F L E U R

de

L I S

- Dim Aldebaran -

IV. à C A U S E des F L E U R S

Juliet's eyes were old when she opened the door: but it wasn't Holly's fault, no, not this time. Memory had made quite the tether to life.

Juliet leaned against the doorway, sagging as an old woman might. Her fingers, long and white, knobby, almost arthritic, wrapped around the doorframe like frayed ropes whitened by sea salt. "I expect you're here to see the urn," she said at last. Her voice was hard: but does the sword choose to be tempered, does it choose to be sharp and fatal?

It began to rain. When her hair, short by habit, was lank across her forehead, she spoke into the silence of the rain: "Weren't we sisters once?"

A grin across Juliet's face, flying by like a starling, there and gone. "It would appear," she replied, examining her guest, "that we still are."

Juliet made tea, more for effect than taste. It was served in the parlor; the paint curled from the walls, forming little hummocks of faded color along their bases. The furniture was covered with sheets, dust covers, shrouds: the place seemed a ghost of a home…

…though Juliet had a home, at least, with white ghosts of memory for company; she could visit them at any time, wander the halls until they were the very corridors of her mind—

The platter rested on the table; true silverware, an heirloom of sorts, though there was no heir to pass it down to. She appreciated the silver, and did her best to forget the fact.

Juliet served the tea, though she herself did not drink. Belgian porcelain rested between her pale fingers, the dead clutching at a memory lest they forget, a memory of grander times—"Madame… Madame broke first."

She nodded, sipping. She could imagine: before, Angeline's mind had been like Juliet's teacup but broken, shattered, useless but for a humoresque to pass on and laugh about generations later when the tragedy was far enough away for comedy. All those years ago, she had collected those pieces, and forced them together, binding them together with her magic, a weak adhesive at best. The blame for the second breaking was on her: the regret was a knife to the arm, cutting out delicate traceries in her flesh.

Juliet's fingers stroked the silver, around the curves. "She had an accident with a mirror."—'accident' because what madmen do is never what they intend, of course. "Monsieur followed, because he's the falling sort." She looked down at the cup; it was like (another) ghost in the gloom of the rain outside; the Domovoi, the French girl—? "It never rained at any of their funerals. I hate the rain. It never comes when it should—stay tonight, we can talk tomorrow. The rain is such terrible business."

V. Le R O M A R I N

The night twisted with serpentine shadows, coiling around her until even the sheets were hot folds of darkness, enclosing in slow suffocation—

This is why she could not forget:

Around her were likewise curled ghosts, wrapped so tightly in on themselves she could scarce see them (though she knew they were there—), ghosts that would lay so still they seemed dead again until you breathed and then they would uncurl, long, white ribbons like in a flower-girl's tresses, drowned in the river but still, the ribbons were white… the ghosts rose, then, on their own accord, for she could not subdue the ghosts, the voices, the memories—

The shadows uncurled; and she did not, tucking her head between her knees in fetal position, embryonic madness, fledgling fear. Her jaws ached from clenched teeth, and with each rising ghost she would clench a little more and the pain would trickle up her jaw to her temple (it hurt to fear—)

The ghosts whirled like white flamenco dresses, spinning out madly as they flew about—flamenco swans, she thought, flamenco swans, flamenco swans, watch them dance, watch them fly, watch them die—

Another—the ghost came and whispered it softly, into her heart, so soft even the sensitivity of one broken and shattered had to strain—but she had a brighter memory now, sliding before her eyes, clouds in summer sky, golden fields, like the song:

fields of gold—

…and they walked in fields of gold…

…fields of barley (and of rye?—no:)

fields of sun-soaked barley, beneath the jealous sun where she didn't belong but she's there; how it glimmered, how it shone, another sort of gold, maybe he'd like it better—

…fields of gold, aurum potestas est—

Tighter she curled; but the white ghosts came and wrapped their arms around her like a wet blanket so she shivered, so cold, she might just freeze instead—

…let us lie in fields of gold, here's the moment, you know it's right—

The ghosts laughed; what a child she was! what a child, with her dreams of white and gold—

…you know it's right, I need this, I've never known before…

…let us lie here a time, beneath the jealous sun, let us lie here a time, let us lie together—

The ghosts embraced her with sordid sympathy; they were as the rain, faces in the rain (so strange—) watercolors, washed away by the rain.

How could she forget what never was?

They encircled her in a haze; as if she was about to cry like she had so many times before. As she slipped in she knew it to be sleep, but what heresy it would be, to fall asleep in the arms of memories—

—but what heresy it was to even remember.

VI. Le J A R D I N

Juliet remarked on her eyes over breakfast: "Et tu, Brute?"

Seamless smile; small, tight. "Never thought you the Shakespeare type."

