Cockerelles & Posies

"A fitting name for a gardener if that's your dream."

"That's what posies do, right?"

"Not all of them."

I notice her dress has a small tear in its hem and some stains here and there on the fabric, and my heart softens at her predicament.

"Cards getting in the way of your dreams then. Funny how something so small can stand between you and what you really want in life. I imagine you're as overwhelmed as I am with all of this adulthood we're asked to face up to on our first day."

Neea sweeps her blond hair over a shoulder so it's not between us.

I skooch away from her a bit and turn to face her to keep my intentions clear.

"I try to be like my mother," I say. "It's as though she knows what's coming in the distance and can use it to motivate her onwards. You don't have to be a mother if you don't want to. There are all kinds of other things posies can do."

Neea gives me a look that says I don't seem to understand her dilemma at all.

"What?" I ask.

"Well, you've got a pendant around your neck. It's easy for you."

I touch the symbol on my choker that all cockerelles wear to save posies from confusion.

"You've got posies throwing their bills at you in hopes of becoming cockerelle," she continues. "And there are girls like me with cosmetic dreams best filled by purchasing their seed at the source, all in hopes of meeting a planter who likes what I'm doing with myself."

"Yes, I understand what you want. But you can't find it sitting here on this bench staring into the distance. You have to get out there and meet people. Life isn't all one big d-bill-driven ceremony. You need the support of those who share your ambition. At least that's how it works in my family. When one of us expresses our deepest intention, the others come together to help see it through."

"My family wishes I'd put down the cards," she admits. "They tend to see my problems long before I do."

"Well, you must draw closer to them and respect their advice if that's the case. And get away from those people who keep inviting you to their games. There's a much bigger game out here to play, and the stakes are much higher. It's your future on the table. Isn't that enough to fill your need for risk taking?"

"I hadn't really thought of it that way. I suppose I'm being impatient. I just worry this habit of mine will bleed into my mothering. Can't have my children starving because I can't win a game of poker."

"You must abandon your cards then and embrace the opportunity ahead of you. You've got a whole life to live. Think of all the charms you could put on your body to make you whatever you wanted to be. You're already a very attractive posy. I think you will make a beautiful mother. I think all you need is a little bit of encouragement. What are you really worried about in all of this?"

Neea clasps her hands to her forearms.

"To be honest, I've never sucked a root before," she says.

I do my best not to giggle, but soon we're both snickering like school children.

"No, no. That's nothing to be ashamed of," I say. "My mother raised my sisters and me to keep our special parts to ourselves until we were old enough to make good decisions too. I didn't run around poking my root into my posy friends when I was growing up. Mothers in my neighborhood wanted their girls grown independent and self-assured."

"Naturally," says Neea.

"Right. You can't have that when some cockerelle is jamming their piece of poplar into your flowery parts when your too green. It's the law anyway, you know. It makes a girl's life harder when she shows up at Fission already popped and ready to go. Gets your head all messed up, and you start to think things you wouldn't have thought otherwise."

Neea's smile says she understand my meaning perfectly.

"Have you ever played with your petals?" I ask her.

She blushes a bright red.

"Why?"

I reposition myself where I sit once again, this time like I'm an old relative trying to give her a bit of wisdom from my own drawer of experiences.

"I've pulled my own root many times."

Neea puts a hand over her mouth to keep whatever laughter is in there from getting out.

I shush us both softly.

"No, really, I have," I say. "I'm quite good at it too, so I know what I like."

"Well, how does that help me?" she asks, huddling in close as if I'm about to divulge the meaning of life or something.

"I can tell you what a cockerelle likes. I can describe it."

Neea's eyes go to my crotch, and I know she's worried I might pull it out to demonstrate my technique.

"No, we won't do that, Neea," I say. "We'll keep it purely scholastic. It's not like you're going to crash your car and die the first time you try and please a cockerelle. There are millions and millions of planters out there looking for a girl just like you. And they will appreciate the fact that you've kept yourself pure."

"Planters like their posies pure?"

"I would definitely play the innocent card as you have with me. You just need to find a cockerelle with family in their eyes. How about if I show you by playing you?"

