Page 84 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
Gloria filled her cup without asking. “You look like someone who touched the wrong end of a lightning strike.”
“I feel like I got scrambled by a storm god,” Nora muttered, wrapping her hands around the mug.
“Sounds about right.”
They sat in that kind of silence that belonged to people who’d seen strange things and decided not to ask too many questions about them.
Finally, Nora said, “She ever talk to you? My grandmother. About… any of this?”
Gloria nodded, slowly. “Not directly. But she knew something. Left breadcrumbs.”
Nora hesitated. “I don’t really remember her. I was just a kid when she passed. It was always just me and Pops after that.”
Gloria reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a weathered envelope, folded flat and sealed with a strip of red tape.
“She gave me this ages ago. Didn’t say when to give it to you. Just that I’d know.”
Nora took it. The paper crackled under her fingers.
Inside was one page. Handmade, uneven. A few lines in faded ink.
My dear Nora,
I stayed. I listened. But I never crossed.
The desert doesn’t demand obedience. It asks for becoming.
I couldn’t give it that. But I think you can.
Three things bind a Bloom to the land:
A touch freely given.
An offering made without knowing the cost.
A vow spoken with nothing but the heart behind it.
You’ll know when it’s time.
He will too.
And the desert will bloom again.
Nora blinked away the tears forming in her eyes. “Is this… like a ritual?”
“Instructions. Or maybe a warning,” Gloria said. “She said it’d make sense when the time came.”
Nora traced the words on the page with her finger. “Why me?”
Gloria stirred her coffee. “You stayed. You dreamed. You walked into the hollow and didn’t flinch. Most people leave before the dust settles.”
Nora ran her fingers over the page again.
“What happens if I do it?”
“I don’t know,” Gloria said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe the desert swallows you whole. Maybe you come back shining.”
“That’s comforting.”
