You set I Will Plant a Lilac Tree in your Chest and the scrap paper back on the nightstand after looking through its pages for several minutes. You’re not sure why you spent so much time looking through it. You simply did, and felt… better for it. Satisfied, like scratching an itch, or stretching long-idle joints. Both of these were physical needs you actually felt a keen longing for- but seemed beyond you at the moment. The pain from the wounds on your chest is less overwhelming now. Instead of the horrible, throbbing pain that encompassed your whole upper body, you now feel the wound itself. A worryingly deep ache that for all the pain feels like healing. But beneath that, deep inside you, you feel a cold, sharp thread that lazily traces from one shoulder to the opposite hip. That coldness tells you how close you were to death. A deep, almost fatal wound that will never be fully healed. You gently touch your shoulder where the wound begins. You remember the cold metal entering your body, shockingly cold, the strap of your bag severed, falling, then the hot blood, it was your life, the heat was your life and the cold was inside you-
Your bag.
Its important. Vitally important.
Before the panic has time to set in, your eyes find it, perhaps you woke up a previous time and found it then too. Or else it made its way into dreams through whatever unremembered and unconscious haze that lay over you.
Beside the door, a wooden stand with a familiar cloak, and an unadorned wooden chair with a bag on it. Your bag. You gently ease yourself into a sitting position, with your legs over the bed. The feet feel raw and almost vulnerable from disuse, the floor beneath them rough. Cautiously, you push yourself up. You stand erect and do not sway, knowing that if you let yourself you’d just fall. Instead you hold yourself stiffly together, and focus on your feet and the wood before them. A short deliberate step forward. Another.
You are panting again by the time you see the feet of the coat-stand. You reach out groping and get a good handhold on it, supporting yourself somewhat before you raise your eyes.
Your bag sits there, serenely, one strap hanging down off the chair, cut.
You stumble forward the final step, nearly falling at your destination, as you reach out and unbalance yourself. You catch your balance as your legs painfully impact the chair seat and one of your hands finds its back, where you support yourself again, now hunched over the bag and you haven’t looked away from it. Your other hand feels the coarse fabric of the flap, then the wooden toggles that hold it closed, the wooden toggles on the strings that you always tie in a rosette. The wooden toggles which are not tied in a rosette.
Your heart courses again, your fingers borrow their old dexterity from some sense-memory and slip the toggles apart. You lift the flap and it occurs to you that you don’t even remember what the inside of your bag looks like. You would not know if anything were in there that shouldn’t be. Or if anything were missing. But you lift the flap.
And there you find a book.
“An Introduction to Grifts and Cons”
There is nothing in this world more valuable than the bonds we form with those around us- these represent untapped and extremely lucrative lines of income, just waiting to be collected. Join us, as we explore the many ways you can exploit the basic levels of trust and camaraderie that you are granted simply by dint of society’s existence, and use it against your fellow man. Be the change you wish to see in your purse. [“Honey” Hank Towshod and “Sweetboy” Stevie Allos, 64 pages, Nonfiction (Instructional, Sociology)]