Escape Pod

Pickled Roots and Peeled Shoots and a Bowl of Farflower Tea
By Chaz Brenchley


there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me


Just that morning, she’d had a novice shave her head for her. He was a promising lad - no, more than promising, he was a promise halfway to being realised already - but still ridiculously young, all awkwardness and angles, nervous of his own body let alone anybody else’s. Let alone hers.

Of course he’d cut her. She’d felt the cold bite of the blade and then its sudden absence as he snatched his hands away, his suppressed cry of self-recrimination, the tentative pressure of a cloth to stem the bleeding. She raised a hand and laid it over his, pressing firmly, teaching him not to be shy. Not with her body, not with her blood.