Miss Rin tried to implement “mindfulness meditation” in the common room. She lit sweet-smelling incense and struck a small brass gong.
“Sit,” she commanded with a forced softness in her tone. “Fold your legs. Hands in your lap. Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Bud-dho. Bud-dho.”
The children sat crisscrossed on round, scratchy cushions, staring at her with expressions ranging from polite confusion to outright skepticism.
Thanom couldn’t do it. Sitting perfectly together made the latent fire under his skin fester. He kept one eye open to check on Mali, his leg bouncing up and down until his knee repeatedly bumped Jate sitting next to him.
Art sat like a statue, though he wasn’t meditating. He was listening to what he thought might be plantlife communicating with each other through the open windows. Then he heard it inside the hallways, and deep beneath the floorboards. All around, really. But also… not? He noticed that if he tried to focus on one aspect of the plant communication, he could no longer perceive any of it. It was like being in a crowded room with everybody clearly speaking Thai, but if you tried to catch a word of it, everyone stopped talking. Soon, Art realized that whatever he was sensing could only be known if you let yourself be overwhelmed by the whole of it. All at once. This meant letting go of trying to grab onto any part of it. He took a deep breath, loosened all his muscles and smiled.
“Close your eyes and stop grinning, Art!” chastised Miss Rin. “We are meditating, not daydreaming.”
Soon, the sessions were ignored. They weren’t rude about it; the kids were too well-trained for that. Instead, they maintained their manners through practiced evasion. When Miss Rin appeared holding her rolled-up yoga mat, Thanom suddenly found urgent, filthy pots to scrub in the kitchen. Art quietly slipped out the back to go work in the garden. Mali would suddenly remember a massive stack of math homework she needed to complete immediately and dragged Jate away to help her.
Only Peach remained, who had yet to reveal her method of escape.
“Ploypailin, close your eyes,” Miss Rin said softly, pausing her pacing behind the girl’s cushion.
“I can’t,” Peach replied, staring straight ahead.
“Why not?”
“Because if I close them, my essence might speak and the room gets too loud.”
“The room is silent, dear.”
“Not this room,” Peach countered. “The other one.”
Miss Rin sighed, rubbing her temples, and chimed the gong again. “Focus on the tip of your nose.”
Peach opened her mouth and started producing a continuous vocal drone with vibrato. The pitch matched with the gong’s resonant frequency, forcing the brass instrument to keep ringing loudly long after Miss Rin had stopped striking it.
Miss Rin ended the session ten minutes early.
Peach declared afterward that “the universe prefers standing, anyway.”
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Later that week, Peach stopped closing her eyelids entirely for a full twenty-four hours. Every time someone looked closely, her eyes were pinned wide open, the whites dry but luminous. She looked like she was caught halfway between being shocked and remembering something. She continued talking and smiling in her usual eccentric way. She attended school, and afterwards reported for laundry duty.
Art watched as Peach leaned back, held her eyelids open and squeezed a few drops in from a small bottle that he assumed she had snagged from the infirmary.
“Did you sleep?” Art asked under his breath, handing her a wet shirt to pin to the line.
“Not necessary,” she replied, grabbing a wooden clothespin without looking at it. “Today I’m on focus duty.”
No further explanation occurred, and nobody really expected one.
They were sweeping out the back corridor when the broom in Peach’s hand stopped moving. She scanned the floor, eyes darting around.
“Missed a spot,” Jate noted, pointing his dustpan at a pile of dirt near her foot.
Peach shook her head. “Nope. The wind is about to do it for me.”
A gust swirled through the open exit door. It gathered the loose dirt, dead leaves, and dust bunnies into a neat, conical pile precisely where she was looking.
Jate’s mouth dropped. He slowly lowered his dustpan. “Did anyone else see that?”
Peach twirled the broom like a cane, tapping the handle against the tiles. “It likes me today. The wind.”
Thanom arched an eyebrow at her, leaning against his own broom. “Since when does wind like people?”
“Stop being silly,” Peach chirped, skipping away.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
That afternoon, Peach disappeared for twenty-seven minutes. Art timed it.
She was next to him, weaving red yarn through a fence post when Art bent down to tie his shoelace. When he looked over to say something to her, all he saw was the red yarn dangling loosely in the breeze. Peach was gone.
Art scoured the grounds, checking behind the shed and near the laundry lines. Nothing.
When she finally rounded the corner of the building, Art was sitting with Jate on a bench in the courtyard with Mali and Thanom standing nearby. Peach’s feet were bare and her shins were covered in white chalk dust.
“Don’t worry,” she said, before anyone could ask. “I didn’t go down to the Viharn. Just listened near it.”
Jate looked up. “The creepy pool again? Why?”
Peach nodded, dusting the white powder off her knees, creating a small pale cloud. “It’s still breathing.”
Thanom stepped between her and Mali without thinking. “Stop saying things you don’t explain.”
Peach tilted her head. “I do explain. Just not in the order you like.”
