by Paula Guran
They took the apricots, and some new potatoes, red peppers, strawberries, and mint besides. “Good for the stomach,” Alice told the stringy-haired blonde, who up close looked too young for three school-age children.
“I get carsick,” she winced, looking like she wished the dirt would swallow her. Wondering how Alice had smelled her sour stomach, no doubt, with her breath covered in the smell of cigarettes. Cringing at the touch of a stranger’s attention on her for one flat minute.
I turned away.
The little girl was standing by the back tire of the truck, watching her shouting, bouncing brothers. “There’s flowers on your feet,” she informed me, mild. Her own feet were encased in plastic sandals.
“So there are,” I replied.
“Are you magic?”
“No,” I told her. “Just enchanted.”
Alice plucked a daisy from my toes and tucked it behind the little girl’s ear, her hands as careful as with her carrots.
When I got home the daffodils were blooming, and Alice had said not a word more. Butterflies nested along the kitchen counter, following the train and twist of flowering mint. I eased them off and into the air with the hem of my shirt. My mother taught me young about touching butterfly’s wings: so delicate the valleys of your skin would strip their scales away.
They fluttered through the open windows into the growing evening, while I tapped and cropped away at the job manual for next summer’s crop of state park guides. They tickled my toes, drifting to the floor, attracted by my sweat and the scent of roses. I walked like a sworn Jain monk across my sea-green kitchen tiles, placing every toe gently to avoid crushing living wings. Tiger lilies seeded in my wake, pushing uselessly at the solid floors.
I had brushed my teeth with Alice’s homemade mint toothpaste and tucked into sheets scented with her lavender before I remembered my hiking boots, still at Idaho, abandoned for the tingle of her hands upon my skin.
She woke me late morning from butterfly dreams, with the sun coming hard through the window. “Lisbet?” the leaves said, sawing one on the other like cricket legs. They smelled rich: sunlight on soft, hot veins, life churning and spreading into the summer skies. The smell of Alice’s skin, I thought, and shivered.
“Oh gods, Lizzie—”
A branch snapped. I opened an eye.
There were flowers in my mattress, curling around the springs. Ivy had strangled my alarm clock sometime before eight-forty-five a.m., and all around me, opening, were roses, roses.
And above them Alice, hands twisting in each other like drowning worms.
“G’morning,” I told her, and her hands stilled.
“I’ll fix the door,” she blurted, and reached out for the woody tangle around the nightstand. Ivy curled around her finger. She pulled her hand back.
“You broke in?” I mumbled, still half-asleep and pollen-drunk. There were no break-ins this far up, by the border. Everyone was neighbors here. I still locked my door come nightfall.
“You didn’t answer the door,” she said breathily, windy enough that I opened my other eye. Her mouth was twisted, not a wince, but pained like I’d never seen before. “It looked like a bier,” she said, and dropped into my wicker chair.
“Let—” I tugged with one leg “—let me make you some coffee.”
The rose-roots caressed my calf and ankle and held on fast.
“Oh,” I said, and my heart sped up to panicking.
“Shh,” Alice said, one hand flat on my forehead, cool and a little damp and smelling sharp like tea tree. “Breathe for me, that’s right, that’s good—”
She parted the roses with her pocketknife, murmuring an apology for every pruned-out life. Blossoms drifted down the comforter to the floor, parting and bruising on the hand-knotted rug that covered wood that stayed cold even in summertime. “Stay still for me,” she soothed. The knife blade touched my outer thigh.
I breathed.
The shade peeled off my legs like a long morning, inching down to full noon. When I felt the sun on my ankles Alice said, “Okay, up,” and thrust arms under my armpits, rolled and lifted and I was standing on the battered old rug. Underfoot was satin; underfoot were petals, ankle-high, delicate. Like walking on butterfly wings.
I stared at my rose-grown bedsheets, split with thorns and staining deepest red. My chest stuttered again. “Coffee,” I said, pressing a hand against my breastbone, and fled into the kitchen.
I leaned over the coffeepot and breathed it in, real, until the steam was too hot. Alice was in the doorway when I looked up. My old Christy Moore tour T-shirt hung over her arm. She held it out with a face red as roses, eyes fast on the floor where my trail of desperate bud blooms scrabbled, sent out roots, and died. I took it and slipped it on over goose-pimpled skin.
