At the moment, Usheniko was cleaning up her table and her bookshelf. This morning, when she saw the dust bunnies and lint all over the place, she shuddered. She wanted to get it over with, and if she were to leave it for a long time, then the dust would infest the place and might deter a lot of customers.

As Usheniko hummed to herself, she swept the woodwork with a feather duster. She brushed the crystal ball and the maroon carpet, then she transitioned to the top of the bookshelf. The height was out of her reach. “Goodness me, I can’t go on my toes without breaking my bones! I am old, haha!” Usheniko turned to her daughter, who was sitting near the drapes. Azukunika stared daggers at an album book. “Sweetie, can you clean this up for me please? I know you’re bored and all, so come here.”

Azukunika clicked the roof of her mouth. “I’m busy looking at this.”

“What? You have all the time in the world to do that. Now help me, or else I won’t give you those scrumptious muffins that you have been waiting for!”

The daughter shook her head and crossed her legs. The sight of that struck a nerve in Usheniko.

The woman grabbed a chair from the table and brought it to the bookshelf. Standing on it, she reached the top. “You know Azukunika, you have been rather meek lately. Is there something the matter? Is it about your time in prison? I know that it’s a brutal place to be, since it is situated in an isolated place and all. I heard that there is a lot of gang members and convicted murderers there. I am scared that you can’t even handle them! But you can tell me, right?”

“No thanks,” Azukunika said, she glared the moment she turned a page in the book. “I don’t need you to intrude.”

“Aww shucks, don’t be like that.” Usheniko wiped the last of the dust on the bookshelf. All the dust bunnies disappeared for now, and the woman broke into sweat and sighed. She carried herself down and hopped to the kitchen area, where she had made some muffins. She placed them on a tray, presenting it to Azukunika. The latter shooed it with her hands.

“I am not hungry right now,” the daughter said.

Usheniko dropped her jaws. “Eh?! You haven’t ate in a while! Here, just eat it all!”

“With those eye-like almonds? No thanks.”

“Ouch!” Usheniko clutched her chest. “My heart hurts, now I am dying from the lack of interest not just from the girls, but from you too! Why must it be this way?”

Azukunika scoffed, she then stood up and latched her hands onto the drapes. Looking outside, the breeze cooled her face. Usheniko wanted to ask more about her daughter’s current mood, but she couldn’t quite wrap her tongue on how to do so. Azukunika returned here too suddenly, so it must be that it overwhelmed her to the point of exhaustion.

The mother looked at the photo album, and the first page of it gushed her heart. It contained pictures when Azukunika was only an infant, and most of them had her father in it, who was long dead from a disease. Since Usheniko settled down in the village, she recovered all her pictures from a treasure chest that was underneath the grounds of the tent, as she buried it about three years ago. She took pictures of Azukunika and herself almost everyday, and at one instance, the album became a burden to carry even with two hands. Those images in the book, they were created at the time where the villagers discovered sepia-colored cameras somewhere in the frontiers, and they used it as often as they think they should. Then all the cameras died from technical difficulties; the villagers were lost on how to fix that newfangled technology, so they destroyed them instead. They remained unknown to most people today.

“Wow, I remember this time, when you were seven!” Usheniko said, she giggled to herself. “You used to play in the mud a lot, and one day, you dirtied your doll and cried. I couldn’t clean it up, much to your frustration. Although I bought you a new one, you didn’t like it because the cottons were so hard and rough! And look at this, when you graduated high school in robes! You were so stunning, and you still are!”

Usheniko flipped through the book, and along the way, she saw a bunch of scratch marks. “Whoa, what happens here?” She assumed that it might have been an animal that burrowed itself in the book one night, but she brushed it off and continued perusing. Time passed by, and Usheniko occupied herself with this more than the duty to clean up her home. Her bosom thrilled and memories came here and there; she felt the urge to turn back the clock and live those good days again, when she spent with Azukunika a lot of happiness. Now it was somewhat better for the mother as Azukunika was here, and maybe some time later, she could share again the experiences with her.

But that was only wishful thinking. Upon Usheniko’s return to the village a while back, she heard from the Holy Army that her daughter was arrested and sentenced in the charges of treason and attempted murder. She couldn’t believe it at all that her daughter would do such crimes, and at first tried to coerce the High Order into letting her free. But the rigidity and immobility of the administration to even consider Azukunika a ticket to freedom convinced Usheniko that her kid could be stuck in prison for decades. She could only pray that they’d release her in no time.

