Assistant for the Alien Prince by Tammy Walsh
Sofia
Mom deserved better than this.
A whole lot better.
The gravedigger tossed another clod of dirt onto the cheap plain casket.
My mother’s resting place.
A few cheap pieces of wood hammered together with rusted nails.
It was all we could afford, and we’d have to go hungry a day or two to afford that much.
The dirt made a deep soft thump sound that might have come from inside the casket, a weak fist beating for us to let her out, that there was still a little life left in her yet…
It was possible, wasn’t it?
No, I thought, not with how pale her skin had been that day I entered her bedroom for the final time.
Mom had been an angel, far too good for the likes of the existence we’d struggled through for the past nine years.
When our stomachs grumbled and our heads ached with lack of food, she would hug me close and whisper:
“It could always be worse.”
I never understood how it could be worse.
Not when you didn’t know where your next meal was coming from, or if there would even be a next meal.
The cleric spoke forlornly over the small congregation of mourners.
They might be small in number but among them were many successful artists and writers.
They’d been friends with my mother for many years and were always on hand with a polite word or smile of kindness.
They were getting on in years and my mother’s death was just another in a long line of good friends who’d recently passed.
Whenever I asked my mother how she met her friends, she merely shrugged and said true friendship could last forever, if properly nurtured.
One of her best friends was Camila.
She placed an aged hand on my shoulder and I reached up and rubbed it gently.
We’d struggled through many years of little food and even less chance of survival.
Things turned from bad to worse when dras attacked five years earlier, and it’d been all we could do to hold starvation at bay.
It’d been thanks to Camila that we hadn’t perished during those tough siege months.
Camila was my nanny and had always taken great care of me.
She was my second mother and ensured I got a good education.
Camila always came through for us, finding a loaf of bread or a puny rabbit she’d bartered from a local hunter somewhere.
I don’t know what she gave him in return as we had nothing to offer, and I was too afraid to ask.
Life hadn’t always been hard like this, I seemed to recall.
There was a place of marble floors and columns so thick a grown man couldn’t wrap his muscular arms around it.
I once brought that memory up with my mother and she pretended not to hear me, and when I pressed her, she told me it was probably a drawing from one of my fairytales.
The images were fuzzy around the edges, so I supposed she had to be right.
Strange, though, that I swear I could feel the coldness of the stone beneath my fingers and so clearly picture the hardness of it against my back…
If only things were so easy, to live in a palace and to never have to worry about not having enough food to eat.
When her friends asked if we needed help, Mom always thanked them for their kindness and was quick to turn them down.
She was proud and wouldn’t accept handouts, no matter how much we needed them.
Only once did I ever make the mistake of asking why we couldn’t contact my father—whoever he was—for help.
My mother snapped at me that she would never go back to him, least of all to ask for aid.
I guessed the risk of dying of starvation was better than dying of the shame of returning to him.
A tear slithered down my cheek and Camila wiped it away with a spindly finger.
She smiled down at me, and I gripped her hand tight.
We were all we had left in the world now.
Just the two of us.
Something moved out the corner of my eye and caught my attention.
A white flower drifted lazily side to side, using up the entire width of the grave as it came to a stop on the casket’s blank wooden top.
It was a strange flower, unlike any I had seen before.
It had long petals like a spider’s legs, half-coiled as if preparing to spring off the casket and scamper up the muddy walls of its earthen prison.
A sprig of yellow flowers arched like lolling tongues from the stigma.
It was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen.
A fresh spade of dirt crushed it, knocking it from its prideful position.
A second clod of muck hit the flower and obliterated it from view.
The gravedigger beamed an offensive grin at the destroyed flower before continuing with his shoveling.
He took no sadistic enjoyment from it and seemed a little simple of mind.
I peered up at who’d dropped the flower and found a man with a long pale face clutching a broad-brimmed hat to his chest in respect.
The taller man standing beside him wore the same military uniform, though it fit him even more poorly than his shorter chum.
I didn’t recognize them as members of my mother’s close-knit group of friends, but I doubted I knew them all.
They sure didn’t fit in with my mother’s high-class and well-heeled buddies.
Camila sucked in a sharp breath and her hand stiffened on my shoulder.
I peered up at her and noticed the cause of her reaction:
The two mystery uniformed men standing opposite.
Her face was drawn and pale, her eyes wide and lacking its usual self-restraint.
She’d never been the type to be easily shocked or surprised.
But right then, I saw the unmistakable shimmer of fear on her features that hadn’t been present even during the darkest and most difficult of months of the siege.
She gawped at the two men as if they were apparitions.
They raised their eyes and focused not on Camila, but me.
Something was afoot.
Little did I know that a thousand lightyears away another funeral was taking place for a second member of my estranged family, and it would have far-reaching and dire consequences, deeper even than that of my own dearly departed mother.
