Touched By the Sun

A turtle 🐢 prompt

Photo by Maryellen Brady

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Pearl Laveau's hands were deep in rosemary when the world went quiet.

Silence of every bird on the Eastside deciding, all at once, that sound was no longer necessary.

Her fingers stilled in the cold January soil. The rosemary released its sharp green scent, memory and protection tangled together. On the balcony railing, the crow that visited her each morning cocked his head, fixed her with one obsidian eye, and left without his usual commentary on her gardening technique.

"So," Pearl said to the empty air. "Today, then."

The sun told her three nights ago, speaking in the language of warmth against her closed eyelids. She'd woken with the taste of copper on her tongue and knew, the old rhythm was returning. Energy was coming to remind the world that not everything could be measured, optimized, or controlled.

She'd prepared quietly. Ground hawthorne berries in her stone mortar until they released their heart-sweet smell. Hung bundles of mugwort to dry in her studio, where half-finished watercolors bloomed across her walls like gardens. Washed her hair with rainwater she'd collected in October, when the rains first returned.

Pearl stood, brushing soil from her knees, and watched Bellevue wake up.

From her balcony, she could see the panic. It started as a tremor in the air. Invisible but unmistakable. The same quality that preceded earthquakes, when the earth remembers it's alive. Car alarms triggered for no reason along 8th Street. Lights flickered in the glass towers downtown where thousands of people stared at screens that couldn't explain what their bodies already knew.

The world sped up. Time always did this when humans got scared. It contracted. Compressed. Frantic. Below her, a man sprinted to his Tesla, phone pressed to his ear. A woman yanked her poodle along the sidewalk, as if speed could outrun the invisible.

Pearl moved slower.

She went inside and brewed tea. Nettle and chamomile, honey from the Sammamish beekeeper who always asked too many questions but kept good bees. The kettle's whistle was a small sound. She poured the water with the deliberation of ritual, watching steam spiral upward in patterns that almost looked like words.

The taste of metal grew stronger. It coated the back of her throat. Sat heavy on her tongue. She recognized it. Solar wind, plasma, and the breath of the sun made manifest. Everyone else would taste it and think danger. They would rush to emergency rooms. Call the EPA. Blame the tech companies, or the government, or each other.

Pearl tasted it and remembered New Orleans summers, when heat rose from pavement in shimmers and her grandmother read the weather in the weight of the air. "The world speaks, cher," Grand-mère would say, hands busy with herbs on the back porch. "You just got to remember how to listen."

She'd been listening for forty-seven years now. Long enough to know that some storms were meant to arrive. Long enough to understand that her work wasn't to stop them, but to make space. To hold calm like a cup of water and let it overflow.

Her phone buzzed. Texts flooding in from the metaphysical shop where she sometimes taught watercolor meditation. From the farmers market collective. From Sarah, the software engineer she'd befriended at a plant swap, who was probably panicking in her Redmond condo right now.

What's happening? News says atmospheric anomaly. Should we evacuate?

Pearl—do you feel this? Something's wrong.

They're saying don't go outside.

Pearl typed slowly. One-fingered, because she'd never quite made peace with smartphones ~

Brew tea. Breathe deep. This will pass through, not over. You're safe.

She sent it to everyone and turned the phone face-down.

Outside, sirens blared. The whoop of emergency vehicles, the urgent bleat of the tornado warning system that had never been used for anything but tests. The sound of a city that forgotten how to simply wait.

Pearl gathered her supplies. The leather pouch her grandmother carried, soft with age and smoke. River stones from the Snoqualmie. Collected over years of patient searches. Dried lavender from her balcony garden. The small glass vial of olive oil she'd infused with calendula last summer, sitting it in sunlight for six weeks while she painted and the flowers gave up their gold.

She needed fresh flowers.

January on the Eastside wasn't generous with blooms. Pearl learned this land's secrets. She descended to the small courtyard garden behind her building, where management allowed her to tend the "landscape maintenance" in exchange for keeping it pretty. They didn't know she'd planted witch hazel three years ago, and coaxed winter jasmine to climb the south wall.