I recline into a pose that says I'm offering if someone's buying. I do it right, leaning back, my arm laid casually along the top of the bench seat, the fingers of my other hand tracing little patterns on my thigh distractedly. I make my eyes a little sleepy too. It helps sell the look.

"I'll pretend I'm a posy, and you pretend you're a cockerelle," I say.

This doesn't fly with her at all by the look in her eyes.

I put my finger to my lips and take off my cockerelle pendant, holding it out so she can touch it.

"See, now look at me. Without the pendant around my neck, you would think I was just another posy."

"Yes," she says, "but you can't do that, can you? Isn't it illegal?"

I pat my cheeks softly as if I'm afraid I've been caught red-handed.

"Only if you were to wear it. A small fine for the embarrassment you cause. But that's all. It's an idiotic thing we wear to divide the sexes. Look at me, I've got a pecker in my panties and you can't even tell."

"Right, because you're a cockerelle with or without the charm."

"Yes, of course," I say, my eyes rolling at her slavery to convention. "It's a secret I'll tell you, but the cockerelle pendant is the only charm in Heartseed that doesn't change anything about you. It's more like the crown on my head. It signifies what I am."

She giggles.

"Sorry, I was just thinking maybe if I put it on, I might become a cockerelle too."

I am quick to correct her.

"No, it's really just a piece of regular jewelry, not a charm. It doesn't affect your body or your mind or anything like that."

She takes the pendant from me and puts it on her neck. She touches her crotch.

"No root."

"Besides, you don't want to be a cockerelle," I say taking the pendant and stuffing it in my purse. "You have to pay a professor, and study, and wear your root out trying to raise enough d-bills to pay your way through. It can really tap you out."

"You make it sound as if production is a chore for your body. My grandmother told me she could drown a pair of posies in a morning when she first started out."

I find myself agreeing with her.

"The mind does require the right state to achieve such feats. The training of a gymnast helps. That's why I spend so much time running now that I think of it. If it weren't for the economics of our society directing our passions toward constructive ends, I'd say our people would be swimming in an ocean of the stuff. Gets the mind thinking it isn't the carrot that drives the mule but the cart the beast is pulling."

Neea sighs at my observation.

"The higher sciences turned seed into gold is how it sounds," she laments.

"I try not to peer too deeply into the minds of whatever gods created our world. I just look for opportunities to test their laws. That's what gives my life meaning."

"I suppose that's what risk taking is really all about, isn't it?"

"Yes. It's our attempt to discover if consequences are truly bound to our actions, or if luck is a thing at all."

Neea scratches her chin thoughtfully.

"So, I'll just direct my weakness for gambling into a strength as I use it to make my future."

"Sounds insane, but it isn't if you understand the nature of how our world works," I say. "If you want something you must be willing to risk something. You just need to be confident what you lose is worth what you're hoping to acquire. And of course, don't try and take short cuts like gambling if you want your life to have any meaning. Invest your efforts in yourself and the people who know you best and are willing to help you find your way."

Neea hops up from her seat and charges off with a new spirit in her step. And I decide that I too will apply this philosophy to my life. I will take my own medicine.

#5

A warm breeze blows across the veranda making an introduction for the lovely piece of timber who comes sauntering over to me. She's an ebony-haired, junior-year damsel with all the dressings of a stalwart businesswoman come to ascertain my features.

"Well, aren't you a lovely young posy," she says. "Have any d-bills you'd like to pass on to an up and coming executive heiress?"

It hits me right away that the cockerelle has her wires crossed because I'm not wearing my pendant. Dressed as I am, this proud procreator sees my stockings and skirt just as the leather-bound money changer did earlier.

"You think so?" I ask.

"Lovely, yes. A princess. But what's your name?"

I look at her like I am measuring her up now. It's funny. She looks like a taller version of my sister Becka if sis were to lose her fascination for the natural sciences.

"Name's Margot," I say, batting my eyes at her. I can't help myself. The woman is in fact gorgeous to behold. If she'd been a posy, I would have offered her my seed just the same. "You look very smart in that outfit."

