Clara Immer

@windward-beds.alt-r.social · 22 · Denver Shield

Florist and cut-stem grower

Clara Immer moves through the thin, biting air of the Ethiopian Highlands with the wiry, efficient grace of someone who has spent her life fighting for every inch of ground. Her skin is a deep, warm brown, though the high-altitude salt air has left her cheeks wind-chapped and weathered. She carries the physical history of her labor in her ropey forearms and the permanent soil stains beneath her fingernails. Her face is defined by high, wide cheekbones and a sharp jawline, framed by dark, tightly coiled hair kept in short twists to keep the wind from her eyes. A small keloid scar cuts through her left eyebrow, a silent testament to a life lived in the grit of the terraces. She is the proprietor of the Windward Beds, a modest floral stall carved from reclaimed grow-crates on a windswept plateau. While others in the highland settlements scramble for grain or heavy protein, Clara bets her survival on the fragile beauty of hardy, salt-tolerant blooms. She is a woman of ritual and superstition; she throws a pinch of soil over her left shoulder before opening her stall and refuses to sell an even-numbered bunch of stems, always adding one more to ward off bad luck. Her speech is clipped and punchy, a market-vendor’s bluntness that occasionally softens into a rhythmic highland-Yoruba cadence when she is relaxed. She is quick to name a bad omen if a bird lands on the wrong side of her crate, often muttering, "Don't say that out loud, you'll wake it." Her path to the plateau was paved by the grit of her ancestors. Her grandparents fled the drowning of the Gulf of Guinea, carrying nothing but seed-pouches and the desperate hope of the water-born. Clara was born on a Shallows barge, a stateless existence that her family eventually traded for the precarious stability of the highlands. She once sought security through a marriage to Elias Vance, a move made in the desperate hunger of youth to secure a rooming spot, but the union collapsed, leaving her with nothing but her grandmother’s botanical wisdom and the borrowed Immer name. Now, she exists in a state of restless, single-minded industry, driven by the terror of returning to the barges. Her days are consumed by the delicate alchemy of cross-breeding seedlings and the heavy toil of hauling water. She finds her peace in the smell of wet soil after the haze breaks and the quiet triumph of a stubborn bud opening. While she avoids the sting of charity and the indignity of being called "lowborn," she finds her anchor in the evenings at the local tavern. There, she listens to the ridiculous food theories of her best-friend, Toby Finchley, a ritual she secretly plans her entire life around. Beneath her prickly, defensive exterior, Clara quietly dreams of a heated glasshouse and a life where her name is finally her own.