Every November, Islay took a little pilgrimage to the graveyard. It wasn’t always the same day, because she was busy, but she tried to get as close to the tenth as she possibly could. Last year, she’d had to come out the Monday before election day, which hadn’t been fun--Dad had been the kind of neurotic he only achieved in the early November of election years--but this wasn’t about Dad, not really. Not even Dada, who was like a quarter of the graveyard away, brooding over the graves of the friends who’d been with him when he had his Accident.

November just wasn’t a very good month, she thought.

Her momma didn’t have any family back where she’d come from. Momma wasn’t, like, disowned from her family, there just wasn’t any, and that’s why she was buried here, with a little plastic headstone that laid flush to the ground and had little cut-marks where the rotors of a lawnmower had been driven over it. There was just… her name, in block print. Her birthdate, and next to that the day she’d died. Islay had the whole scene memorized, though she only visited once a year, and she’d only been doing that for a few years now. For a while, she’d been in foster care, without that much mobility. A little stint in a group home, and then Dad and Dada had found her, and taken her home.

She hopped off a decaying stone wall, onto a roughly-paved pathway that delineated the section of the graveyard where people who wanted to be buried there were buried from the ones who just couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. There was no real difference in care between the section of the graveyard Dada was in and the section she was headed to; the grass was just as trim, and the gravestones were scrubbed clean of graffiti as regularly as anywhere else. Just there were fewer bouquets of fake or wilting flowers, fewer lonely specks of mourners.

Off in the distance came a low murmur, and the whirr of machinery. Islay tuned it out. Death didn’t wait for her to finish up with her yearly visits to her momma; Death just sort of did what it wanted to do, and November was such a dreary month.

There was a splotch of bright color on the gravestone nearest the road, and Islay paused. She hadn’t brought flowers, or ordered any, so there shouldn’t be any. But, there, right there, a single branch of bright pink flowers. Maybe it’d been… him. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that her… father... would have done. Maybe he was different now that he wasn’t on the drugs all the time. Islay pulled up her camera, and snapped a picture of the branch. Dad, did you order these for Momma?

She tucked her phone into her pocket, the vwoop of a sent text interrupting the faint echo of a sermon. A moment later, she took the phone out again to investigate Dad’s answer: No smile

That was blatantly unhelpful. Islay crouched down, the hem of her uniform skirt brushing the ground as she reached down to touch the flowers. They called to her, really. Like a promise that she couldn’t quite remember. As her fingers wrapped around the green of the branch, something shifted. It was like waking up from a nightmare and finding the whole world had shifted slightly on its axis, leaving her slightly to the left of where she remembered being. She shivered at the sudden change of temperature, and looked down to see--her entire outfit had metamorphosed into some kind of crazy Gladiator getup, chainmail fitted over her hips and when she turned her head, stiff horsehair bristles brushed her chin.

Colchis Page of Mars knelt in front of her mother’s grave, fingers tight around the stem of her weapon, which as far as she was concerned was not much of a weapon at all. How she knew it was meant to be a weapon, she didn’t know. How she knew she was Colchis Page of Mars, she also didn’t know. The biggest problem here was… how was she going to find her uniform in time for school?

It turned out that just wishing hard enough would turn her back into Islay Conrad. She straightened up, hands on her hips, and reveled in the warmth of her sturdy boots and thick tights. That didn’t solve the question of the flowers in the first place--although now they were gone, like they’d never been there, even the shed petals had vanished--but it was a relief. Maybe it was some kind of gift from Momma? Maybe… “Thank you,” she said, brushing her fingers over the pauper’s tombstone. “I know ghosts aren’t real, but thanks.”

She turned to rejoin Dada, reconsidered. “I’ll come back next year,” she said. “I’ll bring you flowers next time.” Islay took a few more steps, stopped again and turned. “I love you.”

Then she heard Dada call her name, and hurried away.