Another Day at Unity (28)

If she could have, Coraline would've granted all her father's wishes.

She tried every day—rising with the sun each morning, before he was awake. She flipped through her mother's recipe cards, searching for something their kitchen could provide. Inevitably that meant making a few alterations, or substituting what they could still afford for what her mom once used.

She cooked and cleaned and prepared, so that by the time he woke, she was there.

Her father was not very strong anymore. He couldn't get into his wheelchair without her help, and couldn't make it very far in the house without her to lean on. But Coraline was there, to bring breakfast, keep the bed clean, and do all the other chores it took to keep their home in good condition.

It had too many rooms now, rooms for her two older brothers who had been taken by the plague. Her mom was gone too, so she didn't use the pottery studio anymore.

Coraline did. Once father was fed, she took whatever clay she could find, and worked it into simple things—plates, bowls, cups, pots—whatever the people of Petalburg needed. Sometimes she crafted the shape of daemons, to be buried with the dead. Other times, she tried her best to create toys from clay, to varying degrees of success.

After working for a while, she went out into the forest to gather wood, which she traded to the charcoal-burners for fuel for the kiln. The plague hadn't taken that old machine, the only thing that kept her and her father from starving.

While the next batch of creations baked, she brought a rolling tray of the last day's to her father's bench, where he glazed and painted the figures.

His face was not so soft and gentle as it had once been, and his strokes not so fine with the brush. The plague had stolen his right arm, and made it painful for him to move in certain ways.

Still, he insisted on helping her each day. Sometimes, he created beautiful designs. Other times, she would secretly paint over his failures with plain white or black, to make it easier to sell.

By evening, Coraline was ready for her trip to the market, where she would trade finished pieces from previous days for fresh clay, fuel, and food. She always came at night, so she could buy anything that was about to expire, and cook it right away.

Mr. Beni had once been a friend to the family, and always gave her more for her money than it was worth. There were only so many ceramics one shop needed, especially from hands as young as hers.

She made dinner, brought her father back to bed, and again the cycle would repeat, back to the start the next day.

Sometimes there wasn't enough money, and she had to figure out a way to trick her father into eating without realizing it was the only portion. Other times, there was a little extra, and she could buy something to fix something broken in their house. That happened less and less as the months passed, and everyone in town who had any use for new ceramics had bought them. How often could people break their plates?

Not enough to keep two people and two daemons fed, no matter how small little Lamplight got.

She tried some other ideas to make money—picking flowers, selling extra things from the house that the two of them no longer needed, or writing letters to their relatives.

But Petalburg had so many flowers that there were already others better at selling them. Likewise, they had already sold anything of value during the plague, when they were still trying to get medicine. Her relatives sometimes answered the letters, but never with anything she wanted to hear.

"When your father passes, come and live with us in Mossdeep," they would say. "It's terrible what happened to your family. You can find a future here."

When her dad passed, as though it had already happened. Coraline burned those letters, and never wrote back. She already had her dad to explain what they wanted.

"The house is on good land," he would say. "When I die, they'll fight to take you, so they can steal it from you and sell it for themselves. I have to... endure. Until you're eighteen. Then it will be your home, and none of those mandibuzz can take it from you."

"You'll live longer than that," she told him. "Until you're old and gray, until you're a grandfather and a great-grandfather. You'll get as old as Eons themselves."

He laughed. His vibrava perched on the wall beside him, wings flapping to keep the air moving over her father's face. But the daemon had no hands, and couldn't aid him in his work in any other way. At least he stayed cool. "We will see. So long as my grandchildren are growing up in the house your mother and I built together, I will be happy, even if I'm no longer with you."

Coraline could declare the future for her father all she wanted, but her words didn't have the power to change anything. He still got thinner and weaker every month, no matter how many times she skipped meals to provide for him. They had to stop paying for electricity in the house, using candles when they really needed light, and carrying water up from the river instead of paying for it from the city.

She asked Mr. Beni, and her old teacher at school before she had to drop out, and got basically the same answer. There were very expensive medicines that could help him, and some rare berries known to the Eons. Without something like that, just keeping her father fed and comfortable wasn't enough.

Coraline couldn't steal from Mr. Beni, not after all he had done for her family. Even then, it wasn't the kind of thing she could take once and make her dad just get better. He would need to take it every day for the rest of his life, or he would be right back where he started.

"I don't know what to do," she told Mr. Beni, after dropping off a tray of plates stained with her tears. They were among the flattest and most perfectly baked she had ever made, though her father's work was getting worse. That meant they were black, like most of what she brought these days.

She clutched the little purse of coins he gave her to her chest, feeling tears streak through the dirt on her face. There was more of that these days, since the shower didn't work anymore. "I've already given up everything we have. There's nothing left! I can't work any harder, there's not enough hours in the day!"

