Part 4

“It’s a goddess,” Pliny said with a smile returning to his face.

“Of what?” Leah was still admiring the beautiful handwriting on the card.

“See, no one really remembers. There were probably thousands of Romans, or perhaps Gauls before them, or a village of farmers and herders before them, who couldn’t imagine an existence in this world without her in every tree and rock and animal. Now, we just have her name.”

Leah returned the card, and they walked another hundred feet to another cabinet. Leah opened the brass doors and pulled another random card: “Cardea.”

“Ah. I like that one.” Pliny smiled even bigger. “The Roman goddess of hinges. Every door used to be opened with a small prayer. Funny enough, it wasn’t because people feared doors or hinges; it was because people understood what crossing a threshold meant.”

Leah pulled another card: “Tenenit.”

“The protector and auditor of ink markers,” Pliny explained.

And another: “Aha Nzambi.”

“A spirit of the river. Thousands used to cast sacred offerings in waterways to pay homage.” Pliny took the card and gently put it back exactly where it was in the cabinet. He caringly shut the doors. “Most of you people think it’s emperors and conquerors that are mostly remembered by history. Really, history is a collection of whatever librarians of the time found important.” He chuckled to himself.

The next greenhouse they entered held a massive circular courtyard. There weren’t any plants, just benches and a large iron fountain in the middle that looked like it had gone dry a long time ago. Pliny sat on one of the benches and gestured for Leah to do the same.

“Any guesses as to why they become plants?” Pliny leaned back on the bench with his eyes on the hard water stains in the middle of the fountain.

Leah wordlessly shook her head.

“They stop moving. When people believe in a god or anything, they carry it around with them. It lives in all their conversations, their rituals, their habits. It’s always in the little things that bring shape and volume to their lives. But when the last person forgets…” Pliny gestured all around at nothing and everything.

“It roots?” Leah looked down at her feet, then around the courtyard where Pliny was pointing as he spoke.

“Close. They wait. They wait for someone to wonder why people stopped wondering about them.”

Leah turned to Pliny. “Do people ever come here?”

“Sometimes.”

“What happens?”

Pliny shrugged. “They cry a lot. Usually around the third or fourth greenhouse. They start to recognize the plants. Not by their names or their descriptions on the plaques. They recognize the feelings and realize how important it was to them before they forgot it.”

They left the courtyard greenhouse and walked toward the last building before the ominous, shiny new structure. There was a quiet hum that came from the new greenhouse. It was like distant electrical wires or bees inside the walls.

As they entered the next greenhouse, the humming was stifled, and a new set of impossible life forms sat arranged in the mists. They passed a sprawling vine with blossoms resembling tiny brass keys. Its plaque looked tarnished and was hard to read: “The Goddess of Hiding a House Key under a Flowerpot.”

The next was a small evergreen. Pliny said that the thin needles glowed faintly after sunset and stayed illuminated all night: “The God of Checking on Sleeping Children One Last Time.”

A few steps later, a large woody bush had fruit that smelled almost exactly like Leah remembered her grandmother’s kitchen when she baked bread: “The Goddess of Recipes Never Written Down.”

“My mother. She used to bake all the time.” Leah spoke while she bent over to closely examine the leaves. She laughed softly, stood up, and turned to Pliny, “Nobody knows how. She never followed any recipes. When she found out she was sick, she made a recipe book completely from memory and left it to me after she died.”

Pliny smiled and kept a respectful silence.