…shrug. "I have plenty of time for everyone, these days…all the time in the world; you'd think I'd have run out of lines by now, but no, this player is still upon the stage—"

She tried the marmalade; sharp, bitter, a memory of days when irony was a delicacy, not le plat principal. "The library still open?"

A nod.

The toast was cold; it was like a bitter loam down her throat, wet, slimy marmalade having saturated it to its entirety, slightly gritty, thick. She considered the tea; watching as Juliet poured cream, watching as it bloomed like a white flower in the dirt, bloom and wilt and fade and die. "Did you know?" she asked suddenly.

Juliet looked down; like a tightrope, balancing. "I don't think any of us know anything, really. Least of all about him." Hollow, like a drum, last relic of a world of ardor, those primally ignorant times: that was her laugh. "He didn't know a damn thing either. Do you remember when—" and off again. A grin: "Defeated the purpose there, didn't I?" Juliet got up.

She followed.

The tea cooled; and no one likes cold Darjeeling.

In passing, the rooms were a labyrinthine cemetery: all was covered with white sheets, ghosts, new, heretical ghosts that hadn't even the life to move, cold company for the living pair that walked between them.

The ghosts swirled by her; each passing room through the doors, open but never entered, no mystery left. Memories in each laughed; more at themselves than her.

And through and through: Juliet had an ugly laugh, she realized, like a mother-in-law. It was his room on the right; she remembered, and felt the passage of something sane from her mind, something that had cracked but hadn't fallen, not before now.

The beds had no words for her (no words for what never was—); nor did the pictures, haven spoken their thousand words to those who hadn't cared to listen.

The final door: Juliet walked through, and Holly with her, two trespassers, pilgrims before Hades (or perhaps Persephone; but neither were the chatty type), stirring the tattered dust in their wake and letting it settle in slow spirals.

The place was a Victorian construct: she could trace the grandeur even beneath the white shrouds, dead glories (Ozymandias, her mind whispered—) There was a certain majesty, now, a certain majesty that it could never have had before with its gold flatulence.

She sunk through them, quicksand; the memories shifted around her to let her past as she slipped in further.

"I can open the windows, if you'd like," Juliet murmured. The room had such perfect acoustics that those words became enough to break the ice so she could breathe:

"No—but thank you." He had always had them closed; they preferred the darkness for what they did—

The piano was there, covered, but she could trace the keys through the sagging of the white shroud. She wondered why she could hear the music, the soft cry of Chopin and the bleeding perfection of Mozart but not see the player—perhaps he had disappeared into the piano, a far kinder end than the red scream of the bomb—

Like a bad chord: "Everything's covered. He was such a private person, I don't think he'd want us to see—" to her: "Though we saw anyway."

An alcove in the wall: the conservatory, she remembered, he called it the conservatory though only one ever played there. There were windows there: she opened them and had an odd sense of vindication from the sun bleeding gold across the room so she closed them again. Even that small bit of light had burned the place of some of its mystery, Juliet finding a small security camera nestled between mirror busts of Pallas Athena upon the mantel.

"Anything good?"—and a laugh, nevermore, Lenore—Juliet turned from it and brushed the spine of a book, dust stirring. Had it shivered? "Have you read Meditations? I didn't like it. I couldn't cry for a month."

"Too much?"

"Too little—" She found another book, seducing old memories from the pages with an ivory finger that still glimmered of town, street-corner. "No emotion."

"Wasn't that the point?" It felt strange to correct anyone in a tomb, so she looked away: the cello had sweet curves to its sides, a Renaissance courtesan, Bianca; the piano the sweep of grandeur, Victoria, God Save The Queen; clarinet, secret, soft, the chaste girl you only touch once and then she's gone, Hester—

"The violin?"

There had been something seductively singular about it for him: even the majesty of the piano could not compare, no, not the soft chatter of the flute or the empires rising and falling from the bell of the trumpet.

He would play Rachmaninoff for her, slow and sweet and smooth, but with a flavor to it, a sort of tang or aftertaste, old honey, the rich sort in which Alexander had been laid, or the pale desert honey of Palmyra, or offerings beneath the Roshōmon.

Juliet moved to a shelf. There was a small chest, inconspicuous and unintending. She opened it; within were shards of wood, curving like pieces of a broken porcelain doll; strings curled like locks of hair given to a lover, but forgotten at the bottom of the jewelry box. It was a Stradivarius: this would have killed him if the bomb hadn't.

"He had it with him. The Limerick man did his best."

—a casket, she thought, that's all that's left of him, that smear on the road wasn't his corpse, this is, it was his soul, not the blood, not the blood—

She looked close, tracing the woodgrain patterns, like the sweep of skin over hollows or knobs, like a memory, returning fast—

"Yours," Juliet said. "I have an entire house; I can spare you a broken violin."