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
That night, she refused to sleep on a cot. Instead, she dragged her blanket directly into the center aisle of the East dorm and laid there, right in the middle of the walking path.
“Why are you sleeping there?” Art asked, helping her carry her pillow.
“Best place to see all the edges.”
Everyone thought it was bizarre, but no one stopped her. Jate was relieved that he finally got to sleep alone, at least initially. Later in the dark, he rolled over and whispered to Art.
“What if she’s not just weird? What if something’s using her?”
Art was hesitant to answer. Mostly because earlier that day he’d watched a vine curl gently toward his hand, and he could feel what it wanted. Making sense was not as easy as it used to be.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
It didn’t take long before they all came to similar conclusions. Like it or not, this was the world now, and they all had to adjust to the shift. Some adapted more quickly than others.
Jate had been working outside in the garden all day. Doing manual labor was about the only thing that managed to distract him from over-thinking these days, so he got out there whenever the opportunity to do so presented itself. He had skipped lunch today and did a lot of heavy lifting. Feeling drained, Jate put down the bag of mulch that he had been carrying over his shoulder near the shed, and began walking up the path back to the orphanage. He was rubbing his sore shoulder when he heard the shed door open behind him. As Jate looked back and saw Peach approaching him carrying a bucket of paint, his left hand suddenly fell through the shoulder he had been massaging.
He stared down at his dangling shirt sleeve, horror struck. Jate realized that his entire right arm had vanished, and now his face was losing color. He looked like he was going to vomit.
As his arm popped back into solid existence, Jate collapsed backward onto the grass, dry-heaving and clutching his right bicep to make sure it was physically attached. He then felt something sticky in his right hand and looked up.
Peach was sitting on a paint bucket, smiling down at him. She was pressing a sticky, half-eaten rice cake into his newly solidified palm and folding his fingers over it.
“Consume the sugar,” she commanded with conviction. Jate did as he was told. Peach stayed with him until he calmed down a bit and then stood up. She grabbed the wire handle of the paint bucket, said “Gotta go!”, and walked off briskly towards the main building.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
In the common room, Mali was lying against Thanom on the floor as they watched an old black and white horror movie with some other kids. On screen, a distressed woman was looking out of her window. Suddenly, a hunched over, inhuman shadow rose up against the wall and crept towards her bedroom door. Its gaunt, taloned hand reached out and the silhouette of clawed fingers began to elongate… Mali couldn’t take it, so she screamed. Thanom, who was dozing off, got startled by Mali’s frightened outburst and jumped to his feet.
Just then, Peach appeared out of nowhere and poured paint all over the floorboards. The children scattered as Peach dropped the paint bucket and exclaimed,
“IT IS I! NOSFERATU!!!”
Footsteps clacked loudly from down the hall. When the Director turned the corner and shrieked at the mess, she immediately dragged Peach away by the ear, chastising her for being a weird vandal. Peach just smiled, blissfully ignoring the lecture.
Thanom and Mali watched them disappear down the hall.
“Um…”
Mali looked up at Thanom. “Why?” she said, confused. Her brother shrugged, resting his hand on her shoulder.
“Ouch!”
Mali reflexively jerked away from his touch. Thanom noticed then what he hadn’t in all of the hullabaloo that just occurred. His hands were hot, the air smelled like burning wood, and the floorboards they were just laying on were now covered in brown scorch marks.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Life continued.
One afternoon, Art was cleaning dishes in the kitchen when he heard a wheezing noise from outside of the window. He went to investigate and found a rotting potted plant that someone had discarded. He knelt next to it and pressed his bare palm against the parched soil. After a moment of feeling slightly foolish, an olive tendril shot out of the dirt, wrapping itself around Art’s wrist. It crawled up his forearm, sprouting three flowers, each the same deeply mesmerizing violet hue. Art instantly recognized that this color was the exact shade of Thanom’s eyes as they were back in the buried temple, and he knew somehow that this was the revitalized plant’s way of thanking him for his kindness. The fact that the plant and himself were apparently open books to each other felt more natural and right than anything ever had before. If this had been another person reading his mind with such uncanny precision, Art would be as thoroughly disturbed as anyone else would be—but this was a plant, and Art knew now what he had always known, what everyone knows without really having to learn it—plants just want to live, and if they can do so harmoniously? Better. Everything about people that contradicted this singular fact was completely arbitrary to a plant.
After that experience, Art found peace whenever he closed his eyes under a tree and heard the roots breathe.
Thanom once walked past a glass of water. Within seconds, it churned into a boil. The liquid superheated, boiling over the rim. The sudden temperature shift caused the glass to violently shatter. Shards shot outward and scalding mist splashed over the table. He just sighed and cleaned it up.
Mali held a glass marble directly over a cup of water, about a meter above it. She started tapping her foot and counting out loud. “One. Two. Three.” On one, she opened her fingers. The marble dropped about a half meter and then stopped exactly on two, suspended by absolutely nothing.
“Getting better!” Mali cheered, as she snatched the suspended marble out of the air and dropped it into her pocket.
