Entry #12
From The Archive: A Fictional Account of Memory and Myth
If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is an entry from my on-going serial fiction experiment “The Archive.”
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Day 69 — Morning
I didn’t sleep much. Not that that’s new, but last night wasn’t about nightmares—it was about knowing. About the weight of information that hasn’t settled yet. That I haven’t quite processed.
I keep replaying it.
The chalk. The box. My name.
The way it wasn’t hidden in some back corner like an afterthought. It was centered. Placed. Like it was waiting for me. I keep wondering if that box was a warning or a welcome.
Either way, I face the day. The morning air nips at my cheeks when I finally venture down, carrying the musty scent of damp earth and something sharper—yarrow maybe, or wormwood. Demi’s already in the garden, because of course she is.
Barefoot. Crouched over the mint. Humming something wordless, something that reminds me of wind chimes and bones. Her braid swings like a metronome. She looks up when she sees me and gives a small, sleepy smile.
“Morning,” she says, voice honeyed with practiced ease.
Like nothing’s changed. And that’s what gets me. Not the box. Not the shed. Not even the poison shelf. It’s the calm. She’s too calm. Like she knows. Or like she’s testing me to see what I’ll do.
So I nod. Say “morning” back. Take the cup of tea she offers. (Smells like lemon balm and something else I can’t name—maybe paranoia.) And I sit across from her like I didn’t slip into her secrets last night and walk out with mud on my soul.
The question about the box burns behind my teeth, eager to spill out. Each heartbeat seems to pulse with it: What’s-in-the-box-what’s-in-the-box-what’s-in-the-box, Demi?
But I swallow it back, let it settle like poison in my gut. Not yet. Not until I understand the rules of this game she’s playing. I need to see if she flinches. If she waits. If she wants me to ask.
So I sip the tea that tastes of herbs and secrets, letting its warmth spread through my chest like false courage. I curve my lips into something that might pass for a smile in this half-light, might fool anyone who hasn’t spent weeks studying the art of survival. And I wait, because that’s what you do when you’re hunting something that might be hunting you back.
Day 69 — Afternoon
The sun crawls across the garden like a hesitant lover, but the soil radiates heat through my jeans where I kneel beside Demi. Dark earth packs beneath my fingernails—a different kind of secret than the ones I gathered last night. She says we’re planting basil, or maybe lemon thyme. The names blur together like everything else here, where even the simplest herbs might hide teeth. The air tastes green and sharp and deceptively safe, like a beautiful mushroom that kills you slowly.
Demi breaks the silence with another of her hums—an old folk tune that seems to rise from the earth itself, threading through the air like smoke. It’s the kind of melody that settles in your bones, that makes you remember things you’ve never lived, that whispers of darker harvests than herbs.
Sweat trickles down my spine as I gesture to the meticulous garden around us—the raised beds with their geometric precision, the trellises where vines climb in perfect spirals, the rows so straight they might have been drawn with ruler and blood.
“You’ve got a system here,” I say, measuring each word like ingredients in a potion. “All this—did you have it set up before the collapse?” The question feels inadequate, too small to hold the weight of what I really want to know: Did you plan for this? Were you waiting for the world to burn?
Demi’s hands don’t pause in their rhythmic weeding, her fingers moving with the certainty of someone who knows exactly which plants deserve to live. “Started with my mom,” she says, voice soft with something that might be memory or might be myth. “I added a few things. Tweaked it.” Each word feels carefully chosen, like stepping stones across dark water.
“Like the greenhouse?” I keep my tone light, curious—just another student learning at the feet of the master gardener. Not someone who spent the night picking locks and stealing glimpses of mystery.
“Exactly.” But there’s an edge to the word, sharp as the thorns that guard her shed.
I let my fingers drift through the dark soil, feeling its secrets shift beneath my touch. Each grain holds a story, I think—of growth, of decay, of transformation.
“And the shed?” The words fall between us like seeds, and I try not to think about how they might grow.