Lamplight was a bird just then, a little natu who could catch anything she dropped in his psychic powers. It wasn't a form he liked, though he took it more and more as her workload grew. He fluttered over to her shoulder, brushing his head against hers. She held him too—at least her daemon would always be with her, no matter how awful everything got.

"I'm... sorry," he said. "I wish I knew how to help you. We used to get more tourists, but... things have been slow this year. Not a lot of extra gold to go around."

He stepped out from behind the counter, leading her towards the back of the shop the way he always did. That was where he kept the food on the verge of expiration, or with damaged packaging. This time he stopped near the door, lingering near a new display.

Coraline didn't usually look very closely at anything other than the food in Mr. Beni's general store, it would only make her feel sad. But this time she did—a vivid painted comet, along with the image of an ancient pokémon beneath.

"May the wealth of the Millennium House bless you this year!" it proclaimed, along with rows of little metal and leather... disks?

"I wish I had more to offer, Coraline. But maybe the comet can help your father. I've heard stranger stories before." He slid one of the smaller disks off the top section, holding it towards her. "Here. Have you ever heard of a wishmaker?"

She ran her fingers over the strange disk. It had many interlocking lines inside, forming the petals of a flower. The outside had seven diamond sections, that could be opened or closed. "It looks old. Is it... magic?"

"Some people think so. The comet—you know about that, right?" When she didn't answer, he continued. "It only visits the planet every thousand years. Before the fall of Millennium House, it was the most important holiday in all of Hoenn. People traveled for hundreds of miles to Sootopolis, hoping House Millennium would choose to grant their wishes. They really did it, too—impossible things. Their wishes elevated commoners to the Great Families, brought back lost loves, cured the incurable."

"If House Millennium was still around, we would go to Sootopolis right now and ask," Lamplight thought. With the telepathy of a psychic type, he could speak without making noise others could hear.

"But there aren't Jirachi anymore," Coraline said. "Who would grant my wish?"

Mr. Beni shrugged, continuing down the aisle towards the rear door. "Some people think the Jirachi got their powers from the comet. Maybe it doesn't need a Jirachi to grant your wish."

Maybe. Coraline wasn't sure it worked like that—but she didn't have a lot of other options in front of her. "What do I do?"

"Simple. The comet will appear in the sky three days from now. When it does, make your wish each day, closing each of those pieces one at a time until the last night. That's when the wishes get granted."

Even Mr. Beni didn't sound very much like he believed it. But if other people did, maybe they knew something he didn't.

She kept the wishmaker with her every day after that. When the first night came, she brought it out under the stars, so she could look up at the comet.

But the sky that night was cloudy, obscuring what might've been there. She thought her wish anyway, with Lamplight as a little trapinch beside her in the backyard. "Dad gets better," she said, closing one of the seven diamonds.

That left six more to go. Six days while she had one last step on her list, when she had already worked as hard as she could and was barely strong enough to stay standing.

Maybe having something waiting for her made the days better, or maybe it was all the visitors passing through Petalburg to try and see the comet. Either way, sales went better for her those days. She had plenty of food, and even bought a whole loaf of bread, instead of having to bake it herself.

Each night she went out into the cold to look for the comet, and each night she failed to see it. But eye contact wasn't part of the legend, she would probably be okay.

"I can feel it up there," her daemon told her on the second-to-last night, pointing up through the clouds. "Right there. Make your wish that way."

"No you can't!" she argued, holding it up against her chest. "Why would you be able to feel it and I couldn't?"

He shrugged, bobbing up and down as a little chimecho. Or she felt the shrug, anyway. Those little stub arms didn't work to show emotion very well. "Maybe it's one of those things that a daemon does, and not a human."

There was so much the two of them didn't know—and now maybe they never would. School was where kids went to learn things, and they couldn't go there and also have enough time to keep the home running.

On the final day, Coraline brought the wishmaker to her father's bedside with breakfast. She settled his tray on the bed in front of him as usual, then drew back the curtains to fill the room with light. "It's here, Dad! The last day of the Millennium Comet! People are saying we should have clear skies all night!"

Indeed, there were no clouds overhead just now, just bright sunlight and little white tufts, drifting lazily across the expanse.

Her father said nothing, but that wasn’t new. He was weaker this month than the one before, sometimes too weak to even get out of bed. That wouldn't stop her from being excited. Tonight, she got her wish.

Then she reached the other side of the room, where her father's daemon rested. The vibrava was always close, ready to provide whatever aid she could to the struggling human.

Except today. The daemon was gone.

Coraline jerked sideways, scurrying across the room to her father's bed. "Dad? Where is your—"

He still hadn't moved, lying peacefully on his back with both eyes closed. When she touched his cheek, she found only cold, clammy flesh.

He wasn't breathing.