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The water bubbles evenly, rolling over the flame like in a dance. Levi watches it, maybe a little too closely. Now that the weather was getting chilly again she finds herself sat by the oven more often than not, even when she doesn't have to be. The beets roll gently in the pot, too many to eat at once, the fruit of a bargain, while a smaller amount of potatoes boils in a separate pot.
Levi handles the hot vegetables with mild curses, with a bowl between her legs to catch the peelings. She never attempted to salvage waste before, out of some misplaced sense of self respect, and regardless of that she never found no use for them until now. She had a new hobby, which required her burying overripe produce and all their undignified parts like cores and peels, so she began saving them. It was a decidedly good cause: nature is cyclical, was what New Illustrated Comprehensive Guide For Gardening explained, it can create even out of waste. Like to say: use what you have at hand even if its shitty. Levi held onto her reservations until those old bushes of unidentified pebbley fruit have started to bloom under her window, and now whenever she stood before the basin she can see their small leafs carressing the glass. It was no use, fighting nature, and the feeling was rewarding. Putting order to things that were once unruly.
In early autumn the garden was still showcasing her hard work, bright green with the tittle of yellow and red. Sprouts mimicked the fence, their arms curling over the wood, and with summer having lasted longer then normal some of the vines have become as tall as Levi's shin once she tore out the dead, thorny brush thats been there for ages and let it regrow, aided by Erin's book. She recalls the afternoon they spent there yesterday, mostly lying on the grass. It tickled Levi's arms and made patchy stains on the knees of Erin's trousers. Normally she would find it irritating, a hell to scrub out. She remembers occasionally glancing over at the window, but that day was not the first day ever that her uncle decided to enter the kitchen.
Levi blinks herself out of thought when her wrist begins to cramp. She rotates it shortly as pink water drips down to her elbow.
Her day dress dipped into the damp earth, and turning onto her front twisted the skirt up her calves. Erin mustn't have noticed, Levi thinks, peeling methodically. She pet Levi's back like this for some time as they layed there, like girls playing in dirt.
Levi puts away the waste bowl and reaches for the mountain of beets again. She begins to chop them into sticks, knife slicing right by her fingers. The bushes were just tall enough to hide them from view to anybody coming up the passway. They were voices dressed in a drape of green. Levi begun to mourn the inevitable loss of her work, seeing how the sky hung low over the rooves, knowing Erin had been approving of her progress. She had told Levi she had good hands and palmed both of them, ghosting her lips over their fingers.
While Erin outright stared when she wanted it, Levi's knees dug into the dirt with restraint. If someone happened to peek over the fence at that time, they would have seen them like this, warm hands clasped together. Nothing indecent, and yet. Normal between girls and none of anyone's business.
Levi pauses to clear her cutting board, absently bites her lip and lets it go. She had a tendency to chew it until its bloody and then walk around with raw slits on her mouth for a week. Still, it was better than the alternatives, such as cigarettes that stain your teeth and fingers. It was a small giving. She worries the seam where it turns slick and rough with scar tissue and folds a leg under herself.
Erin was chatty and sharp and she didn't let go of Levi's hands for a while, rubbing an absent, soothing circle with her thumb over her knuckles while she spoke in bursts of idle conversation. A more careful gesture than she let on, because nothing escapes her. Levi had observed their hands that were stained with grit and lamented their differences. Right then they both smelled of the earth, potent after tending to the garden, and Levi felt it was relaxing even with how she liked to keep herself pristine. To be messy, for once, granting herself the right to be. She could've snatched her hands away and gone to wash, but she hadn't. She counted her breaths and leaned into it. Maybe the whole thing was a plot to get her to exercise patience. Her eyes burned, from not staring, the back of her neck prickled and turned away to any potential voyeurs.
She had stopped wondering what led them to each other. She knows she was never naturally charming, not self depracatingly but honestly. Not like others could be, charismatic, the word sneaks up on her and its bright and big like it wears a lion's mane. Levi knows her strengths: she's good at other things or decent at the very least, like cooking and washing but not at the things that make a house a home, not in the way that most think of a woman's due duty, like keeping sweet to keep a man happy. It felt alienating to imagine herself performing in this way; and she never felt those expectations with Erin. They were compatible. What they had have, it is nameless but it existed. She let Levi be her crass and foul mouthed self. She waited for Levi come to her of her own volition, and Levi would crawl through dirt.
Her heel feels very solid under herself. She scolds herself for thinking weird things of something innocent: its something boys tend to do. Its the kind of thoughts that never lead anywhere. Thoughts of skirts twisting up with wind or recline, and shirts gapping at the collarbones. Her eyes water with a sting- she tore her skin.
She sucks her bloody lip inside, working until her fingernails are stained purple and her wrist cramps. She reaches for the potatoes and stops- she should have started with those, before the whole board was coloured with beets. Idleness beckons the devil and she has become sloppy. She swallows her smile and it tastes like blood.
Levi transfers the beets into the pickling brine without spilling a drop and tightens the lids in a way that will surely cause her trouble later. The soggy, pale-pink cubes stare at her angrily from the cutting board and she stares back.