What-Normal-Means
Sefa had a treatment plan in her tablet. It used the word *normal* eleven times. She did not open it.
"Tell me what you're supposed to do," she said instead. "Among the Velreth. When someone releases a colour."
"The others come," Iri said simply. "Every one who can. They look at the water for as long as the colour holds. Then each adds a drop of their own — not to copy mine, but to say *I have lost things too, and yours is now among them.* By the end the bowl is dark with everyone's losing, and it is the most beautiful thing we make, and we pour it into the soil so something grows there." He turned the bowl a quarter, watching the blue thread breathe. "I have been waiting four days for someone to come. On the human deck, no one comes. You file me instead."
Sefa understood, then, that the file had the diagnosis exactly backwards. Iri was not failing to grieve. He was grieving correctly, completely, in a language fluent and whole — and grieving *alone*, which for him was the one unbearable thing, because his people had no concept of it and he had just been dropped into a culture that had almost nothing else.
Her job, the order said, was to make him normal. She looked at the blue in the water and decided that *normal* was the cruelest word anyone had handed her in thirty years.
"I don't know your custom well enough to do it right," she said. "But I lost my brother to the same