"You can call me Ms. Pendry," she says. "I'm a little wound up this morning. Then I see something as cute as you, and I say, 'Here's where I belong.'"

A funny thing happens then. My stomach begins to flutter. I suppose it's from all the head-wondering I've been doing that morning, but I'm not compelled yet to expose the fact that I have a cockerelle pendant in my purse. I was curious, and it was a good kind of curious.

"Ms. Pendry, you are the very essence of what I find beautiful and comforting," I answer her little flirt with my own innocent fun. "If I could spend the rest of my life at your beck and call, I would never dream of anything else. You have all the sophistication of a stern warden sent to protect me from whatever hardship life may send my way."

"You see me as some kind of keeper?" she asks, stepping in front of me so that I may admire her confidence more closely. "I believe you're confused. You seem to believe I'm here to tell you what to do."

"I would say your first name was probably glorious or something along those lines. It is the feeling I get in my heart looking at you."

Ms. Pendry is happy with my ascertainment of her.

"Glory Pendry," she says, offering me her hand. "Your youthful beauty drew me here, and I relented so I could welcome you on your first day."

I take her hand as a posy would with the back of my fingers facing her so she can kiss them. It was the angle of her advance that caused me to position them that way, yet it was seeing her gentle eyes that made my tummy flutter. Thank the gods my root is relatively easy to conceal. Otherwise, there might be an embarrassing moment for me at this point, and I would still be the same cockerelle girl to this very day.

Cockerelles were bred in my family to have a small root so as not to hurt the posies, my mother told me after some of the other girls showed me theirs at summer camp when I was eight. Theirs were grander because their parents came from a line of women who thought it a scepter meant for rule. Mother brought me up to believe that it was the posy who was more fragile. She needed to be treated like porcelain and cared for like a babe. And my root was perfectly sized for making a posy feel loved while still delivering the stimulation a girl needed to make it through her day.

"Such kind thoughts," I tell Ms. Pendry. "Sometimes I do enjoy being treated like a piece of glass."

"I like to make a posy's first day at Fission something she can display forever among the curios in her heart."

Her hold on me is so careful, her lips so gentle, her smile so affirming. I see my game as that of a revolutionary.

My hand moves to my pocketbook.

"After," she whispers, touching my chin.

My heart is beating. Must I really go through with this to prove myself? What if someone who knows me walks in on us?

"Are you okay?" Ms. Pendry asks me.

I take my own dare and slide out to the edge of my seat thinking my pose contradicts that image of Fission's likeness on the cliff face.

#6

"I know how they work," I say, taking the gift. "I was raised in a family of cockerelles."

Her gift comes in the form of a wide neckband fashioned out of velvety-green fabric that matches my attire. Won't that make a statement? I think to myself.

"So, you get the idea how this charms works," she says, helping me fasten it on. "You should keep it to remember your first day and your first time."

The collar makes me feel like I'm wearing a turtleneck without the shell.

"It will help with the flavor of it," she says. "Not the root, but the seed. I hear too many new girls who think the stuff is a little bitter or tart."

I speak up then ready to share my street-smart wisdom from back in the day growing up with fairy tales about the things of sex.

"They say you get used to it. Like coffee or beer."

Ms. Pendry opens the fly of her trousers.

"It's best taken like medicine," she says. "It's hard for a posy to know the heart of a cockerelle. It's like getting used to cough syrup, especially if the cockerelle fancies drinking a lot of coffee and beer and other such things that add to its bitterness. But we climbers have to climb. We need our coffee in the morning and our beer in the evening. This collar will help you start to cope with the taste, but in another way, they say."

"How's that?" I ask.

Ms. Pendry covers her smile with one hand and lightly teases the hair around my crown with the other.

"I hear the collar makes the seed taste even more bitter the more you use it. You know how charms are with their mysterious powers and effects."

"Yes, there is a give and take is what I learned in school."