Demi’s hands still their endless weeding, just for a heartbeat. Most people wouldn’t notice—but I’ve learned to measure life and death in these tiny hesitations. The pause hangs in the air like frost, barely long enough to name, but I feel it settle in my marrow.
“That was more of a hobby space,” Demi says, her voice carrying the practiced lightness of spider silk—delicate but strong enough to trap the unwary. “Experiments. Drying racks. Odds and ends.” Each item listed feels like a veil being drawn across something darker, something that smells of chalk dust and midnight trespasses.
I raise an eyebrow, wondering if she can hear how loud my heart is beating. “Sounds mysterious.”
Demi’s shoulders rise and fall in a shrug that’s too perfect to be casual. Her fingers never stop moving through the soil, like she’s reading its confessions.
“Only if you’re easily mystified.” The words float between us like dandelion seeds—harmless on the surface, but carrying the potential for invasion.
“Oh, I definitely am,” I reply, coating truth in humor like honey around a bitter pill. “Just last week, Atlas stared at a sunflower for ten minutes and I nearly convinced myself it was a sign from the universe.”
The laugh that bursts from Demi catches us both off guard—short, bright, genuine in a way that makes my chest ache. For a moment, she’s just a woman in a garden, soil under her nails and sun in her hair.
“I mean, he’s clearly a prophet,” she says.
I grin, trying to hold onto this moment of normalcy even as it slips through my fingers like water.
“Don’t let it go to his head.” Atlas, hearing his name, looks up from his guard post by the tomatoes, his eyes holding more wisdom than I’m ready to understand.
The silence that follows feels like the moment before a storm breaks—that electric pause when the air itself seems to hold its breath. Birds quiet their morning songs, and even the insects seem to still their endless drone. The garden waits, every leaf and petal suspended between one truth and another.
My next words drift out like poison mist: “I’ve always been curious about what people keep behind locks.” My fingers trace patterns in the soil that might be runes or might be nothing at all. “Not because I don’t trust them—just because I want to understand what they’re protecting.”
Demi’s hands move through the soil with the precise grace of a surgeon—or an executioner. She works a stubborn weed free, each movement measured and intentional, like she’s performing a ritual instead of simple garden maintenance. When she finally speaks, her voice carries the weight of mountains, though it’s barely above a whisper.
“Sometimes,” she says, examining the uprooted weed as if reading prophecies in its broken roots, “it’s not about protecting the thing inside.” Her eyes meet mine, and in them I see something ancient and hungry. “Sometimes, it’s about protecting everything else from the thing itself.”
The words fall between us like stones into still water, ripples of meaning spreading outward.
When she raises her head, the morning light catches her face at an angle that transforms her—priestess, protector, keeper of dangerous knowledge. The garden seems to lean toward her, every leaf and stem bending in her direction like flowers following the sun.
“Some knowledge asks permission before it gives itself away,” she says, chilling me to the bone. It’s as if she knows so much more than she’s letting on and I’m addicted to finding out what it is.
I meet her gaze and find myself staring into eyes that have seen things I can’t—or shouldn’t—imagine. Neither of us blinks. Neither flinches. We’re caught in this moment like insects in amber, preserved in our mutual understanding of lies.
“I’m good at asking,” I say, and the words taste like ashes and broken locks. My gut twists with the weight of last night’s trespass, the memory of wire against tumblers, of chalk dust on fingertips. The betrayal burns on my tongue like nightshade.
But then Demi’s lips curve into something that might be a smile or might be a grimace—the expression of someone who’s watched too many people try to unlock her secrets. There’s exhaustion in the lines around her eyes, but something else too—a glimmer of appreciation, perhaps, for the elegance of our dance around truth.
“We’ll see.”
The words hang in the air like smoke signals, a warning or an invitation or both at once. The garden seems to echo them, rustling leaves whispering: we’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see.
Updated Ration Log:
1 pocket vibrator (feels silly compared to the heaviness I’m feeling)
1 water bottle (yay water)
1 granola bar (still here)
1 plastic baggy with seeds and seeds and more seeds (the future)