Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  She had ached for the taste of his tongue as the tickle of fallen rose blossoms caressed her neck. Each night after 10, she would climb down the trellis beneath her bedroom and wait on the brick patio by the fountain. She always heard him before he arrived, heavy shoes clicking like flint strikes against the stone. She was smoking inside; nearly ready to go up. Each night as they kissed and necked, he was tender with her and warm…at first. But as their meetings lengthened, as the moon waxed, his fingers strayed from tremulous sneak attacks beneath her shirt to bolder thrusts under her skirts. He grew insistent. One night, as the moon blinded the owls with its full searchlight shine, he pressed for more.

  First he stripped her favorite blue T-shirt from her completely—a bold move being just yards from her father’s back door.

  “Wait,” she whispered, but not too convincingly. Soon her jeans were gone too, and his own flesh fully exposed to the pale tan of the moon, and open to the massage of her hands. A tremor ran through her belly at this unfamiliar territory, but still, his flesh felt soft and delicate, yet solid as wood. She could feel herself warm and grow under his watering kisses, her tight bud engorging with first passion, unravelling in a satin-slick flower of invitation.

  But then with the pass of a cloud over the fairie light she shivered and whispered “no.”

  He seemed not to hear and pressed himself tighter to her. She felt the rose of passion wither and scorch and she pushed with tight fists against his shoulders again, “No.”

  “Yes,” he answered this time, through gritted teeth. “I can’t wait anymore.”

  A pain shot through her like the sting of a thousand thorns, and Tanya at last opened her mouth to scream, only to have it filled with his thick, sour tongue that suddenly tasted not so delicate and fine but fat and base and ashy with the flavor of cigarettes. She panicked then, and struck him in the ear with a fist, but he didn’t relent. In fact, her struggles only seemed to encourage him.

  Replacing his mouth with a gritty palm, he held her to the brick as he took her, impervious to her cries and wiggles and wide eyes. Finally, she bit down on his hand, hard, so that she felt the skin give way. The hand yanked backwards, but rather than nurse his wound, her sweet and gentle Marshall brought that hand back down in a closed fist and struck her mouth ruthlessly.

  And again.

  With his hands on her neck then, he kissed her, but not with the blending of a lover, rather with the penetrating jabs of a conquerer savoring his bloody victory. Then he pulled back to ride her in animal fervor, lifting her head with each thrust and slamming it back to the brick with each release.

  Tanya felt the warmth pooling beneath her head, at the same time as it slicked and gathered beneath her buttocks. Her heart was screaming as her flesh cried in pain. How could this be happening? How could she have been so wrong about this boy, this wicked young man? She swam in a sea of black filth, every light touch and kiss of the past nights seen now as a violation, a betrayal. There were stars of hurt in her eyes as the heady scent of roses engulfed her like a savior as Marshall came to climax. She breathed it in and savored it as if to blot out the knowledge of the situation, eyes closed, mind seeking another world. And then its sweet perfume turned sickly in her nose, icy sharp in its character. Distantly she felt him remove himself, heard the rustle of his jeans dragged across stone. Heard him murmur, “Shit.” She kept her eyes closed as he scurried away into the night.

  ««—»»

  When she woke next, Tanya strained to see through the blackness, but could not. Her nose felt itchy, but she could not smell the roses.

  “Marshall,” she called.

  Then, “Mom?”

  The nurse’s hand on her brow was cool. “You’re in the hospital dear. How do you feel?”

  “Could you turn on the light?” Tanya asked. “I can’t see.”

  There was no answer at first, and then she heard the nurse talking to someone at the far end of the room. Whispers, and the tongue clicks of pity.

  “It may pass,” she heard a woman say.

  But it didn’t.

  Her world remained a black void where only sound could enter. Tanya was alone in a room without windows. Her food had no taste, the roses had no smell. And no color.

  But she could feel them. It became her only release. To press the world against herself in a smothering embrace. “You’re there,” she sometimes murmured. “You’re there, I can feel you.”

