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The ghosts in the pit of her belly were acting up again. Twisting and churning and weaving together until they became too much for her body to hold, and they erupted through her throat. “The sky is going to weep.” The jigsaw puzzle she was putting together was almost done. A bouquet of flowers. It was five thousand pieces.
Her puzzle table was by the window. She looked out and saw the sky was grey, the clouds were moving close to each other. They were darker the further she looked out. She looked back at her puzzle after a while. The sky would get greyer, but not while she was looking at it.
Mama hummed from where she was reading on the couch. She had been sick recently. Sniffling and coughing, so she had a mug of tea next to her on the ottoman, and a thick blanket over her legs. “The forecast said we would get rain.” She turned the page in her book, then looked back up to Helaena. “How do you feel about that today?”
She thought for a while about it. It wasn’t windy, only grey, with the promise of weeping. “I think it will be good.” She decided and Mama smiled at her.
“It will be good,” She agreed. “We’ve needed rain as of recent. The ground has been too dry.”
“The plants are sad.” Helaena snapped a small length of puzzle pieces into their spot.
Mama chuckled. “Yes, the plants have been sad.” She craned her neck to look out the window then shut her book and set it next to her mug. She pushed the blanket aside and stood, stretching her arms up. Her back popped, so did her shoulders, and she groaned. “I’m going to make…something. I’m not sure. Do you have any ideas?”
Helaena shook her head, but she stood and followed Mama into the kitchen. She opened the cabinets. All of them, one by one, then shut them again after deciding that nothing looked good to her. Helaena remembered when women in uniforms with their hair pulled into tight buns would run about and make food. All of them had disappeared. Finally, Mama pulled out a can of tomato soup. It was dusty.
“Soup and grilled cheese?” She asked, and Helaena nodded. “If you could get me the butter, bread, and cheese, that would be a great help.” Helaena got her the bread first. She took four slices of bread—two for each sandwich—and set them on a paper towel next to the stove. Mama was turning the dial and small blue flames spouted up underneath the burners.
Helaena got the butter and the cheese next. The butter was in a large container that was a horrible mix of grey and brown. She opened the drawer and fished through all the meats and cheeses. “Which one?” She asked.
“Colby-Jack for me, then whatever cheese you want,” Mama told her. Helaena grabbed only the Colby-Jack. She wanted that, too. She closed the door to the fridge and set the cheese and the butter on the counter next to the bread. She opened the drawer and took out a butter knife, setting it on top of the butter container.
While Mama poured soup from the can into the pot on the stove to warm it, Helaena opened the loaf of bread back up and took out a single slice. She rolled it into a ball—as small of a ball as she could—then bit into it. It was thick and turned to what she imagined cement to feel like in her mouth, but it didn’t taste right if she ate it without rolling it like she did.
Mama buttered the slices of bread. “Could you grab that large skillet in the cabinet above you?” Helaena turned with half of her bread ball still in her fingers and opened the cabinet. It was quite an awkward tool, and taking it down from the cabinet with one hand proved difficult, so she put the rest of the bread in her mouth and took down the skillet. She put it on the burner. “Thank you.”
Helaena got down plates from the cabinet, and bowls too. Mama scooped butter from the container and then scraped it off into the pan with her finger. She moved it around until it was melted completely, then she took the slices of bread and put them into the skillet. Two in a row. They sizzled while the soup steamed. Helaena suddenly heard the gravel of their driveway crunch and her head whipped toward the window. It was the mail truck. They hadn’t gotten mail for a while, usually, the truck stopped and checked, but there was nothing to put into their mailbox. This time, the mailman put multiple letters into the box.
As soon as he drove away, Helaena raced to the door and didn’t bother putting on shoes before rushing out to retrieve the mail. She hadn’t ordered anything, she wasn’t expecting anything, but she still liked to see what they had gotten. The air was laced with the smell of weeping. The bugs and birds had gone quiet, too, like they were expecting it. It only took her a few seconds to check the mail, but in that time, two green caterpillars had crawled up onto her toes and curled up on the tops of her feet.
Helaena bent down and urged them off her feet with the edges of the envelopes. They fell back into the grass, then she ran back inside. (She stopped short of the door to make sure no other friends were lingering on her.) Helaena didn’t close the front door when she went back inside. She went back into the kitchen just as Mama was flipping over the slices of bread to grill both sides. Helaena sifted through the mail and put bills into one pile, loan offers in another, and then a sore thumb caught her eye.
“It’s from Aegon.” She said. Mama turned around with confusion resting on her brow. She held her hand out, so Helaena put the envelope in it. She set down her bread-flipper, (Helaena didn’t know what the actual name for it was) and tore it open. She pulled out a letter, handwritten. A picture fell out, too. Helaena got a glimpse of it, it seemed to be her brother on some beach. Mama read the letter, scoffed, then folded it up and put it in the trash. She handed the photo to Helaena. “Do what you want with that.”
She decided to put it up on the fridge, next to all the others. Aegon looked tired in the picture while he stood in front of washes. “What did the letter say?” Helaena wrung her fingers together while she asked. Mama took a slice of Colby-Jack for each of their sandwiches then flipped one slice over on top of another to squish and melt the cheese.
“Nothing important, don’t worry.” She replied, but Helaena wondered what it had actually said.
“What was…not important?” She leaned against the counter.
Mama sighed. “He was asking for money.”
“We should give him some. We have a lot of it.” She didn’t know how much exactly, just that it was a lot.
Mama let out a long sigh. “I’ve given him money, and he’s spent it. Multiple times. After a while, you realize some lessons cannot be taught, but nonetheless, must be learned. Aegon must learn on his own how to garner and use money.” She pried the sandwiches from the skillet and put them onto the plates. She turned off the stove next, then grabbed the bowls and poured the soup from the small pot into each of them. Mama put the bowls on the plates, then nodded for Helaena to get spoons. Helaena got a big one for Mama and a small one for herself. Mama carried the plates to the puzzle table, which sometimes doubled as a regular table.
Helaena went to the fridge and opened it. Her eyes scanned the shelves until she found the small bottles of orange juice. “Do you want juice?”
“No, dear, thank you I have my tea and juice hurts my throat right now,” Mama called back to her. Helaena heard the faint noise of plants being set down. She grabbed a bottle of orange juice for herself, and four paper towels to use as napkins, then went to the table. It was getting darker outside already, so she closed the front door and locked it too, to keep the weeping out of the house.
Helaena handed Mama two paper towels and her spoon, and then they both sat down. The first crack of thunder sounded, and then the weeping began. It came down violently, and Helaena wondered what had made the clouds so sad to make them cry that hard.
Helaena ate her sandwich and today she was okay with eating the crusts on the bread. Sometimes she could, and sometimes she couldn’t, but today they were just as delicious as the rest of the sandwich. Just as she finished her grilled cheese and moved on to her soup, the ghosts in her belly were being rowdy again and this time before they came up from her throat, they traveled to her mind.
They whispered a couple of vicious things into her ears and drew a picture for her of a nose that looked so much like Mama’s but was too pale to be hers with blood running down from its nostrils. The blood didn’t stop until it reached an open mouth and even then it dripped slowly between those parted lips.
Then her own lips parted, and the ghosts fled from her body. “He has woven his velvet upon a loom of his own bones. His fingers are raw and red as the maesters pry his hands from the string, but he will not stop until he can dye the velvet red.”
The outside was nearly completely dark now, safe for a small sliver of sun that still dared to peek in through a crack in the clouds.
Helaena lifted her bowl to her mouth and drank the tomato soup. Mama did the same and said to her, “Lovely weather.”
Helaena was inclined to agree.