Re: Marvel: Max & Ella
[Ella had grown up in a garden. She'd sat on a blanket, playing with seeds and she'd watched her mother feed flowers and growing things with love in a way that she didn't or couldn't inside the house with the thick walls. She'd grown up in a garden and she'd gone back to it, where her mother didn't talk about losing the man who'd led her life for years and where words weren't spoken if you were in the garden.
Flowers, and she didn't think Max when she looked around. It was chaos, and it was busy and there was a line jammed around the flowers. She recognized Amanda as the little girl ducked through the crowd to her mom's side, and Ella's smile bloomed. Elizabeth had been baby hair and baby steps the last time she'd seen Max and recognition was nowhere. There'd been photographs, in the small house but the woman in front of Elizabeth was different from the woman pinioned in time, in faded print.
Elizabeth looked critically at the flowers, and at Amanda, and then smiled all at once, dimples and loose braids and socks sinking around her ankles.] Okay [she said, very seriously and she could be heard introducing herself (with middle name) to Amanda, and telling her that flowers died as soon as they were cut.
Ella hadn't worked a register in years but she dumped the coat behind the register, and she checked out the line the same way she'd worked book-store lines at college. Words had waited years, and time that had bent and doubled back on itself. Words could wait until the crush had lessened a little.]