New Fragile Yellows
Instinctively, Merope knows that following the dark-haired man home cannot be a good idea, but her curiosity will not be denied. She has been watching him from the kitchen for weeks now, and she wants to know. Wiping her hands on her apron, she places a foot outside the door, looks to one side and the other, then slips onto the path and heads for the forest. Hidden by its shadows, she trails him for a few miles until he arrives at his house, perched on a hill -- his castle, she thinks with sudden disbelief. She watches him round the bend of his driveway until he arrives at a set of steps. There, a servant in a black suit takes his jacket.
"Did you have a good walk today, young Master Tom?" he asks.
"Too hot."
The dark-haired man (Tom, she says, the name like a bright piercing shard of sun to her thoughts) and his servant pass through the threshold of the house, and they are gone. Merope searches arched windows for his shadow, but there is nothing there.
--
Behind the cottage is a garden. The soil has not grown anything of use in years; perhaps it has forgotten how to be soil. Sometimes, Morfin wanders into the garden, but most of the time, it is Merope's sanctuary. Today, she occupies it like a crab crouched in its shell, and she rocks back and forth against the ground, arms wrapped about her knees, ankles crossed. What precious knowledge, his blessed name. She speaks it again and again, as if she might wield it as an incantation against him and --
"Dinner, Merope! Can't let your father starve, can you?"
Tom's presence dims. The name tumbles from her lips, and she loses it among the dust and bramble.
--
Meorpe waits until he is safely inside before she tiptoes out of the edge of the forest and into open ground. Glancing around for strangers, she runs across the grass and hides behind a row of hedges bordering the house. From the other side of the wall, she can hear something. If she tries hard enough, she can translate their sounds into words, but they are meaningless to her. Tom is speaking nonsense, and those around him are only obscuring the gentle rush of his voice. She leans in closer, almost impaling herself on the bushes, but the conversation fades altogether.
She slumps onto the grass and rips at their helpless forms. Tom has left her. She is alone.
Abruptly, there is the creak of wood and shuffle of feet. She guesses that it is coming from the back of the house. Moving towards the sound, she discovers a high white fence; beyond that, movements. Merope wraps her fingers around the stakes, the roughness of the wood a perfect companion to the calluses of her palm. Gently, she pulls herself upward. Her legs ache with the effort of holding herself still, but she must know who is there. She must know if it is her Tom.
But it is not Tom. It is not his servant either but a different man, a man whose clothes do not match the grandeur of the estate. What she sees, however, is not this man but what surrounds him.
"Flowers," she whispers to herself.
No colors like these exist in her world painted in gray, brown, and the wilted green of the vegetables she calls sustenance, and they certainly do not exist in her garden. Merope's eyes flutter shut, and she imagines stretching her fingers beyond this fence and pulling the blossoms towards her, smearing them across her skin. There, they would deposit their soft little kisses, and she would lick them, she thinks, spreading the sweetness across her tongue. Then she would dream in their colors, saffron and amaranth violet, and they would sing, and if she could have them, the flowers --
But there is a man standing watch over them, so she contents herself with watching himin the spaces between the bars of the fence. Surrounded by flowers anchored in their pots, he is bent low close to the ground, a spade in his hand. He digs a hole, a small mountain of soil forming nearby. He reaches for one of the flowerpots and transports its contents into the hole, patting the soil into place. Again and again, he does this until the flowerpots are empty. Then he picks them up and takes them to a shed on the other side of the garden. When he exits it, he brushes his empty hands against the sides of his trousers and re-enters the house.
Entranced, she pulls herself up to her full height and glides towards the shed, her hands sliding along the top of the fence. She gasps to feel it give way. In that moment of time suspended, she is seized by the sudden realization that she wants this. Biting her lip, she slides into the garden, hoping that she is not caught. The shed -- the shed, one of its doors slightly ajar, will have things.
Its interior is dark, but light shines through the chinks in the wall. It is all dusty and infested with spiders. Compared to snakes, however, they do not scare her at all. She scans the shelves' contents, bewildered by the array of tools she finds. Merope does not want fancy metal inventions; for those, she can find improvisations. No, she needs something that she cannot get anywhere else. She needs the very source of the flowers themselves. She needs seeds.
There. A white envelope in the corner. It rattles as she picks it up. Smiling, she slips out the shed and steals into the encroaching darkness, pressing the treasure to her bosom. Father will beat her for being late for dinner, but for this -- for this, the punishment is well worth it.
--
Father and Morfin have left for the inner depths of the forest. What it is they do there, she does not ask (she suspects they are somewhat responsible for the squirrel corpses littering the premises these days), but they are gone and that is all that matters. Merope is standing in the kitchen, the skin on her back still stretched tightly from her latest beating. Her body begs her to not contemplate yet more troublemaking, but the seeds hiding under her pillow demand otherwise.
The flowerpot, she assumes, is an intermediate step. Without it, the nascent flower would be exposed to the elements and perhaps damaged. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a flowerpot in this house, so she drifts into the kitchen and picks out a bowl. She also rescues from the kitchen a large wooden ladle. These will suffice.