  ««—»»

  Tanya met Mel at a special education class. He was the teacher, and she loved to listen to the melifluous tones of his voice. It was caramel and chocolate. Molasses and cream. She already loved him when he told her she was pretty one night, as she stood in the foyer, waiting for the familiar step of her mother who came each night to drop her off and pick her up. She felt her skin flush, but at the same time, shrugged away his compliment.

  “No,” she said softly, “...but thank you.”

  He took her hand in his—wide, leathery, strong—and pressed it tightly.

  “Yes, you are. Do you like coffee?”

  “I can’t taste it,” she deflected.

  “You can feel hot and cold, can’t you?”

  Within a month, her mother was no longer driving her to school. In six, Tanya was standing against the wall in their kitchen, listening as piece by piece of her 25 years were carried past, landing with thuds and rattles and grunts in the bed of Mel’s van.

  “I’ll take care of her,” he promised her mother. Tanya imagined the wrinkles playing like braille across her mother’s falling cheeks.

  “Do,” was all she said.

  Mel fed her ice cream and coffee that she couldn’t taste, but could feel. He massaged her feet. Mel read Sylvia Plath and Jackie Collins to her. Mel seemed to smile with his voice at every move she made. But most importantly, Mel took her to the rose garden.

  “I can’t,” she insisted, the first time they drove to the conservatory. “It’s where...I...just can’t.”

  “Taste the air with your tongue,” he advised. “Feel the scent in the humidity on your skin. It’s healthy, even if you can’t see them or smell them.”

  In the end, she gave in, and walked with him tremulously on nearly even flagstone steps. Once she stumbled at the rough rise of a heavy stone and he held her upright by her elbow. She shook with relief and fear. But as they wove deeper into the strange maze of muffled glass houses, she realized he was right. Each house was like a special pressure chamber; the air changed its feel, growing Florida muggy and Phoenix arid and Oregon cool damp with each whoosh of the doors behind them. Its flavor eluded her but she could feel its taste. The heat of the sun through the glass panes warmed her head and neck and the clasp of his hand on hers led her to explore the more ethereal aspects of the garden, if not its view.

  “Touch this,” he commanded, moving her hand by encircling her entire wrist, and placing it in contact with ferns and foliage, buds and stems.

  And then.

  “Touch this,” he said, and laughed when she drew back in pain.

  “Every rose has its thorn,” he said then, and hugged her to him.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” she pouted, pushing him away. But he kissed her and apologized.

  “If you don’t feel the pointed things in life, you’ll soon take the soft ones for granted,” he said. This made sense to her and she found she loved him more.

  “Can I feel your pointed thing,” she giggled, running a hand up his thigh.

  “Yes,” he promised, but instead led her to feel the bark of a sequoia tree. It was rough against the back of her hand and she pressed against it, drawing its detail inside herself until her hand was raw. Her blood flowed hot through her arms and she knew that she had crossed a precipice. A divide. She had spent years learning how to avoid bumping into furniture, years hiding from the sharp edges of the world. Years hiding from Marshall.

  She wasn’t hiding anymore.

  “Let’s get married,” she announced, and in a house fil
led with unseen armies of roses, she listened as his voice trembled and he said, simply, “yes.”

  ««—»»

  “I’m going to grow you a rose garden,” Mel said one day, as he lightly ran a knife along the bottom slope of her cleavage. It was a game they had developed. She had taken his message to heart: every rose has its thorn. She would not try to savor the rose without first feeling its thorns. It made the end pleasure of the petals so much more intense. Likewise, she would not make love to Mel without first snipping her nerve ends raw.

  He would carve sweet nothings in her skin or decorate her with forests of twining, twisting pins. Each sharp prick of her flesh made her face contract, and yet, the rush of the blood through her heart made her beg him not to stop. Each week, they played the game anew, the goal changing with every implement Mel used. The pain made her feel alive, broke her out of her black detachment from everything around.

