Lavender: a Strangely Slipstream Novelette

Burial

Her concept for Sandcastle would have become more fanciful, but during the time she'd imagined and planted him, her teachers were concentrating on an anti-drug lesson: avoiding the scintillating pleasures of the slow salt transition.

The death of the Deerplant wasn't inventive enough. The ordinariness of the act was already beginning to crack the domed sky. The gray sound shook her.

Sandcastle was always trouble.

There was no excuse for him to exist.

Someone else would have to repair those hairline cracks before the ordinariness seeped in. She was tired of doing it. Someone taller, used to climbing on scaffolding, or who got paid for it, would be a better option.

She didn't see anyone clambering for the job.

If Lavender weren't so aesthetic, she could have grown a pragmatic handyman, with buttcrack, to follow her around instead of those two poetic goofballs.

As people got older, their imaginations often grew less vivid, and so they tended to ration how many things they grew. But Annatalia kept up the suggested exercises of picturing things vividly.

Annatalia's role in passing the law restricting children from having imaginative-growing rights was vindicated by the horrors of the Deerplant slaughter.

If that current rule been implemented when she was young, Sandcastle and the DayMare would not exist. And neither would the neighbor's Goth bloody things. If Lavender had to continue on, there should be qualifying tests that would weed out adults who make bad decisions and restrict their growing rights as well.

People born in Lavender who became snide, addicted to Earth's pop culture references, who were prone to ruining the poetry of major events, were sent off on the Woven rail, on orders from the company Annnatalia worked for. The rail was the only way to get to other alternative worlds and the way to regulate who was allowed in them.

Otherwise, Lavender would have cracked two years ago. Annatalia was a good catcher. She could strong-arm the unimaginative folks and get them out of Lavender before their families could interfere.

Annatalia's sister had shown those tendencies lately to a worrisome degree, and the possibility of her exile would have to be discussed over dinner. Annatalia hoped the dry conversation didn't crack the sky too much. Ousting a child had to be done very carefully and beautifully.

That's why she had chosen the Bloodflowers and goat to keep the event up to the necessary creative standards in which case things got bogged down. The goat was continuing to wear away the rooty stubble on its hooves while tethered by the garden, so when dinnertime came, it wouldn't scamper wildly and then fall over in the back yard.

Annatalia hated the idea of losing closeness with her sister, but she also felt squeamish about taking the Woven rail to visit her on another world. Especially as she would be the one to banish her to it if it came to that. Annatalia refused to take the rails to any of those worlds if the Anti-Heroes destroyed only Lavender.

But why should it be only one time-share world? They should really get rid of all of them. Ideally making sure as many people as possible were off each one and on the Earth before destroying the worlds one at a time. Still it seemed so violent. Responsible, but – drastic.

She shuddered at the non-poetic quality of those places. That made her want to die.

At least Earth had comedy movies with her favorite film stars she could swoon over while drinking chocolate milkshakes. Comedy was too careful on Lavender to be funny, and the caffeine in chocolate kept one from salt-lick-traveling on a whim. And no one wanted to grow cows in the gardens for milk. They were too easy to take for granted and that was dangerously dull.

Annatalia had to dig a hole to bury the Deerplant along the edge of the garden. She got the shovel from the shed and started in. "Are you going to help?" she asked.

Sandcastle grunted and shuffled off grittily.

Tiny quartz bits glistened in the sunshine. The DayMare pitched in and grunted.