I wasn’t quite finished with the story I was telling by the time 2025 ended and so decided to continue it until it reached an ending point. Then I will start a new one. Besides, I kind of want to see where Penelope ends up. And so we have…
Day 211: As she went to the kitchen to get some breakfast she wondered if a greenhouse attack was much better than a shove into the street.
As she went to the kitchen to get some breakfast she wondered if a greenhouse attack was much better than a shove into the street. “Neither is very good,” she decided.
Penelope looked over the offerings in the kitchen and tried to figure out what would be the least complicated to make. As the English muffins were already pre sliced she decided it would work. She separated the halves and put them in the toaster. As the toaster worked to brown and crisp she took out the butter and marmalade. The butter was on a dish on the counter and already softened enough to spread easily. Given the orang peel strings in the marmalade she decided a spook would work better.
Getting the marmalade jar open was the hardest part of the operation. ‘Maybe I don’t need marmalade,’ she thought when it wasn’t turning. She frowned. “I wat marmalade,” she decided. “And I am not going to be defeated by a sticky jar lid.”
She sad down on one of the chairs and clamped the jar between her knees while twisting the lid with her hand. It turned and she lifted the removed lid waving it around like a flag.
“Victory!” she said. Penelope then took the marmalade and it’s jar back to the kitchen. The toaster finished it’s work and Penelope soon had the browned muffin dressed with her toppings of choice. She place them on a plate, put everything back in it’s place and settled herself at the breakfast bar. As she ate breakfast she thought through her dreams.
“More like someone else’s memories,” she thought. She remembered the color coating and wondered if the green lights were all Emily and the other colors memories submitted by someone else or if they were divided by topic with each topic getting a different color. She frowned. “Classification usually isn’t a part of my dreams.”
Thinking about it, Penelope didn’t feel like there were dreams instead she felt that if she were able to look at her family tree there would be an Emily listed in a time period that featured wide skirts and corsets. “Probably ought to get a book on fashion history if this keeps happening.”
Given that all of the Emily scenes she witnessed had to do with healing and moving from plants to people she had no answer to the person versus topic idea. “It could just be a dream brought on by my wanting to heal faster,” she thought.
Penelope ate her toast. Up on the rooftop she knew there were plants. Some, she was fairly certain were poisonous. Others she couldn’t name. Not knowing was why she planned to get plants and seeds she knew weren’t poisonous to practice with. “I suppose I could spend some time identifying all the plants and seeing if any of them are non toxic. Then if there is one I can practice with that.”
The idea of testing out the magic she watched in her dreams to see if it was real or just a fantasy had a great deal of appeal. “And I know there are several plant identification books in the library.”
She finished up her breakfast and took the plate to the sink. Both it and her hand were sticky from the marmalade. No matter how careful she was Penelope had never managed to eat marmalade on anything without her hands becoming sticky. She washed the dish and utensils and then swashed all the sticky residue from her hands. As she was drying them, Penelope heard the doorbell ring downstairs.
Ten til Midnight 