  “Can you stand forty pins?” he would ask.

  “Yes,” she answered, in a tiny voice. “Forty-five.”

  If she cried “uncle” before reaching the number, she lost. If she let him go further, she won. Either way, when the game was over and his kisses finally swelled her lips and tightened her nipples, she ended in ecstasy.

  “I would like a rose garden,” she admitted. “I could feel their petals against my skin every day, then.”

  “And their thorns,” he added.

  “Yes,” she said. “And their thorns.”

  ««—»»

  The first time they walked together in the garden, the rose bushes had no buds. Tanya ran her hands up their thin stems and winced as the blood ran in rivulets down her arm.

  “They’re all thorn,” she complained.

  “Give them time,” he said. “First come the thorns, and then the flowers.”

  And they did come. The garden grew with the breadth of her belly, which Mel had seeded with a child. And in her fifth month, Tanya felt the first perfect, satin-smooth bloom.

  “Oh, Mel,” she praised. “It feels wonderful. It’s softer than a feather, and more velvety than velvet.”

  He laughed and promised, “Soon, it will all be in bloom. Just like you.”

  ««—»»

  When the contractions racked her body with feral bites of pain in her sixth month, Tanya cried for her baby, and for herself. She felt alive with the fire, and yet shredded near death at its kiss. It was over quickly; Tanya writhed and sobbed in the endless darkness and her pregnancy rushed out of her in a flood of bitter, heated acid. The bed was sodden, soaked in an empty broken promise.

  She didn’t blame Mel, and yet… His knives seemed sharper of late, his games more intense. She wondered, as her wracking pains slowed, could his long needled probes have killed their child? Just yesterday, he had brought her to screams with his penetrations.

  No, unfair, her mind railed. That was her fault, as much as his. She craved the blades, encouraged their attacks. The pain made her feel. Its intensity almost made up for the senses long lost, but still imagined. Sometimes the ghost of a peppermint stick washed painfully across her tongue making her mouth water, or the scent of her father’s aftershave before church on a Sunday smothered her to coughing for a second before disappearing, leaving behind an emptiness deeper than the black sea her eyes swam in, day after night. She wished more than anything that she could part that cruel curtain, and see the man who kissed her and held her and kept her safe, as he indulged her twisted needs.

  She wept then with guilt at her lack of trust in him. Guilt at her own inadequacy. She had lost their baby. Even in this she was only half a woman.

  Mel only made her feel worse as he waited on her carefully, patiently, over the next few days, bringing her soup and toast and helping her to the bathroom, watching to make sure her bleeding didn’t continue.

  “I love you,” she told him, “I’m sorry.” And he hugged her tightly.

  ««—»»

  Two weeks after her miscarriage, Mel came into their bedroom and announced, “The roses are in full bloom. Do you want to go?”

  “Yes,” she answered, and he took her hand dramatically, like a knight come to escort the princess to the ball.

  The stairs seemed endless, her legs weak and trembly; it had been almost two weeks since she’d left her bed.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” he asked, as they walked through the kitchen.

  She nodded and took a breath.

  “I’ll be fine. I need to walk.”

  Step by step they descended to the garden, the air teasing Tanya’s hair in a ghostly kiss that made her sigh.

  “I’ve missed it out here. Show me the prettiest ones.”

  He took her hand and guided her to a bush of thick cushiony buds. Tanya held the thorns to her palm and brushed the petals across her cheek to tickle her nose.

  “Tell me how it smells,” she begged.

  He laughed. “Like life,” he said, his voice heavy and delicious. “It smells like the breath of the sun and the kiss of life.”

  She left his guiding hand then and twirled her way through the garden, stopping at each scratch of thorn across her flesh to kiss and rub the bouyant flowers on top, laughing with a giddiness that had seemed lost to her just an hour before.

  “My roses are beautiful,” she laughed. “Thank you.”

  “There’s just one thing,” he said, his voice close in her ear, startling her. She’d thought he remained by the stairs.

