The
Melody of
May
11, 2008 (7459)
Chapter I. Saturday
Sophia lay in her bed, awakened by
the sound of morning birds chippering away through
the window she had forgotten to shut last night. It was more than a bit chilly, especially
since she had the unshakable habit of kicking all the blankets into a dense
heap at the foot of the bed. And all this
meant that Sophia really had to use the restroom.
Nevertheless, she just lay there,
only twitching infrequently. It was
Saturday, after all, and that meant returning to the natural way of things:
replacing the digital alarm clock with the sun, tucking away the FDA-unapproved
energy bars in favor of scrambled eggs and toast, and leaving the minivan in
the garage, instead
donning a pair of worn walking sneakers, too ragged to wear to school but just
perfect for wandering about town.
Sophia was seventeen, but she smiled
enough that you would think she was either four or going on eighty-five. She strolled through life on many levels and
gleaned the unique flavor of joy from each one – you could rarely tell just
what she was thinking from behind that smile, but you would have that
instinctive trust that she was contemplating something beautiful,
or nothing at all. Indeed, Sophia
thought big and Sophia thought small; the delay in relieving herself was like
waiting for the weekend, or waiting for her birthday, or waiting to find a
boyfriend. That last one was causing the
greatest bit of impatience, admittedly, but enough love trickled through her
life to keep her occupied and amused and whole through the years of her adolescence. Her mother and father loved her; her baby
sister Chrysaline loved her; her friends from the
high school building club loved her; and most immediate to her Saturday routine,
the shopowners downtown loved her, too.
Probably thirty minutes had passed
since daybreak when Sophia decided that it was time to get going. She wanted to be back from her errands before
Chrysaline woke up, but certainly not so early that
the shopkeepers had not yet flipped over the “closed” signs. After fixing herself up in a minimalist
fashion and changing out of her PJs, she headed out
the front door, lifting the canvas shopping bag off its hook and slipping on
her grass-stained shoes.
The walk to
“Sophia, over here!” came a youthful shout, and she turned around to see
Nicholas, the florist’s son. He was
carrying a bunch of blush-colored lilies.
“Do you want a flower for your hair?”
“A lily?” asked Sophia, passing
under the striped awning decorated with crawling ivies and hanging spider plants.
“Oh, no no,
these are so fragrant you would surrounded by bugs!”
“Wouldn’t that be attractive!” joked
Sophia.
“Here,” said Nicholas, holding out a
blossom in his free palm. “This hibiscus
– it just fell from its stem in the wind so we can’t sell it, but it’s to beautiful to go to waste.”
He placed the carmine flower behind
Sophia’s ear.
“Is it pretty?” she asked him,
tilting her head slightly.
“Yes, ma’am!” he shouted gleefully.
Sophia laughed and pinched his
cheeks. “I’m not old enough to be
‘ma’am’ ed yet, young sir!”
“You look plenty old to me,”
Nicholas said with a mischievous grin.
“Hey!” retorted Sophia quickly, and without
hesitation, the boy took off sprinting with the teenager closely in tow. Sophia held the flower to her head with her
left hand while reaching out with her right, trying to nab his shirt collar;
the two circled round and round in front of the flower shop as if square-dancing
in fast-forward mode, until finally his father came out and with his gruffy mustache-filtered voice, reminded the boy about the
consequences of rambunctious horseplay around fragile vases and pots.
“But Dad! She started it!” he cried, pointing at
Sophia, who despite being twice his height, had on a sheepish expression that
made her seem twice the smaller.
“I promise it won’t ever happen again,” said Sophia with a
goofy, overacted gesture.
“Even if I remind you that you’ve
been gaining weight lately?” asked Nicholas.
“Why, you!” shouted Sophia, and the
two took off into the distance.
The flowerkeeper
just shook his head and returned to pruning the mums and roses.
Nicholas finally stopped to catch
his
“Hey, Nick. Are you hungry?” she inquired when he made
eye contact.
“Hungry? Naw ..,” he
replied.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“What if I took you to a bakery and
bought you whatever you wanted?”
“Which bakery are you going to?”
Sophia ran through the options in
her head. “Hmm, I’m not sure. Whichever one we get to first, I
suppose. Depends how hungry you
are. Like, a wee bit hungry, more
hungry, or thiiiiiiis hungry!” she said, spreading
her arms wide as if trying to hug a panda.
“Well. But I just said I wasn’t hungry.”
“Just because you said you aren’t,
doesn’t me you’re not,” said Sophia smugly.
“Just because you said you’re taking
me to a bakery, doesn’t mean you will,” replied the boy.
“Oh, so this is how our dear
friendship ends? Mistrust? Broken promises?” asked the girl.
“Friendship? Since when were we friends? I can’t be friends with a girl! Eww!”
“Girls have cooties?” asked Sophia.
“No, even worse,” said Nicholas with ominous intonation.
“What’s that now?”
Nicholas paused to enunciate clearly.
“They’re taller than me.”
“Oh dear, when did this happen?”
“Last year. Sneaky ones, those girls.”
“Well, do you know the story of the
tortoise and the hare?” asked Sophia.
“Sure, I do,” said Nicholas.
“Well, girls are the hares and boys
are the tortoises. One day, you’ll catch
up and be taller!”
“Than you, too?” asked Nicholas,
stretching up on his tippie toes, trying to gauge how
far behind he was in the race.
“Than me, too …
probably. Although I’m pretty
tall for a girl,” Sophia said, qualifying her assumptions. The florist and his wife were both more pudgy and less tall, although if Nicholas kept up his
“
“That’s right. But only if you eat good whole grains and not
junk foods. Which is
why we should go to the bakery now.”
“Yeah, I guess we can go to a
bakery.”
Sophia looked around and noticed a
new storefront just an intersectin over. It had a gray-and-violet hand-painted sign,
somewhat sub-par and only reading “BAKERY” in all capital letters. Despite an eye for details like makeshift
store decals, Sophia always had a strong streak of curiosity that lured her in. Living in this small town her whole life,
Sophia appreciated a change in pace.
“Let’s go to that store over there,”
said Sophia.
“It looks weird, though.
“Now now, don’t
make such assumptions about a place.
Evilness is earned, not assumed.”
“But look, the window is
broken. That seems mighty evil to me.”
“Give the place a chance! They probably just bought the place and
didn’t have time to
“But they could have just bought
three-fourths of the house and then used the leftover money to buy a new
window,” replied Nicholas.
“My dear Nicholas. You can’t buy three-fourths of a room. That’s like buying the front half of a horse
or a laptop without the screen. It just
doesn’t work that way!” explained Sophia, but Nicholas was unconvinced.
Sophia gave up on reasoning with the
boy, who was incorrigibly addicted to refutation, and simply led him by the
hand to the shop, where the aroma of exotic spices overwhelmed them both. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but
no picture has yet conveyed the pleasures of taking a deep
The interior was mostly wooden, with
stained tiles covering the floor.
“Welcome!” greeted the shopowner, with a heavy accent. He had long, wavy black hair tied back in a
ponytail to avoid dabbling into the dough.
“Did you just move into town?” asked
Sophia.
“Yes, two weeks. Business is tough, being a foreigner and so
little money.”
“Well, show me your best stuff, and I’ll
tell my friends to swing by,” said Sophia.
“What’s good here?”
“Oh, everything is good,” said the
shopkeeper without pomposity. The scents
of anise and cumin and apricot wafted to the counter from the small
warming-rack of