"Right, then. The collar won't add weight to you anywhere or nip or tuck or any of that. It's more like getting used to drinking high-test whiskey after a number of years. It burns your nose and throat going down right away. Then it fills your belly with bubbly warm heat that makes you wonder if you're going to feel better or vomit suddenly. But then it comes through as usual, thankfully, and ends with that increased inebriation that makes you feel wonderful inside and want another drink."

"Really?" I ask. "That a charm could make a posy feel such things inside herself from a swig of seed."

It dawns on me that my sister Josie was given such a trinket along the way that allowed her to press bravely on as she strove to acquire her transformation into the wooden class of society.

"It will alter the way your mind and body perceive the transaction," she says. "In fact, repetition while wearing it strengthens the mood, if you know what I mean."

I wanted to laugh outright then and there, but I was afraid I might frighten off my lady suitor. This was too strange to keep locked away in my imagination for another moment. I needed right away to see what it was this Ms. Pendry was going on about. Truth is I do like the effect of whiskey. At least until that moment the alcohol comes back to inform you that your playtime has come at a cost. Then you're in the toilet barfing your brains out and wishing for the apocalypse as you swear to the gods and yourself that you will never touch the stuff again.

"A posy can get drunk from seed?" I say with all the doubt I can muster.

"It's not a sloppy drunk, Miss. Though you could drink quite a lot to pull off that kind of end, I suppose. But most importantly, it will give you a boost of confidence as you make your way through the halls of Fission looking for whatever it is your posy heart desires. I've given many of them away since my last promotion, and they keep wearing them for years."

My jaw drops open as her root emerges from her pants to bob in front of me like a sausage getting itself firmly stuffed from within. Her instrument is quite the thing to admire. It's like a finely built airplane with its pink head curved and shaped ever so precisely from the nose of the craft down its long, smooth body. Still, my jaw hasn't dropped at seeing it as much as it has the idea she's put in my mind.

"Posies keep it going for years?" I gasp with urgent disbelief.

"No, they take it off and it breaks the spell," she says. "That would be self-destructive behavior otherwise. It's just that most charms are put aside once the desired effect has been reached. You want a different skin tone or eye color? You put in the nose ring, or whatever charm it is, and you pay the hickory for its seed. But when you're satisfied with the results, you put the thing in your jewelry case and leave it there until you get the urge to try a different color.

"My experience is that posies tend to keep this particular charm around for use even after they find their steady oak. It's a matter of playtime fun and things like that. Cockerelles don't use them to subject posies to their sexual appetite. No, it's more of a nice thing to wear to remind yourself how much you love the person you've chosen to be with. That warm feeling sticks with you throughout the day as you await your next meeting together for pleasure time."

"Kind of like a medication for the lovemaking," I say.

"Yes, it can be used that way, to build yourself up during the week for a fun evening on the weekend driven with a more intense need than usual. It can quiet the inhibitions quite effectively in its own way."

"And without all of the tripping and throwing up and saying things that you wish you hadn't said once you take the collar off."

"Well, it can be abused, so keep that in mind. You don't want to make an ass out of yourself. And you must remember that it is the posy's natural ability to absorb the seed she imbibes, and very quickly, that stops digestion from going in the opposite direction it was intended to go. So, drink responsibly is the word, or you might end up embarrassed."

The tip of her business moves closer to my face as she seeks to earn her d-bill.

I could just give a laugh and warn this gorgeous climber that she has mistaken me for a posy. But then out of the corner of my eye, I see that Neea girl coming back, and I get confused. How embarrassing will it be for the well-suited woman in front of me if I expose my ruse in front of another posy? And Neea is aware I'm only playing a game. How will that follow me should I run into her again down the road someday? I should feign embarrassment and resist to allow poor Ms. Pendry the opportunity to walk away with her pride intact.

It happens so fast from there, though it does feel natural once the rhythm begins.

I recall an image of myself rolled over on the bathroom floor with my root dangling down above my mouth. I wanted to have a taste of seed to see if it was as awful as it was made it out to be. I couldn't reach it, of course, but I had the thought of being a posy myself and pleasing a cockerelle so I could invest her seed in some change to my body.

A bit of drool slips out around the process happening in my mouth and runs down my cheek. I wipe it off and dry my hand on my bare leg.