  “What’s the matter?” he said when she jumped at his voice. “Did I scare you?”

  “No,” she said, steadying herself against his shoulder. “I just didn’t hear you there.”

  “I can be very quiet,” he agreed.

  “What one thing?” she asked.

  “The garden is not quite complete.”

  Something stabbed at Tanya’s back and he yelled “wait, stand still,” as she shrieked, backpeddling into a razor sharp tangle of thorn and flower.

  “Something bit me,” she cried out. “Mel?”

  His hand reached out to her elbow to steady her. But she was still off balance; she felt the blood running down her back and she twisted, lashing out at the bite, finding her hands punching, not some stray dog at her feet, but hitting Mel’s face.

  “Take it easy,” he soothed, voice of chocolate tinged with bitter lemon, but she was tumbling away from him, tripped by the slash of a rose stem and sudden vertigo.

  The world exploded in a rainbow of fireworks across Tanya’s black horizon, and with the light, her thoughts blinked out.

  ««—»»

  Her first thought was that her right leg was broken. A stabbing, red-hot scald ran up and down its length.

  Her next was that something had died.

  “My god, what is that smell?” she exclaimed, not realizing what she had said until she opened her eyes and saw the man bending over her leg, using an instrument resembling a cheese grater to remove slices of skin from her thigh.

  Without thinking she kneed him in the face and pulled herself backwards, crablike.

  “What...” she began to ask, ignoring the blood running in slow dribbles from her leg and looking around her.

  “...is this?”

  The man was rubbing his chin with his hand. He was the ugliest man Tanya had ever seen. His left eye was glazed over with white, his cheeks were sunken and grey. Her hands had always known that his arms were somehow misshapen, but now she could see the breadth of his deformity; odd tufts of hair matched with twisted cords of muscle to produce a manged and mangled appearance. His chin jutted sideways and his nose was just a blob of wide-pored clay. His face and arms were covered with a network of discolored scars, a pink and white crosswork of snip and stitch.

  “You can see!” he exclaimed. His grin grew wider, dragging his cheeks into eclipse with his eyes. He scrambled to his feet, and lifted his arms.

  “I’ve built it all for you,” he said, gesturing around them at the low ceilinged heat lamps beating down orange and bar
e between the wooden beams just a couple feet above them, and the quiet, slowly oscillating wall fan. There were no windows, only four concrete walls. All this time, she’d thought it was a spacious garden of open breezy air beneath the warmth of the sun.

  “It’s your very own private garden,” Mel bragged. “It will never fade or wilt. It will always be here for you to touch.”

  Tanya stared at the basement maze of winding paths amid twined branches of barbed wire. She was surrounded by the glint of metal, some barbs rusted, no doubt from the spray of her own blood. At the top of most of the barbed wire bushes were the pale flowers she had brushed her face against so many times these past months. Intricate blooms of layered petals, painstakingly pieced together by her husband and mounted, somehow, on these bushes of unforgiving cruel steel.

  “I started with my skin,” he explained, pointing to a misshapen rose of brownish black. A strip of Tanya’s own bleeding flesh still hung, seemingly forgotten, from his clenched hand.

  “It took me a few tries to learn the best way to cure it without it rotting or turning hard. After that, it was easy. Just harvest and cure, assemble and mount. Your mother gave us this whole section here,” he gestured to a group of pasty bloomed bushes, adding, “And I did this whole bush here just last week.”

  He pointed to the devilish twinings of barb and peach-fuzz fine flower next to her.

  “That’s the culmination of our love, honey.”

  She looked at the pinkish buds, tightly woven petals seemingly bursting with the need to open and shower their scent to the world.

  “That’s our baby,” he said, nodding, white eye glinting like the moon on a grey day. “Isn’t she beautiful? She was delicate to peel, but I think she’s the most beautiful rose here.”

  The tears coursed in heated rivers down her face as she touched the baby soft skin of the rose crafted from her lost child. Then she kissed it and breathed in the scent of her daughter.