The witch hazel bloomed. Spidery yellow flowers that wafted of distant spring. She gathered them gently, thanking the tree with her hands against its bark. The winter jasmine offered up a handful of white stars. And there, beneath the rhododendrons where most people never looked, she found snowdrops pushing through, brave and small.

A neighbor burst out of the building, keys jangling. "Pearl! Did you hear? They're saying—some kind of radiation—we have to—"

She turned to him. Her calm enveloped their bubble. It radiated outward like the warmth from her grandmother's kitchen, like the weight of good soil, like the steadiness of roots going deep.

"Edwardo," she said. Just his name, but she put everything into it. Recognition. Presence. The assurance that he was real, and here, and held.

He stopped. Blinked. His breathing slowed.

"It's going to be alright," Pearl said. Not a promise, she never promised what she couldn't know. But a truth nonetheless. "Whatever's coming, it's already part of the pattern. We just forgot how to recognize it."

"But the news said—"

"The news is afraid. Fear is loud. There are other things to listen to." She touched his arm, brief and light. "Go inside. Make yourself comfortable. Put on music you love. This will pass."

She watched the tension leave his shoulders. Watched him nod, slowly, and turn back toward the building. He'd probably still check his phone every thirty seconds, but he'd do it sitting down. He'd remember to breathe.

This was her magic. Not just the herbs and the ritual, this calm she carried. Peace that spilled over. Kindness as contagion.

Pearl walked to the lake. Lake Washington spread gray and restless under a sky that looked normal but felt electric. She found her spot, a small curve of shore near Meydenbauer Bay where blackberry brambles kept most people away. She'd cleared a circle here over the years, tending it quietly, and the land accepted her stewardship.

The sun hidden behind clouds, but Pearl felt it. Felt it in the warmth that bloomed in her solar plexus, in the gold thread that connected her spine to the sky. It was speaking now. The words were frequency. Vibration. The fundamental hum beneath all things.

I am still here. I am always here. Remember.

She knelt on the cold earth and began.

Ground the flower petals between her palms, witch hazel and jasmine, snowdrop and the dried lavender she'd brought. They released their essences into the January air. Hope, purity, protection, peace. She mixed them with the calendula oil until her hands were slick and golden. Until the scent rose like prayer.

With oil-slicked fingers, she wrote on smooth stones. She wrote in the language of spirals that meant welcome, circles that meant safety, lines that flowed like water, like breath, like the ever-turning wheel of seasons.

She placed each stone with intention around her circle. North, south, east, west. The directions her grandmother taught her.

Above, the sky began to shimmer.

While the world spun faster ~ sirens, panic, the frantic scroll of social media…her circle became still. A pocket of time, ancient time, the time that trees and stones knew.

The plasma storm was invisible to human eyes. It moved like aurora, like oil on water, like the shimmer above summer roads.

It pounded the earth in waves.

Pearl breathed in. Breathed out. Let the storm find her circle.

And welcomed it.

With the simple offering of calm, of presence, of a body that remembered how to be still while everything else moved. She was a standing stone. A deep well. A door left open.

The storm touched her circle and recognized itself.

This was the secret her grandmother knew. Her grandmother's grandmother had known, that every woman in her line had carried like a seed: some things couldn't be fought. They could only be witnessed. Held. Given room to be what they were without resistance.

The plasma wind moved through her circle like a breath. A sigh of relief. Something wild remembering it had permission to exist.

Around the city, people argued and blamed. Time sped up. Fear multiplied. But here, in one small circle by the lake, the storm passed through gentle as love. As recognition. As the universe's old rhythm, finally coming home.

Pearl stayed until it was finished. Until the air settled. Until the first bird—her crow, she thought—ventured a tentative note into the quiet.

Then she gathered her stones, pocketed them warm, and walked home through a city that didn't know it had been held.

The sun broke through the clouds just as she reached her building. It touched her face, warm and golden, and Pearl smiled.

"You're welcome," she whispered.

And the light, if you knew how to listen, whispered back ~ Thank you for remembering

For my turtle friends

Edward.Marlo.Ruiz

Rachel Tribble