“We go up into the woods today,” she said when I was decent. My hiking boots were toes-to-the-wall by the kitchen door.
“I have to have this manual done for when I rotate in—”
My right leg tickled. Butterflies, I thought, and looked down at a thin trail of blood. Thorn-scratched. The gouge looked like a cat’s-claw, or a woman’s. “Today,” she said fixedly, and took my broom to the aborted flowers.
The daffodils were gone from the shower drain. In their place grew a cluster of impatiens, touch-me-not, a bright raspberry-puff of a bloom whose name I didn’t know. I washed my hair thoroughly. The shampoo poisoned them on its way to the septic tank.
The bedroom was clean of roses when I tiptoed in to dress. The mattress was stripped, spring-marks and sweat stains laid open. I looked away from it and thought about shorts, underwear. A T-shirt not the color of roses.
“I couldn’t find spare sheets,” Alice said when I crept back into the kitchen. The dead buds had vanished, and there was toast on a plate in the centre of my table, a bowl of sectioned oranges. Shipped in from Florida: something that’d never see the inside of Alice’s fridge. She hadn’t touched them. Her hands were clean and scratched raw where they cradled the chipped old mug.
“I don’t have any,” I said, and poured myself some coffee. She’d laid out a teaspoon for me: two cream, two sugar. My hand had stopped shaking. That was good.
The corners of her mouth firmed. I watched her around my coffee. There’d be sheets on my doorstep by nightfall.
I laced up my hiking boots when the breakfast was gone. The leather was scratched where the sage had groped along sole and arch for live earth. “All right,” I said to Alice, looked up at her seated at the table.
She looked away.
“We go up,” she said.
I closed my broken-lock door behind us. We went up.
There were honeybees in the woods above Idaho. They made the stepping treacherous as butterflies, gathered in my bootprints to roll in virgin pollen. “Wild swarm,” Alice volunteered. The sun was hot on my back. She shaded her eyes to watch me. Her face reflected ruddy sunlight; I couldn’t see if she was smiling. “Jailbreak from an apiary down in the valley.”
“What if I was allergic to beestings?” I put another foot down, narrowly missing a flash of yellow.
“I’d save you.” Diffident. Not a speck of feeling.
Perhaps I was making up the whole thing.
There was no path this far onto the mountain. Instead I walked in Alice’s footsteps, around prickly tree-branches and their slender young. Crushed leaves from last autumn’s fall muffled her light tread, my heavy. The branches leaned in to touch my hair. Alice put a rough hand on bark, and they stilled.
“Don’t mind ’em,” she said, and led deeper on. Plucked a stem of grass here, a fingernail of bark there.
We stopped in front of a blossoming brush tree, all flat green leaves and straggling yellow flowers. The bees bobbed around it giddily, dancing buzzing maypole steps between the forking branches. “Here,” she said. Tugged out a bucket, and handed it over. It was a kid’s bucket, the kind they sell at beachside stalls with little plastic shovels attached. It was blue; the appliqué
d white daisies were scratched halfway off. “Halfway full.”
“What’s this?” I ran my right hand along the branch. Stringy yellow flowers crumpled into my cupped left palm.
“Witch hazel,” Alice said, and for the first time ever I saw her crooked-tooth grin.
She came back with wild raspberries; we ate them when the bucket was half full, leaned against the deer-nibbled bark of a knotty old birch. The tickle between my toes was lazy strawberry vine, rambling curled across the busy earth. Alice reached down and plucked a ripening berry.
“It’ll taste like feet,” I warned.
She popped it in her mouth. It felt like being kissed. I breathed out, soft, and she heard it; I saw her sit up straighter, out of the corner of my eye.
I looked up at her.
She looked away.
We emerged from the woods with the sun falling, thick light moving slantwise through the muttering trees. “How long before it’s fixed?” I asked.
“Soon,” she murmured, a caress of the hair. And Idaho rose from the horizons, its gardens spread out before us like the breeding ground of stars.
