Open Your Eyes
Gena is in her element, there in the ill-lit, cozy room. It is her nest, her home, and she its never-changing guardian. This morning, like any other, she waits by the kitchen table and a group of kids storm her, eager for breakfast. But once they see that the food in her hands is going on the table they surge around to places where they can claim it for themselves. She sets down their bowls of soup (which she has been tending for the last hour) and some fruit and bread, allowing the two girls and three boys to settle down and busily dig in. One child has the same sun-browned skin and orange hair of a certain rascal she knows, and as he gobbles down his food she thinks fondly, Like father, like son.
As they eat a few of them squabble, but she decides to let them work things out themselves, while she attends to the others, waitressing cups of water and looking over the children with grace and years of practice. Her very presence seems to coax the children to sit down and behave—of course they want to be good for Gena.
She patrols the head of the table, and as the first few kids finish their meal, she is careful to clean up each and send them on their way with an affectionate pat. After which they tear out of the house, screaming goodbye, and when the last echoes of the last child's voice fade away she begins to straighten the chairs around the table.
All at once the house has become quiet, and she is left to herself. She crosses the long room—which is warm and comforting in its earthy tones, hanging lamps—assessing her morning work, deciding where to start. In the end she leaves the dishes where they are on the table. The sound of children still lingers in the air there and she'd like to let it stay there awhile longer.
First Gena stops at the tier of plants that hangs by the windows, gently touching their oily leaves, sprinkling water inside their dusty pink container, watching it soak into the dirt. She puts her watering can down in the shelves beneath when she's done. The plants are a species that a boy who no longer comes here would have loved... She doesn't know why she still keeps them.
After that she goes to the three bunk beds that are arranged against the back wall. Every bed is untidy and warm with recently departed bodies except one, a single mattress which has not been disturbed in years. Last night the gang of children invaded her home, though it no longer served as an orphanage. Tik (his son among them) and the other kids from back then had grown up, but this generation of village children still liked to invade her home to spend a night or two, for whatever reason. Their parents knew, and approved.
After thinking pleasantly on this and tidying the beds, Gena goes to the little bookcases that line the wall. They are mostly full but leave occasional gaps of unfilled space. She organizes these, afterwards beginning to post on the wall pictures that the kids drew the previous night. Paper after paper of "uniquely" drawn families go up; Gena smiles to find that many of them contain representations of herself, usually a crude stick figure with a strangely lush green hair. She tacks up one row of three pictures, but as she stars on the second one she finds that there are only two left to place in the emptiness. She yearns for a sixth picture, but in the end leaves the space on the wall the way it is.
She revisits the area set off which serves as a kitchen, where the light from the nearby windows don't flood in, but merely glow. It is a friendly bluish companion to her as she clears the dishes from the table, bringing them to wooden tub she used as a sink and setting them inside. Pulling up her sleeves, she works to drain the remaining puddles of soup from the bowls and wash the silverware; it is a job that Sis used to do all the time, she recollects absently.
Gena leans back for a moment, still idly scrubbing the spoons, remembering the days when Sis was no more than a pig-tailed teenage girl, physically awkward and yet hard-working and dependable. She had been such a help to Gena when all of the island's orphans had been hers to look after. Now, twenty years later, Sis was a hardworking woman with a family of her own. She still visited Gena sometimes to wash a dish or two (though she knows that Gena is more than capable of doing it herself) and chat about the changes brought about by the recent move to the Earth. She knows that it's because Sis is worried she'll become lonely. The girl just wants to be there for her, the dear...
The older woman, now nearing sixty years of age, just smiles to herself, washes the last of the dishes, and stacks them on the counter. Then she dries her hands and re-straightens the chairs around the table. Pushed against the wall near the door is a basket of damp laundry, which she picks up and carries to the door. Her morning chores have just begun, after all.
When she opens the door and looks out into the morning, she finds the kids are running around outside, bathed in sunlight, some playing by the well while some follow Tik across the clearing. He walks with a sack slung over the shoulder, supposedly full of equipment to repair the Brierclock; when he sees her waves with his free hand. Nearby, just like every morning, Wacho is leaning over some poor cornered girl, showing off his trademark smile, a gaping grin that has never changed and never will. He doesn't notice Gena, but she is doesn't mind, as she has already started on her laundry, gathering clips from her basket and tightening up the drying line. The wind floating by is fragrant, the thornflowers in bloom, and a mood of ancient, imperturbable time settles over the village. But she supposes that just as Wacho has grown so will the village—it will also change and stay the same. She will too, no matter how old she becomes. Picking up the first shirt, she thinks that she now has to accept that she is in a world the only one without wings of the heart is no longer her. But, she thinks, clipping the boy's shirt up, she will never be the only one to experience hardships in this world.
A/N: Wow, another icky one-shot written, this time written for the prompt "Open Your Eyes." Unfortunately you'll have to figure out the relationship between the title and the story yourself... I'll probably edit this one later, as well, but for now please forgive the mistakes and bad writing. Anyways, thanks for reading!