The Tree of Knowledge

Home Life

I wake in the morning to the smell of roasting meat. Jeff, ever the early riser, has started on breakfast. He's cut the bat meat into thin strips and is frying them in a pan over the fire. He calls it "bat bacon". It doesn't really taste like bacon, but it does crisp up in a satisfactory sort of way.

Susie is working on a sort of hot cereal made from Desert Indian Wheat sweetened with cactus pears and dotted with chia seeds.

I stretch languorously and emerge from my sleeping bag, wishing them a good morning. I volunteer to make the tea.

It's getting so much colder. Hot tea will be just the thing to pry everyone else out of their sleeping bags.

From the cavern entrance the next "room" over is the one I crawled into, with the stream. I scoop up some water in a pot and head back to the fire with it. I boil the water with some fragrant orange flame flowers.

Dave has stumbled out of his sleeping bag and leans over the pot.

"Passion flower?" he asks, hopeful.

"Flame flower."

Dave sighs dramatically.

"Passionflower's better."

"Oh, really?"

Boy couldn't identify a flower to save his life. Literally. When he goes out to gather, half of what he brings home is poisonous. I can't believe he's this useless and presumes to bitch about the selection.

"How about I just run to Central Market and pick you up some fucking organic vanilla chai? Does that sound better to you?"

"It does sound good." Susie interjects, wistfully.

"Or coffee....remember coffee?" Jeff adds as he flips the bacon strips.

"Kit! Kit! Kit!" Bonita bounds up to me. Her little hands are stained red. "Kit! You have to look! I painted you a picture!"

Bonita grabs me by the hand, smearing me with the sticky juice. Dutifully, I let her drag me away, leaving Dave to mind the tea.

Apparently, ever since Isabel started on her murals, Bonita has been begging non stop to be allowed to paint too. Isabel, possessing only a finite amount of paint, was unwilling to share it. After learning of this, and receiving many, many assurance that she would not stick her fingers in her mouth, I made Bonita some of the berry paint I had used to make my arrows. With this act, I seem to have earned her undying love, because she hasn't left me alone since.

"Look!" she demands, pointing proudly. "That's me, and that's you, and that's a pretty flower."

"Wow!" I gush over the little red stick figures with big heads. "It's beautiful!"

Bonita shakes her head.

"I don't think it looks like you. I think you should sit still and I can paint you like a real artist."

"Okay, but how about we do that after breakfast?"

Breakfast has a tendency to double as an inventory meeting. Are we short on edible plants? Meat? Firewood? Do we have too much meat or plants, and should we start preserving some of it? Could someone please find some passion flowers so that Dave quits his bitching? Billy puts in a request for thin, bendy reeds for making snares if anyone sees any.