Painful Mistakes

Painful Mistakes

Painful Mistakes

Today’s job was to bring the pot and ashes to the forest and boil some of the white bark for about a bell’s time while the black bark from the other wood dried in the sun. Lutz’s step was brisker than usual, probably because the pot alone wasn’t that heavy for him, even with the ashes we were using today thrown in.

After reaching the riverbed, I hung the black bark on my basket so that the sun would dry it. Meanwhile, Lutz prepared the pot. After placing the water-filled pot on the makeshift stone hearth, he went to go get firewood. “Listen, Myne. Don’t leave the pot alone, no matter what.”

“I know that already!” The pot and ashes were both very valuable, both monetarily and in the sense we couldn’t replace them on our own. We didn’t want the white bark to get stolen either, so we absolutely needed someone to keep watch over our stuff, even if that someone was dead weight like me. Lutz, knowing that I had recently been putting more effort into gathering and therefore wandering all over the place, made sure to drive the point home hard. It sucked.

“You say you know that, but I know you’ll just wander off the second you see something interesting.”

“I won’t leave the pot alone until you come back, so hurry and do what you need to do.”

When I first came to the forest, I tried setting my basket down and exploring without it since it was so heavy, but Lutz and Tuuli got super mad at me. Unlike Japan, it wasn’t safe to set something down and go somewhere you couldn’t see it. Thievery was a constant risk. Which was exactly why the kids would carry their baskets on their own backs and only gather what they could carry home themselves.

Lutz ignited the wood he had quickly gathered, and then went off to get more. I placed the black bark on the basket under the sun and watched the pot, while occasionally adjusting the basket as the shadows moved.

“Is it boiling?”

“Uh huh, I think it’s about ready.” I put the ashes and the white bark into the bubbling water, then realized I needed a stick to stir it. But I didn’t have anything like that. ...Nooo, something else I forgot about. Depressed at my feeble imagination’s inability to predict these problems, I looked around to see if there was anything I could use.

“Lutz, we need two sticks of about the same length to stir the pot. The bark of normal wood will peel off into the water, so bamboo is preferable. There should be bamboo close by, right?”

“Two bamboo sticks, huh? Alright.” Lutz found some bamboo and cut them on the spot to make two equally long sticks, which I used like cooking chopsticks to stir the pot. He must have gotten a lot better at dealing with bamboo while struggling to make those strips, I thought to myself. After a bit of stirring, I heard Lutz mumble something.

“...Myne, you’re stirring with those sticks pretty well.”

“Bwuh?! Ah, uummm, yeah. Pretty good, right?” I gave a fake smile, but a cold sweat was gushing down my back. There was no Eastern food here, and thus nobody used chopsticks. As far as I knew, nobody even owned a pair. There wasn’t a little girl in the world who would casually ask for sticks to stir a pot, and then hold them like chopsticks rather than grip them individually by the ends.

...Oh nooo, Lutz is looking at me weird. It’s just my imagination. I’m imagining things. There’s no way he’s suspicious. No way. I kept stirring the pot while avoiding reality. It’d be more suspicious if I changed how I was holding them just because he said something. My only choice was to charge ahead, but my heart wouldn’t stop pounding.