Azukunika scraped her own nails and chuckled. Her eyes slowly dulled in color, she uttered nothing but grunts. Without informing Usheniko, she walked out of the tent. Her footsteps crunched the ground so loud that Usheniko noticed her right away and grabbed her arms.

“Hey! Where are you going? I don’t mean to bother you, but please, don’t be so bashful my dear.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Come on! Don’t be so cold towards me! I bet the prison is becoming a bad influence on you, right? I hope you get better from whatever you are dealing with! And come back here, I haven’t done talking to you yet!”

Shrugging, the daughter glared at Usheniko. There was something in her expression that rattled the woman for a bit, but the root of it she couldn’t figure out what it was. Perhaps Azukunika experienced an incident among her inmates that might lengthen her sentence. It didn’t add much to this situation though. The girl being so unusual in her demeanor got Usheniko scratching her head and wondering, it was as though her daughter became invisible in her feelings, out of what Usheniko would expect from her.

Azukunika brushed her hair. She turned to the drapes. “I’m going to the temple. I need to handle important stuff for the High Order.”

“Eh?” Usheniko tilted her head. “Now you are going there? You should have done so when I was attending Sunday service! Also, it couldn’t be that the reason you came back is to work for them.”

“I have to. They were the one who summoned me here in the first place.”

“That’s odd. What are they doing with the likes of you-”

Azukunika snarled, her eyes welled in tears. Usheniko came up to the young girl and tried to hug her, but the latter pushed her away.

“Don’t cry my dear,” Usheniko said. “You can tell me what’s wrong.”

“I am not crying.” Azukunika grimaced. She then departed from the tent. She walked far to the intersection between the food stand area and the markets, and disappeared from Usheniko’s sight. The woman could barely believe that such a girl like her could act like this nowadays. She now inferred, at least guessed, that Azukunika might be going through some changes in her mind and body, like she was still stuck in puberty. But overall it came to Usheniko that her daughter was finally a grown-up, something that the mother should at least appreciate.

“Oh well. She’s twenty-four now, so she knows what to do in her time. I can’t stop her. I am getting old, if one would call forty-five an old age.” Usheniko walked back to the kitchen and heated the stove. “I got to get back to this. Neha needs her lunch, and I must prep it for her! So today I will make a delectable, all-delicious fried rice with deep-fried fish!”

Thus she cooked. She gathered the ingredients from the pantry and the boxes, and conjured a smile. The days when she first met Neha and Sachen, it couldn’t get any funnier; she let out a laugh. Way before their meeting, Usheniko stayed with her family in a mansion, the place that once occupied the same spot where the tent was right now. She used to roam around the markets and eat lavish food at the restaurants with allowance from her parents, and had enough money to do this every week since her family was wealthy in the occult and consulting business. It was one year ago, that after she left a noodle joint, she found a pair of kids playing around near the mansion that by then was demolished. Sachen got her head stuck in a cage full of sparrows, and the birds pecked Sachen’s face so much that it looked like the rascal developed chickenpox. Neha called for help, but some people either dismissed it as a theater performance or they didn’t want to help at all. Immediately, Usheniko pulled Sachen’s head out of the cage, and it left the latter in sores. Neha thanked the woman for helping and offered to give some money as compensation. With a smirk, Usheniko pointed to a small tent that was next to the mansion ruins. In return for her help, Usheniko wanted them to come to a psychic session, where she could consult them of their fortunes for the rest of the year.

In the first session, Usheniko predicted that Neha would find a pair of gold coins in her pockets. For Sachen, she would see bird dropping on her windows. Both of them came true, and the juveniles laughed and shivered in awe of this; they thought Usheniko was a fluke. So they attended a session again and again, only to discover that all their fortunes were true again. However, they did not know this simple trick: Usheniko described the most mundane, the most common things in everyday occurrences. Never did she resort to making fortunes that were outstanding or out of reality.

Usheniko acquainted herself with them. Over the days that the girls visited her, they became enthusiastic from their consultations, even when they were suspicious about some of her results. They grew close to Usheniko, and they turned from acquaintances to good friends. Usheniko herself cherished her time with them, and hopefully, she’d stay by their sides forever.

After the woman was done making the food, she closed it in a container and left it by the counter. Her muscles throbbing, she dropped her body onto a cot that was next to her bookshelf. She wondered if Azukunika was going to come back early; as of recent, she had been coming home in the dead of night while Usheniko slept.

When Usheniko replayed in her head her first encounter with Neha and Sachen, she giggled.

“That’s where I made their nicknames, little sparrows.” Usheniko then napped. She let out drool from her mouth.