The stove was cold in Idaho. It was chilly, even with the rugs and woven tapestries, the seam-free joints of the floor, the double-leaded windows that blurred the view of the stars. Northern mountain summer: a breath of strawberry-wind across the cheeks, and then leaves falling before you knew it. I sat at the kitchen table and Alice stirred up the fire. The chimney was older than the rest of the house; it leaked. Alice’s furniture smelled of loam and old maple smoke.
She made up two plates—apricots and sage cheddar, her own brown bread—and we ate quiet as the night crept in. When the moon came through the window Alice got up, padded barefoot to the door for her water pail, and went out to the pump. “Time to start,” she said as she came back in. “Need the big pot.”
Alice had deep cabinets. I opened them by firelight, one and then the next, feeling for the lip of a pot bigger than the others. When I brushed it my hand tingled. The room was warm; its lip was hot like hearthlight. I reached in and tugged it out, short unmuscular jerks. It was prickly black iron, weathered down on the rim.
“You have a witch pot,” I said, half-smiling. She didn’t reply.
I rested it on my belly and levered it up to the stove. The weight bore on my stomach like I imagined children did from the other way in: steady and thick. Warm. It clanked when it cleared the edge of the stovetop.
In the bottom, snagged on the iron, was a single rose petal.
I put the pot down on the stove. I went back to the table. I sat.
Alice poured her bucket of water in and wicked the petal into the fire. It had dried out in the cupboard, in the bottom of the forever-warm pot. It burned fast. She stirred something into the water with a stained-smooth wooden spoon. It rang out seconds against the rim of the pot.
“Pass me the witch hazel?” she said. Didn’t look up. I sat. Something rough pushed through a hole in my battered socks and snaked into the world. I didn’t care to identify it.
“Lisbet?” she said, and turned her head.
“It was you.” I leaned my head on my knuckles. I couldn’t look at her. “I knew, okay?”
The wood-on-iron sound stopped. After the shifts of the woodstove, the house was as silent as winter.
“There’s only one hedgewoman in the next three towns. People’d talk if there were more. They talk about you at the post office.” I closed my hands tight so the nails pinched my palms. I was babbling. Stupid. Angry.
She put the spoon down. It clanked on the cloudy glass rest. “Yeah,” she said soft.
“That’s all you have to say?” I got to my feet, and pain pierced the skin of the arches. I was standing on briars. They had scored the soft polished wood of Alice’s floor. “I know. I know you did this, and I got a good idea why, and that’s all you have to say to me.”
She gripped the edge of the counter.
I walked clock-steady over to her and turned her right around. “Usually you kiss a girl. Or you ask her up for dinner.”
She let go of the counter easily. Boneless, like a toddler.
“Or you take her out to a movie. Or if you don’t like movies you send her—” and my voice failed. I came down on my heels onto thorns. Flowers.
“So you know why.” Her head was down. Her shoulders hunched. She muttered like a beaten child.
“Tell me why.”
A pause. “Not gonna—” Her hair was too short to hide behind: a utilitarian woodsman’s cut. The way her chin shrunk into her chest, it hadn’t been once. It had been long and dusty blond like beehives.
“Tell me.”
“—if you know—”
The joints of my fingers were aching. “Just say it.”
Alice opened her mouth. A cough.
A river of flowers poured onto the floor.
I yanked my hands back, swearing. Roses spilled over them between us, scraping breasts and belly, digging thorns into my sleeves. I shook, and they clung, dragged me back, rooted down into the rug. The blooms were thick, sick scarlet. The smell was a slick in the back of the mouth. “The hell—”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. And then bent over, heaving, and choked.
“Alice!”
A thorn curled under her front tooth. She twitched her lips a little. In the firelight, I couldn’t tell if they were blue.
The thorns tore when I pushed through them: legs, arms, chest. One step and blood dribbled down between my breasts. Two, and it tingled at my knees. Her lips were blue. Up close I could see it. Her eyes were big and emptying out.
“Breathe for me,” I whispered, and heard the rattle of leaves in her throat.
I thrust my hands into the thorns and pulled.
They came out bloody. Hers, and mine. They came out rooting and squeezing: I threw them to the floor and the roots died blind. I pulled until I had the last of them and checked her heartbeat, the color of the delicate skin beneath her eyes. State Parks employees got mandatory first aid training—even the ones who just wrote and set the manuals.
