Photosynthesize

PHOTO: Painting by Eden McCoy ’24

By Amanda Archer ’23 for Spoke Literary and Art Magazine

Every day, the apothecary tended to their growing herbs. The garden was small, and tucked away behind their shop, which in itself was tucked away in the back of a winding street through the town. Sunlight reached through the rooftops of the surrounding buildings to the greens fewer hours in the day than they would have liked, but each and every time they sowed the seeds, the plants were persistent.

The customers were just as persistent. If their prescribed salve or draught wasn’t helping, they’d return again and again for more help, guided by the cobbled pathways under their feet and their desperation. Their desire to find an ailment that works. The apothecary did not tire of helping them. To tire of helping would be to make them lose their persistent nature, and see them slowly lose hope. If the plants in the garden were not tended each day, they would start to droop and yearn for what life had given them before.

If the customers happened to inquire of the harmful effects of their mixtures, they found no issue in explaining dosages of a toxic level. What follows the exchange is the choice of the buyer. The apothecary relives those moments night after night under the cold, blinking stars, and each time comes to the conclusion that those buyers simply possess the same desperation as any of the other customers.

Every so often, a customer would stop returning. With the loneliness of someone who had found a comfortable complacency in their work, the apothecary could only wonder which of two pathways their life had taken for them to no longer require a cure. These musings followed the menial tasks of the day: the counting of coins, watering of plants, stirring of Compounds.

The first time the apothecary heard a familiar name and funeral in the same sentence, they were out buying food at the market. They paused, a rock rooted in the flowing stream of people all around them. But they had lost wind of the conversation, and all the other talk crowded out their ears. They continued shopping, only diverging from their usual routine to buy an extra packet of lily seeds.

When the apothecary arrived home, they stepped straight into the garden. Now, with the shaded garden blanketed by a serene silence, broken only by the hum of wind, they recalled the customer’s face perfectly. There was a spare patch of soil, separated from the herb plants and bushes. There, the apothecary bent down and gingerly dug out a hole. The dust of dirt left long undisturbed floated up, coating their hands in a dry layer of earthy smell. With these hands, they took a single lily seed from the packet and dropped it into the hole. They pushed the loose dirt back over to create a mound over the seed and stepped back up from their bent position. The sun was setting. As the apothecary watered the soil, the shadows stretched across the ground until the only light remaining before the sun hid behind the rooftops was the light upon the newly planted plot.

And if this lily seed needed a little extra sunlight over all the other plants, that was just fine with the apothecary. They were happy enough to provide.

This lily seed grew across the weeks, until the apothecary heard news that warranted a second flower to be planted. The first finally bloomed. Business flowed as usual. A third was to be planted. And then another, and another. The years created a beautiful plot of lily flowers, stretching out to sway in the breeze and soak up the sunlight they required.