeing her and fuck that.”
“Such a lady.” Nona rolls her eyes.
LLora winks. “I learned from the best.”
There’s a companionable silence for a while as Nona keeps to her counting and Llora pulls out a book on botanical taxonomy she’s about hip deep in and thinking she’s either going to learn to swim, and prove to Nona she can step up and take her place by her side, or she’s going to drown. Now, she’s never swum, seeing as she’s never actually left Nona’s trailer park and there’s no cement pond there abouts, but she gets the gist that you keep your head above the water or you gulp death. She’s hoping to be paddling like a dog any day, long as she can wrap her head around the, like, nine million classifications in this book. If she could hammer out plant systematics – A+ student in her home schooling class of one here – then she can get this taxonomy stuff down.
It’s not like she’s got any place else to be or anything else to do, despite Nona going on about the singing which, yes, she kind of enjoys but she doesn’t see signing for her supper in her near future. What she sees is about nine million plant classifications. Starting with… plantae; magnoliophyte; lilopsida; liliales, liliaceae. Ya know, lilies for those less educated or those who actually had a frickin’ life.
Eh. She shrugs and dives in. She’s not sure how long she’s been nose to book when there’s a knock on the door. She starts to get up from her, yep, slouched position on the couch but as usual Nona waves her back and goes to the door herself.
Nona cracks the door like a half an inch and mutters, “What?”
“Hey, Nona Stroga, sorry to interrupt you at home.”
LLora perks up at the sound of Kevin, Nona’s newest runner’s, voice. She’s never seen him because Nona’s back (and backside) are broad and make for a very good door, but she likes the sound of his voice all right. Though she knows he isn’t going to get past Guard Dog Nona and her Door of Doom, Llora sits up, drops the book at her side, and starts to comb her fingers through her hair, trying to get it to some semblance of neatness.
She has to arch her back to get it unstuck from her waistband so she could pull it forward over her shoulder. Shit, when had it gotten so long? Gah. Maybe Nona had been right about this combing it thing. Or cutting it – though Nona never allowed that. A girl’s hair was her crown, Nona would say. Like a hundred times she would say. Was it really any wonder Llora kept it long? Eh.
A soft memory, of a time when she was younger and Nona would sit and comb Llora’s hair while Llora would sing some silly song Nona had taught her and she’d say “A girl’s hair is her crown, my beautiful girl.” plays through her mind.
As she combs her fingers through it now, she thinks when did Nona stop combing her hair and when did she stop singing those silly songs? Maybe the next time Nona rails at her about not combing her hair she’ll pull up a chair – probably next to the counting table because Nona doesn’t much leave it – and hold out a comb and offer to sing if Nona combs it for her. That would be nice.
Kevin’s voice carries to Llora. “There’s a problem with one of the grow houses. Something about mold or rot or something. They say they need you there.”
Nona sighs then says, “Okay. Let me grab my bag. I’ll meet you up.”
“Kay.” There’s a moment and then she hears, “Hey, Llora.”
Wow, like, he knows her name? What’s with that? I mean maybe it’s just because he’s smart enough to want to learn what he can about Nona and she’s, like, a part of Nona’s life or inner circle or something, but it feels kind of good to be acknowledged by someone other than her foster mother.
Nona squares her shoulders and plants her feet. “You don’t need to be talkin’ to her. Go. I’ll meet ya.”
That said the door closes and it’s just Llora and Nona and the trailer like it always is. Llora drops her fingers from her hair, picks up her book, and looks to Nona.
“Can I come?”
Nona shakes her head. “No. It’s not time yet for you to be out there. There’s too many things that could hurt you. Or, you know, your mother could be lurkin’ and I’m not so sure about you punching her in the face.”
Llora buries her disappointment and goes for the laugh. “Yeah, you’re funny. Like a clown.”
Nona grabs her big slouchy hat and jams it over her head. “Yeah, you know, it’s probably the hair.”
She pulls her jacket from the hook by the door and picks up her carpetbag of mystery. That’s what Llora has called it since she was, as Nona would say, knee-high to a grasshopper when that bag and its contents were her biggest temptation to explore.
She slants a glance at the door, the closed door that was always closed to her, and thought back to the idyllic days when that was her only temptation. Sometimes she thinks she’ll never go outside. But, at least she has the greenhouse that’s attached to the double-wide that makes it, like, a quadruple-wide.
With its glass windows that trap in the heat and keep the delicate plants that Nona experiments with safe as houses, like the double-wide keeps Llora, it offers a glimpse at the world beyond the trailer, if not beyond the trailer park. Llora figures if she sees one ass-end of a trailer she’s seen them all and most of the patchy grass and scrub and wind-thrashed dirt that makes up the open areas of the park seems pretty much like all the other patchy grass and scrub and wind-thrashed dirt that she can see if she strains her eyes.
So, she’s not really missing much. At least, that’s what she tells herself to make it seem, you know, okay that Nona is way protective of her and won’t let her out into the world. It’s probably for the best. The world seems kind of ugly anyways.
Saying nothing more, Nona leaves the trailer. Llora picks up her book and goes back to studying but her mind really isn’t on it for some reason. Not just because it’s nine million terms to remember. Not that. Just, some reason.
She puts the book down on the couch and rises to move over to the door that separates the greenhouse from the living part of the trailer. Then there’s a knock at the front door. Llora approaches it slowly. Raising her voice to be heard through the door she says, “Yeah?”
“Llora?”
It’s Kevin’s voice. Not that she’d know it from a million other voices, not like that or anything, but it wasn’t like she knew many other people or how their voices sounded. Yeah… she’s babbling.
“Yeah. Who else?”
“So, uh, watcha doin’?”
“Talkin’ through the door to you?” She pauses, considers what else to say, then adds, “Nona’s left.”
“I know.”
“Okay. So…” She hums, buying time to come up with something else to say.
There’s a short pause and then he says, “I’ve seen you working in the greenhouse. That your thing?”
“You’ve seen me working in the greenhouse? What you stand in the dark staring in?”
“Maybe.” Before she can figure out how to react to that, he adds, “Nona likes to have a few guys guarding the place at night. Sometimes I do that.”
“Oh,” she says, “That makes sense.”
“You want to come out here and talk?”
Llora takes two steps back from the door and her hands go up automatically in a defensive move. “Nona wouldn’t like that.”
There’s the sound of foot scuffing then, “You always do what Nona likes?”
No hesitation. “Yeah.”
She approaches the door and presses her forehead against it. “Look, you need to go.”
“You sure about that?”
Is she? Llora stops and thinks for a moment. Is she really? Dang it. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
There’s another sound of scuffing feet then silence on the other side of the door.
Well, so much for that then. She pushes away from the door and heads back to the couch. She’s just sat down with her back to the door when the door knob rattles. The door scrapes as it opens. She’s never noticed that, but that could be because Nona rarely goes out and she never does. Since the door was locked and Nona has the only key she just goes with picking up her book and opening back to the page she was reading, before asking, “Did you get it fixed that fa…?”
The words cut off as with a rush of air an object impacts the back of her head. As her vision goes dark the book falls out of her lax hand to land on top of the letter on the rose-covered carpet.
Enter The Woods 