Her heart was pounding. Her lips were dry and purpled. I couldn’t feel breath.
“Breathe for me,” I told her. No answer.
I laid a hand on her chest. Laid her back on the floor she’d joined herself, hardwood, stained with roses. My bloody hands stained her shirt.
Pinched her nose, touched her lips to mine. Began to breathe.
I swept the petals into a clear compost bag when it was over. Red rose, and white rose, and rue.
The roses scratched her throat. The rue was poison—not to be taken orally. Dr. James looked down Alice’s throat with his pointed penlight and scraped down low in Alice’s mouth with a tongue depressor, and put her on a liquid diet until the bloody scratches healed. “No rough food,” he told her and me, her nearest neighbor. “No shouting. Nothing acidic. Lukewarm soup, not hot.”
Alice pressed her mouth shut. Alice turned away.
The doctor packed his cracked black bag and I saw him to the door. “You’ll make sure she takes it careful.” A statement, not a question. A sprig of sharp goldenrod scratched at my right arch. I kept both feet planted.
“I’ll come up afternoons. Maybe Mrs. Nguyen—”
“She won’t otherwise,” he interrupted, and looked down his blob of a nose at me. I looked away. My face felt warm. A lone white violet vined around my ankle and hid.
“I’ll make sure,” I said, small, and he nodded and let himself out.
I watched him drive down the trail from Idaho and then went back inside.
Alice leaned against the kitchen counter, solid butcher’s-block wood she’d cured and fitted herself. Her hands were clasped in front of her mouth. I couldn’t see her eyes.
“Doctor gave me these for you.” Ibuprofen. Household medicine anywhere but Idaho, where Alice didn’t let chemical things. “He said one every four hours, when it hurts.” I set the bottle down before her, clumsy. The doctor’d bandaged my
hands up fat with gauze.
Alice swept the ibuprofen bottle into a drawer and took out ginger for tea.
“He said no hot liquids—” I protested. Not very well. My voice was sympathy-raw and too thin to be strong or firm.
“Goodnight,” she whispered, hoarse. Rose-stricken.
There was a hedge grew up around Idaho that night, lavender and rose-teeth and rue. I found it in the morning with a Tupperware of white bean soup under one arm and pressed cough drops in a bag on the other, with the soles of my scratched-up boots sprouting bright pink eglantine and filling in Alice’s reclaimed path. There’d been no sheets on my doorstep this morning. I’d slept wrapped in the winter storm blanket on the cool kitchen floor. I woke to a halo of mayfly weeds, withering into compost, laying down soil for an army of spiky green aloe.
I touched a finger to the twining growth, and it hissed at the thought of blood.
I went back down the mountain.
The second day there was a message on my phone from Mrs. Nguyen, down in town. Alice hadn’t come for her baskets, she said, in her odd mix of late-learned English and the drawn-out local accent. Could her neigh-bah go up the mountain and look in?
The hedge had sprouted purple lobelia overnight. They weren’t used to the thin air. They died, outside-in, as they opened. Their corpses blanketed the dirt.
“I don’t do this,” I told the hedge, soft. “I have a manual to finish in five days. I have a boss and a job.”
The hedge spat withering blossoms.
My teeth clacked together; a muscle in my cheek started to hurt. “Nuh-uh,” I said. “You want something of me, you ask it. I’m not gonna hurt you for it. I’m not . . . whoever that was,” and bit my cheek at the thought. “But I won’t be—” I rolled words around in my mouth, looked for the one whose taste matched foul “—herded.”
My footprints filled with cactus on the way down the trail. I only looked back the once.
Two days before I was to rotate in, Alice sent me a letter.
No stamp: she wouldn’t have mailed it, not in our little town with its one post office and one whitewashed wood church. Both run by Mrs. Jeffrey Mays—that was how she styled herself, Missus Jeffrey—who would surely comment to the pastor on crazy old Alice sending handwritten letters to the Forestry woman up the highway. Handmade letters: the paper was textured and soft, speckled with flower petals and the twisting skeleton of a stem. I almost placed a toe on it to see if it would grow.
