Pass the Penny Story Challenge 10.

Jenny wanted to wrap herself in the bearskin rug on the cabin floor and take refuge in the forest. She didn’t want to kill anybody, but her daughter came first. That’s the way she played it.

Jenny’s hands were slick on the steering wheel. She drove to the abandoned ranger station twenty- two miles past Oliver’s house. Leaving Morningside and that part of her life behind. Blood on her hands. Amos dead. Marindina dead. Double agent. He’d been working for the right-wing cartel and Jack Seville. The words clung to her like suffocating wet leaves.

She could still taste Gerry’s print shop on her clothes: ink, solvent, the metallic tang of cut paper. But beneath that, something else. A memory. The acrid bitterness of Nightrot.

It was the Nightrot century, Amos had said. The toxin could increase people’s lives by fifty or a hundred years or more. Jack Seville was living proof it worked.  If they could just get the money to develop it, cancer was also a goner. Degenerative neurological diseases blown away.

Gerry had come up with the counterfeiting idea to fund it. Old maps that showed where the sacred bark had been produced in previous centuries by mystics and seers. He’d been sloppy with the first set of plates. Taking the product. Such was the hallucinogenic properties of Nightrot when injected, he thought he could fly.  

Wrong.

‘I love you Jenny,’ was his epitaph. Gurning as his heart slowed to a lover’s crawl. Then a wet dreamy smile that was worth waiting for.

His breath smelled of sweet almonds after she’d made the switch. She snorted the dust from bark of the Nightrot and felt the instant euphoria.

She’d kissed Pavel with her poisoned lips. He was sweet too. She almost missed him.

She rolled the maps, tucked the tube into her jacket, and walked out into the rain. The bark’s dust still clung to her fingers—flaky, warm and glowing if you looked at it in the right way. She brought her hand to her nose and inhaled.

Now the forest and everything in it wrapped around her. She could feel it as she could feel her young beating heart slow. Side effects: megalomania.

Three nights later, Jenny sat in a dark booth at the back of a New Orleans bar called Le Ecossaise run by Sel Tic. He’d been smart enough to cut a deal. The air smelled of cheap beer, counterfeit perfume, and the ghost of burnt almonds still clinging to her jacket. She hadn't washed it. She wanted memories to cling like a new skin.

Before her on the sticky table lay the wax-sealed tube—the maps. Beside it, a small glass vial no bigger than her thumb. Inside was the artificial glow of powdered Nightrot bark. She'd scraped the last of it from the hollow button. Her fingertips were raw, the skin peeling. Every time she touched the vial, a faint jolt pulsed through her fingers, like holding a dying grey sparrow.

Sel Tic gave her the nod. She didn't have long to wait. He was always on time.

Delicate footsteps for such a big man in expensive leather shoes, sidestepping the mob perched on high stools watching a game onscreen and whooping as their team scored. A whiff of his cologne: sandalwood and smoke combined.

Jack Seville slid into the booth. His face was calm, almost fatherly as he grinned at her. Gray temples. A watch that cost more than her college fees.

‘Jenny,’ he said. ‘You killed my best man and some squares in Mornington Heights. Nice touch, framing Sherriff Milton. I don’t know how you did that and I don’t really care. What matters is you stole what's mine.’

‘Marandina worked for you and Milton worked for Snodgrass, who worked for you,’ she said. ‘If either one was your best, then you’re not as good as you think you are?’

Seville shrugged and smiled. He reached across the table and patted her hand. Touched the vial—just a brush of his index finger. He jerked his hand back as if burned.

His smile no longer fitted his face. ‘What’s that? I hope it’s not what I think it is?’

‘French cheese,’ Jenny laughed. ‘Sacred bark. All that crap about it being ancient and you've been trying to find it for fifty years, maybe two-hundred-and-fifty years. Three botanists died protecting it. Amos died. And I pushed a deputy off a cliff—metaphorically or literally?—to get it, which is damn nearer the truth.

She slid the vial toward him. ‘Have some. Free sample. One poorly used and mad-as-hell owner.’

Seville squinted at her. ‘You think I'm a dumb, stupid bastard, like the others? You can play me with your little-girl lost spiel?’

‘I think you're greedy and corrupt, which are both positives where I come from. And I think you want to believe you’re not. You’re part of a bigger and larger cause, which is just as much bullshit as Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, right?’  She leaned forward. The table's edge pressed into her breasts and ribs—a sharp, grounding pain, which put pink into her cheeks. ‘Go on. Just a grain. On your tongue. Prove yourself to the big boys? Be the man you hoped to be.’

He stared at the vial. His Adam’s apple moved up and down. His sweat cutting through the culitivated sandlewood cologne—sour, human, and scared.

He picked up the vial, uncorked it. Poured a bit onto his palm. Powder the colour of ash. He brought it to his nose and snorted it, which surprised her.

His eyes watered. He coughed—once, twice—and then sneezed and his face softened. A familiar smile spread across his dry lips.

‘Jenny...’ he breathed her in. ‘That's... beautiful. You’re beautiful. The world is such a beautiful place.’

She waited until he slumped against the booth. His fingers uncurled. The vial rolled onto the table. His heartbeat. She could almost see it slowing.

She reached out and touched his cheek. His skin was warm. His smile never faded.

She pilled some dollar bills into a pile on a plate in front of him

The maps were safely tucked inside her coat. Outside, the New Orleans rain was warm and thick, tasting of the river that touched everything. She glided past those on the sideway and made her way to the wharf. Unwrapped the vellum tried to curl in on itself. She touched the inked trails, the paper soft as Marindina’s eyelashes. Then she held the map tube over the dark water and let it freefall.

It floated and floundered before sinking.

The Nightrot grove would stay hidden in makeshift mythology. The botanists' sacrifices would be something someone would whisper about and find willing listeners and the virus would spread online.

Jenny had one more pilgrimage to make.

She flew in and out of Toronto the next morning using a cloned passport. The safe house was a cabin surrounded by birch trees that smelled of wet earth. Oliver met her at the door. Her daughter was asleep inside, curled on a couch with a blanket pulled tight to her chin.

Oliver asked her. ‘You found us, OK, without Satnav or a map?’

Jenny nodded. She knelt and hugged him. His hair smelled of shampoo. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of a living body, but she could taste almonds on her tongue. Always.