The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Without any similes left to lean on, Flora seemed to struggle with the rest of it, though she nodded along anyway, the particular earnest nod of someone determined to meet a story halfway even when the story has wandered somewhere too large for her to fully follow. Iris sighed, and made as if to leave, ready to go enjoy the moment rather than sit any longer inside the weight of what she'd just handed over.

"Maybe evil is thinking about it too much," Flora said, in the particular unhurried, simple way she says most of her truest things — not because she has thought them through with any great architecture behind them, but because some truths, for her, have simply always been obvious, the way the sun rising was once obvious to her long before she had a word for sun or for rising. "If the future already changed once, maybe it can change again."

I want you to sit with that a moment, the way Iris herself sat with it, silent, turning the plain, unadorned shape of it over in whatever remains, underneath everything, of a mind built to hold total and absolute knowledge. It is, I think, the truest thing said in the whole of this account, and it came from the one person in the room who understood the least of the mechanics behind it. That is often how it goes, in my experience telling you these stories. The ones who understand the least of the machinery are so often the ones who see furthest past it.

Flora, encouraged by whatever small, startled warmth had crossed Iris's face at her answer, pressed a little further, the way she does when she senses a conversation still has room left in it before it needs to close.

"Does the toy know," she asked, "that evil loves it that much?"

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Iris considered the question longer than she'd considered almost anything else in the telling of the story so far. "I don't think so," she said, finally. "I think the toy believes itself ordinary. I think it has no idea what it's carrying, or what it might become, or how much depends on it never finding out too soon. I think, in a strange way, that not knowing is the only thing keeping it safe."

"That sounds lonely," Flora said, "being loved that much and not knowing it."

"It might be," Iris admitted. "Or it might be the kindest thing evil has ever done for anyone. I'm not certain there's a difference, in this particular case."

Flora considered that for a while, turning it over with the same unhurried care she gives most things too large to fully hold in one pass. "I think," she said eventually, "that I would want to know. Even if it hurt. Even if it changed how I looked at everything after. I don't think I could stand loving someone who was keeping something that large from me, however kind the reason."

"You say that now," Iris said, gently, without any of the teasing she usually wraps around her softer observations. "Most people say that now. It's a different thing entirely, once the knowing is actually sitting in front of you, real and total and impossible to hand back."

"Maybe," Flora allowed. "But I still think I'd rather have the chance to decide, than have someone decide it for me because they thought I couldn't carry it."

Iris looked at her a long moment then — really looked, the particular attentive stillness she reserves for the rare occasions Flora says something old enough, and true enough, that it briefly stops reading as naivety and starts reading as something closer to wisdom that simply hasn't been given the chance to prove itself yet. "I'll remember you said that," she said. "I don't know when it will matter. I suspect, someday, it will."

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