The sight of her garden is invariably saddening, especially now that she has seen Tom's garden, but it is still hers by virtue of it not being wanted by her family. She kneels upon the ground and forces the ladle deep into the dirt, and it breaks with a sigh. She fills the bowl, then pats the soil flat when she is satisfied. Gently, she slides her fingers into the envelope and rubs the seeds between her skin. There are ten of them inside; she knows, for she has counted them many times before. She will only need one. Merope brings it into the sunlight, this little white grain. She pushes it into the bowl, then hugging it, she returns home to prepare Father's meal.
That night, she tries to think of Tom, but she can recall only the seed within her grasp and the flower inside.
--
"What are you staring at?" Merope looks up, her vision blurred. "I said, what are you staring at?"
Her brother Morfin is standing behind her, legs akimbo, hands resting on his hips.
"I'm sorry," she replies quietly, "I didn't hear you."
He rolls his eyes. "You've been looking at your bed for the last ten minutes, so what are you looking for?"
Merope trembles, thinking of the bowl on the floor beneath her mattress, and what Morfin might do if he discovered it. Thievery, he'd call it, not understanding what the bowl was. Then he would tell Father, and Father's eyes would narrow -- treachery is what he would say because Father has always understood better, always known more.
"I wasn't looking at my bed," she begins. "I was looking at the window. There was -- there was a squirrel outside."
Morfin steps forward, a mad glitter in his eyes. "A squirrel, you say?"
"Yes, a squirrel. A big -- a really big one."
"Warm and juicy?"
"Very warm and juicy." She accents this pronouncement with a nod.
"Where is it?"
She points straight across in the direction of the woods. "It went into the trees."
Cackling, Morfin rushes out of the door, brandishing his wand in the air. Merope hopes that he will find this squirrel, which may or may not actually exist, and that he will derive all the pleasure in the world from torturing it. It is wrong, she thinks, to wish such a thing upon an innocent creature.
She hops off her chair and crouches, tilting her head sideways to view the space under her bed. She sighs to know that the bowl is still there, unharmed.
Better the squirrel meets its end, she thinks, than this, her singular hope.
--
She sneaks to the Riddle House every day now. She does not go there to see Tom, however, but the gardener. Beneath the cruel lash of summer, he works the earth. To Merope, there is something beautiful and almost majestic about the curve of his back as he bends down to tend to the blossoms. The sweat gathering at his temples does not repulse her but draws her admiration. His touch and labor sire color and life. This power, she thinks, is truly magic.
Through observation, she learns that she must not neglect her flower for a single day. It must be fed water and given access to ample sunlight, so she takes her bowl out into the garden and sets it on the ground. From the well, she draws a cup of water and, with her fingertips, dashes the droplets onto the soil. She talks to her flower in hopes of entertaining it and pleasing it so that it will not grow up wanting. She loves it as all things should be loved, and one day, when a hint of green pushes into the daylight, scratching at the sky, she learns that fulfillment tastes like the salt of her tears.
The summer stretches onward, and day by day, she watches the stem stretch higher and higher. When it stands a few inches above the bowl's lip, though, almost straining for independence, Merope faces indecision. Rationally considered, the plant is still young, though its sweet round bud suggests robust health. She should keep it in the bowl for a little while longer -- she should not, after all, risk losing all that she has gained simply because she is impatient to see the petals of the flower themselves unwind and flatten. And Morfin might find it, she thinks, if she transfers it to the garden. Morfin might find it, and with a sudden jolt of fear, she realizes that if Father ever discovered this, the dearest of all of her secrets…
But Merope cannot deny her own feelings, and her feelings are these -- that she sympathizes with the flower, not reason, and these days, when she talks to the flower, she thinks that she can hear it replying and it is saying that it wants to be free.
So she plants the flower in the garden, below the watchful shade of trees.
--
The days begin to cool; the flower perseveres. It is a ripe blossom, a stunning yellow against the dullness of its surroundings, and it stands resolute. Father has hit her many times for being absent from the house too often, but the truth is that, almost always, she is merely behind the house, sitting in the garden and whispering to her friend. All of her thoughts are hidden between the petals, coated with pollen. She has told it about Father and his blind cruelty, Morfin and his unmitigated insanity. She has told it about walks in the forest that seem to be without both beginning and end. Recently, she has spoken to it of Tom.
His name still elicits shivers and delight from her skin.
Tom has begun to appear again. His strolls, it seems, can resume, now that the weather has grown cooperative. His route has not varied much, if at all, for she still sees him as the sun sets against his back, cloaking his features in a silhouetted black. Slowly, her thoughts turn. There is less preoccupation with the garden now and more with this enchanting boy returned to her existence.
One afternoon, she is in the garden, reclined against a tree with her hands in her lap. A thought strikes her: she should take the kitchen knife to the flower, sever it from its roots, and present it to Tom. He seems to like his own garden, so there is no reason, she thinks, for him to not like this gift. Perhaps he will praise her thoughtfulness and smile at her, and she would be happy.
Then she remembers that under her pillow are nine more seeds, still untouched, still endowed with the promise of beauty. They will be for Tom (nine flowers, and maybe he will do more than merely smile at her).
But this one -- this one is for her.