thejusticelounge | (no subject)

Left at Mar’i’s agency, the receptionist hands Mar’i a coilring notebook inside a crumpled reused giftbag. Inside the notebook is filled with watercolors of alien plants and ‘descriptive’ annotations. In the front is a separate lined piece of paper with Kyle’s scrawl addressed to Mar’i.

Hey Mar’i,

I was in Sector 25 a few days ago. Obviously it’s far away, and the mission meant my squad had to spot at multiple planets and multiple Sectors, and we did a lotta hurry-up-and-wait. During my downtime I found some cool plants and I so I drew them in this book. I couldn’t bring any seeds (tariff and quarantine regulations - you know how stickler some planets are for rules!) but I feel like a lot of these are plants that weren’t in the Arboretum and I dunno. I thought of you because they were cool and I think you’re cool too.

I put the planet name because sometimes I didn’t know the flower name, but yeah.

Hope you’re doing okay,

Kyle

When the receptionist hands it to her on her way out of the building, Mar’i assumes it’s one of the kookier designers’ new design books. In an attempt to one-up each other at seeming “fresh” and “inspired,” they’d taken to more and more inane manners of printing fashion sketches and modeling memos, and it wasn’t until Mar’i got home, wanders into her bedroom, heels still on—leaving small scuffs on the floor as she walked—that she takes it out of the bag.

Laying flat on her back on the rumpled sheets, Mar’i flips the book open, and freezes when she sees the watercolors littered throughout it.

Before she realizes it, her hands have singed marks into cover where she’s gripping it, and she drops the book on the ground, watching her handprints fade from a glowing red to a bottomless black. It doesn’t damage the pages inside, but the imprint cups around the edges like someone cradling…

Mar’i frowns, slamming off the bed with such force her heels dent the hardwood, and sweeps the notebook off the floor. She holds it by two fingers like it might bite her, and moves towards the trashcan on the other side of her room. It’s too full of flowers, dead or in the process of dying, to take the notebook as well and for that reason she stares at the closed cover for a while longer, refusing to reopen to look at the drawings. Her mouth twists and pinches, and in her hands the book feels heavy—impossibly heavy, like a stone in her stomach weighing her down—with its drawings of plants. Of life. Of living things that she can’t keep alive.

In the end, when the emotions don’t quite match up right and she can’t decide whether to scream or cry, she shoves the notebook in the far corner of her desk drawer, behind colorful pencils decorated with little energetic Korean sayings, half-used crayons and markers, and the various drawings Lian always leaves behind when she comes over that Mar’i can’t bear to simply throw away and hasn’t got around to buying fridge magnets for.