Lotus

   Granma Moon's hands are amorphous:  topographical maps of time.  Three great clefts dominate her left, and as she squeezes the cabbage shoots, they deepen.  The juice pours from the mouths of her knuckles down the ashen terrain of her hand, like rivers.  As her right hand, gripping the foliage, hesitates, the earth quakes.  Last year's storms have left her tendons rusted.  Her fingers, unable to hold anymore, snap like a spring.  Granma curses, sucks the sore on her hand, and lays it back down on the chopping board.  It pinks under the cold air, revealing the venous lotus beneath.  Stolen of the rivers' hiss, the kitchen is silent, its muteness a testament to the indifference of nature in the face of the genome.  

   The moratorium is shattered by a steady splinter of footsteps.  It is Mr. No Face, and his expression is free of the trials of time:  blank.  The boy, awaiting his supper, shrinks.

   "He was not always that way."

   The orphan waits, and Moonie continues.

   "T'was the wake of the third millennium, when the Lotus had just been destroyed.  But, it left a seed.  We used it to prevent the cancer—prevent it, because we could not kill it."

   "The cancer is the darkness within us."

   "Ah, but you see, we became the cancer!  There was a girl with the Lotus in her mind, and we injected her with the poison."

   "You mean you froze her."

   "Yes."

   "But wasn't it evil that was in her mind?"

   "How can those who've not faced their own evil know of its disposition?  Anyways, he loved her.  At seventeen, when they had all but erased her from the earth, he chose."

   "To be frozen, too."

   "To become immortal."

   "He wanted to find her."

   "It took him three lifetimes, but he did."

   "What happened when he did?"

   "She was there, but she was not."

   A furrow of the orphan's brow.  Granma picks up a sprig.  "Do the roots of a plant know of the sun?"

   "No, only the leaves do."

   "What, then, is light to the roots?"

   "Water."

   "Root must grow to shoot.  Man must move forward.  Proliferate."

   Comprehension.  "He chased a memory.  He moved from shoot to root."

   "So he could not recognize the water as light."

   "She ceased to exist—completely?"

   "Upside down, shoot is root, root is shoot."

   "Time reversed."

   "Then, tell me, how can a flower be its roots?"