The Heartless

Over time, Petra grew antsy. A peaceful, quiet life of complacency—no matter how appealing from the start—was foreign to her, having been far out of reach her entire life. I felt no differently; the thought of all the people we had left behind weighed heavily on my mind, and I knew it was on hers too. We’d been part of a community that had been scattered to the wind; most of our friends and neighbors were still out there, somewhere, waiting for some kind of answer. There was a part of me that wanted desperately to stay still, to settle permanently in Verdigris and pretend as though the past had never happened. But there was another part of me that didn’t even know how.

It was thoughts like these that found me in the meadow next to Frida’s house at dawn one crystal-clear morning as the spring began to melt into summer, stringing together a crown of wildflowers to occupy my hands. I recognized Basil’s approach behind me by the sound of his slightly uneven footsteps rustling through the grass before he came to a stop beside me.

“You’re up early,” he commented.

“I was having trouble sleeping,” I replied, joining the two ends of the chain together. “Here, bend down.”

Basil obliged, bending at the hip, and I placed my finished crown on top of his head. Crowning the king, I thought to myself wistfully. He reached up and turned it over in his hands, examining my work.

“You have steadier hands than I remember,” he noted. Then he smirked. “But you still aren’t very good.”

I feigned offense. “That’s how you treat my gift?”

Basil replaced the crown on his head and dropped down to the grass beside me.

After a few moments, I inquired, “Basil, can I ask you something a little bit intense?”

“Of course.” Basil began plucking wildflowers from the space around him.

“Why did I ever want to feel human?”

“What do you mean?”

I hesitated, unsure how to fathom the whirlwind in my chest into something intelligible. Eventually, I settled on, “Well, if being human is so ideal then why are we so terrible? Why do humans spread hate and lies and kill or displace so many innocent people? People have died by my hands, both directly and indirectly, and if that’s what makes me not so different from every other human then maybe I don’t want to be human at all. Maybe I just want to float aimlessly through some void somewhere and never see or be seen by anyone ever again. I spent so many years wishing I could be human instead of a monster, only to realize they were the same thing.”

Ever wise beyond his years and mine, Basil set aside his half-finished creation and reasoned, “The question is not whether humans are good or bad, but rather how to reconcile so much kindness and goodwill with so much evil. The truth is each of us has the capacity for good and bad, and having done things you regret does not make you deplorable or beyond redemption. It just makes you human. And maybe it’s like you said and being human is the most monstrous thing you can be, but I like to think it’s also the most beautiful.”

“You say that so easily,” I mused. For someone who has experienced such violence, I did not add, but Basil seemed to understand, nonetheless.

He chuckled and returned to his steady and practiced weaving.

“Over time, life puts things into perspective.”

“What do you say of love, then?”

“Love has very little to do with it, at least not in the sense you’re talking about. Heart or no heart, there’s blood rushing through your veins, isn’t there? You’re a whole person, Ace. You’re alive. That’s really all there is to it.”

“It doesn’t feel that simple,” I muttered.

Basil shrugged. “I never said it was simple.”

A few minutes passed in companionable silence as the sun started to climb over the tree line and the commune began to buzz with activity, signaling the start of a brand new spring morning.

“I think Petra and I are going to go back soon,” I said eventually. “We finished the fence.”

Basil hummed. “I thought you might say that.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” I asked hopefully.

Basil smiled sadly, fixing his gaze somewhere—or some time—beyond the horizon.

“Ace, I’m tired. I fought with all I could at the age of ten. Please understand that I can never go back to that place again. I’m just… tired.”

“I understand,” I whispered, trying to hide my disappointment, though I’d anticipated his answer.

“Besides,” Basil sat up a little straighter, “the people here need me, that’s my role in this fight. But I’ll still be here whenever you come back, and that’s a promise.”

I smiled. “You’d better keep that promise,” I warned.

The flower crown that Basil had been weaving landed on the top of my head. I turned in surprise to see a sunny grin plastered across his face, an older, wiser reflection of himself from all those many years ago.

“I always keep my promises, don’t I?” he beamed. “I am a man of my word.”