Page 52 of Ex Somnis

“I mean, anyone can cook. Anyone can grow roses. It’s a skill you can learn, not a talent.”

Lucien makes a small disapproving sound. “I disagree.”

“Why?”

“Because without the care and the love that goes into it, a rose is just a rose, and a meal is just a meal.” He pauses to look at a bloom that has opened wider than the others and reaches out to slide a finger over it. “Give it that, and it becomes something else. Something that could not have been made by someone else, in that exact way, on that exact day. You cannot force it. Plants don’t grow because you yell at them to grow. A meal made with love tastes different from one that wasn’t.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“You should try it.” He gestures at the beds around us. “The gardening. I would love to teach you, Lenny. I think you’d be good at it.”

The Lenny lands the same way it always does from him, natural, yet still wrong.

“Thank you,” I say because what else do you say? “And you should come by the kitchen sometime. I’d love to teach you how to make a proper casserole.”

He laughs, a real one, and the warmth of it is completely genuine, like a person caught off guard by delight.

“You have to promise me that.” He smiles at me, and it is, objectively, a devastating smile. His whole face does something different with it.

Goose bumps run down my neck, but not the good kind.

The path has brought us back around to my parents’ bench.

“Lenny, did you have a nice walk?” My mother is looking up at us with her warm smile, except the warmth in her eyes arrives a fraction of a second after the smile reaches her mouth again.

That’s so weird.

My father’s posture is wrong somehow too. Close enough that I couldn’t explain it if someone asked. But my dad always slouched a little, one arm hooked over the back like he couldn’t fully relax unless he was taking up too much space.

Right now, he sits perfectly straight.

“Lenny-honey.” He looks up at me. “How are you doing?”

The words are still in the air when everything in me goes absolutely still.

Lenny-honey?

I drop the yellow rose to the ground.

He never called me that.

Not once. Not when I was small, not when I was grown. He called me Lenny-girl from the time I could walk until the last conversation we had before his heart stopped.

Lenny-girl, how’s my girl? Come here, Lenny-girl.

Never honey. Never once, honey.

And suddenly all the strange little things lately shift sideways in my head, and I realize this feels like a movie about my life made by someone who only studied me from far away.

This place smells right.

Looks right.

The roses are soft under my fingertips, the breeze is warm, and the birds sound real, but underneath it all is something hollow and stretched too tight. Like the world is holding its breath, waiting for me to notice.

My dad is dead.

My mom is dead.