Anything But Rhythmic

Three New Things

Note: Hey, babes. Thought you might like to get to know Cade a little better. So here you are. She's ten here.

Three New Things

Cadence closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Simply put, what she smelled was Spring. It was grass and dirt and damp, cool air. It was newness and open space. It was the color green crawling out of the mouth of the color brown and stretching its cramped limbs.

Spring was beautiful, she thought. It was like the refresh button in the top left corner of a computer screen, but it worked on the whole world.

She hooked her thumbs in the straps of her backpack, exhaled, and opened her eyes. The trees still looked dead and alone, their branches raised stiffly to make crude gestures at the sky. The grass growing in was sparse, checkered with patches of the last generation's brown corpses.

Cade crouched to the ground and ran her fingers along a small patch of green. It was her favorite color, green. It was beautiful. A symbol of life and hope.

"Hey, Sweetheart."

Cadence stood up quicker than lightning and spun around. "Daddy!" she squealed and ran into her father's arms. She wrapped her arms tightly around him and let him spin her in circles in the air. She giggled as he set her down. "I missed you!" she told him and stepped back to look at him.

"I missed you too, Pumpkin," Sam told her and crouched to her level. He reached a hand out, and Cade slid her backpack off her shoulder to hand it over to him. Sam shouldered it like it was lighter than a popcorn kernel. "How was school?" he asked, brushing one pale finger against the dark skin of his daughter's face to brush an eyelash away. "Learn anything new?"

Cadence smiled brightly. This was tradition for them. Sam always asked her that question when he picked her up, and she always told him a new fact or word she'd learned, because it wasn't even possible to get through a whole day without learning something. "I learned that things can't just be alive or dead. They can be non-living."

"Wow," Sam said. "Can you give me an example?"

Cade nodded proudly. She had plenty of examples. Her entire science class today had been spent finding things that fit into all three of the categories she'd named. "A rock," she said. "Things can only be dead if they lived first. A rock never lived. So it isn't dead. It's non-living."

"That's really good, Cadence," Sam encouraged and smiled at her. "You know, I bet your mom would love to hear about that too."

"I'm gonna tell her when we get home," Cadence said so her father wouldn't worry about that. She figured her mom probably already knew that fact, though. Her dad probably had too. But they both loved to hear when she learned something new whether they were already in the know on that subject or not.

Sam stood up and grabbed his daughter's hand. Their arms swung casually as they walked side by side toward the parking lot.

"I learned something else today too," Cadence said softly. She looked at the grass lining the sidewalks. Most of it was dead, and even the living stuff had been trampled by herds of small feet. "I learned that there's a kind of energy in every living thing."

Sam slowed considerably upon hearing her words. "What do you mean by that?" he asked gently. "Are you talking about plants? Is that something you learned in science class?"

Cadence shrugged. "I mean I can feel it," she said quietly. "Not a lot. Not like with people. But I can feel the buzz."

"The buzz?" Sam repeated.

"Like that it's alive. I think it's not fair to everyone else. We were supposed to write down everything we could find that was alive, dead, or non-living, and it's easy for me to tell what's alive. It has energy. Most people can't do that."

"Cade, I wish you wouldn't worry about that."

Cadence twisted her mouth off to the side and bit the inside of her lip. Her parents didn't like for her to worry about anything. But she couldn't help it. It was just hard not to be always worried about other people, especially when she could feel their feelings. Some of the kids in her class had been very frustrated trying to place the items they found in a category. But Cade hadn't had any trouble at all. It wasn't fair.

"I can feel it, though, Dad," she explained. "I can feel it when it's not fair."

"I know," Sam said. "But you can't let it get to you. It's not your fault that you can feel those things. There's nothing you can do about it. It's important to focus on yourself sometimes."

"That's hard," Cadence replied. She tugged on her dad's hand. "But I gotta learn that too, right, Dad? That's a third thing I learned today."

Sam looked down at her in the same second that Cade looked up at him. She watched his smile as it formed, saw its stages of grief and contentment. "You're getting smarter every day, Pumpkin."

Cadence grinned. She knew that already.

She closed her eyes again, trusting her father's hand in hers to guide her. The world still smelled like Spring, fresh and clean and starting over. It was almost like the world was learning to. And Cadence could feel it in the back of her skull and in her fingertips. The world was alive, and it was beautiful.

La Fin