"Rora, could you come down for breakfast?"

Aurora Henbane (Rora for short) was a seventeen-year-old girl who was eerily similar to the flower of her last name; she bore a reputation for toxicity, but in reality was basically harmless and, quite frankly, scared.

“Rora, could you come down, please?” said her all-too-fatigued maternal grandmother, Mabel, in a tone that couldn't be mistaken for anger, no matter how hard Rora tried.

“Yes, Gramma,” in a tone that could only be taken as annoyance.

Aurora used to call her Ma, an abbreviation of Gramma she originally justified, but really because Grandma Mabel was the closest thing to a mother she’d ever had.

Her parents had tragically passed when they were killed—no, murdered—by a lone drunk driver, coming home after a frat party.

One day at school, when Mabel had come, she had called her Ma in front of her friends and they started to laugh at her for having such an old mother.

She tried to explain that it was her grandma and she didn’t want to say "grandma" every time she referred to her, but they saw straight through it like a fresh window pane.

So, she—like most people her age—obliged and stopped calling her grandma. By the time high school came around, she hadn’t said the word "Ma" or any variation of "mother" in nearly five years.

Of course, Mabel was upset, but she understood. She never once pressed Rora on it because it wasn’t her choice, after all.

She had already seen these things with her own daughter, and she liked to remember the parallels, seeing the similarities, and loving every moment.

Slowly, Rora got up and started to open the door like she had done a million times before. Except it felt different this time. There was something in the air, something that made her want to lie down and cry for the rest of the day. Regardless, she left.

Every step down the ebony stairs, she smelled her grandma’s cooking, and it brought her back to a different time, one where she would still call her Ma.

The creaks reminded her of those times when she and her grandmother would sit down at the bottom of the stairs and trade jokes; they hadn’t done that recently.

At the table, everything was set up perfectly. For the first time in a long time, Rora asked her grandma how her day was going. After a few questions back and forth, they started to really get deep into conversation, Mabel afraid she was going to say the wrong thing and Rora trying to open up.

It started to feel like old times.

They sat together in a comfortable silence for the rest of their time, ignoring the clock for the rest of the day.

At the end, Rora thanked her Ma.

For it was simple; their love was as sticky and sappy as the syrup that lay before them.