Her father was a travelling merchant and her mother was a fruit seller.

The man seemed to always find an excuse to visit the dusty old town, once or twice every season. He would look up the stand that had autumn fruit from every province, all year round, and he would wait patiently in the afternoon sun for the last client to go.

The earwig could smell him arrive in the morning breeze that blew in form the easternmost gates. It was a surprise every time for a while, and then it was just one of those things that time would bring back eventually, like taxes or the spring rains. She would glance his way from time to time, while she haggled and counted coins. She always tried to guess which places he had seen in between their meetings, judging only by what clothes and smells he was wearing (because he never looked quite the same).

When it was almost time to close, something hot and sweet that wasn’t tea, but that looked very much like it, would have finished brewing. They would drink in silence for a while, and then they would drink talking for a while. Sometimes her guesses were right, sometimes not, but generally she got at least two cities right. She was good at it, and she got even better with time.

He stayed in town for a week or two, selling what he had to sell, and buying things he had heard another place would want. Some days he would help in the back of her shop, quietly peeling and chopping the fruit that would become preserves, and some days she would close early and they would rummage around the pawn shops of the town for valuable forgotten things for him to trade.

One evening after dinner, he’d prepare to go away again.

She would give him a box with the preserves that were selling best that season, and he would give her a trinket he had brought with him on the last travel which he had been saving for this precise moment. He felt it was unfair for her not to have a parting gift, even though she wasn’t the one leaving.

One day, when the stall had been closed early for their afternoon round searching for baubles, he asked her if they could go instead for a walk around the other stalls of her street (he didn’t know it by any other name than her street).

She nodded, and so they went. Then he asked her to teach him how to pick ripe fruit, and she nodded again.

By the time the other stalls were closing, she asked him how much merchandise he had left to sell, because they would need, at the very least, a double bed.

He nodded, too.

They felt strange for a while. Some days he missed the roaming, and some days she missed her afternoons alone, but for the most part it felt like the warm quietness of one of his visits, only it never quite ended.

They had a little girl, which wasn’t shy, nor quite, like her parents.

Their neighbors would pick her up as she played with peels at the door of the fruit stall, making her squeak with delight. They would say she had the beautiful eyes of her mother, and the strong hands of her father.

Her parents listened to all this, and smiled.

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Finally finished the earwig lady picture.

I was about to just post it when I realized I had thoughts about it. In particular, how come she has earwig feet but human hands. I believe it deserved a story, so there it is.

On a side note, this character ended up reminding to @whitemantis’ Saa. I didn’t have that character in my mind at all when creating her, but she ended up having a few details in common, and now I can’t unsee it. <xD

It had been a while since I worked in a pic as colorful as this one. It was really nice. 0 u 0