Harvest
Maureen had been watching her garden for over a month. She’d already planted the cosmos, bleeding heart, columbine, and amaranth. Tulips and daffodils bloomed and faded, yellow leaves loose and dirty in the fresh tangle of daisy and poppy. Sunflower stalks as tall as men, and still she waited patiently.
Her garden grew from the outside in, bordering the fence and moving to the center, where it stopped at the mud. Not a bloom or a stalk, not a wisp of grass or a creep of thyme, only the red clay earth, untouched.
Maureen watered and waited. She circled the mud in the morning and watched for any sign of life. Nothing yet but still she persisted, watering every morning, and sometimes in the evening too, before the earth could crack in long dry fissures and form calluses under the clay.
Sometimes Maureen took her spade and traced figures in the moist earth: long faces with dark eyes, trees with bare branches, giant flowers with fat petals, birds with spread wings.
Another face there, with nose and mouth and eyes. Green eyes. Yes, he would have green eyes and tender lips and workman’s hands, strong hands that would hold her at night, in the dark, in a storm, and she would let herself be afraid of the storm, not out of fear but out of the promised comforting. Those hands.
Maureen turned on the hose, watered the mud and hummed her garden song while she thought of hands.
When Maureen wasn’t busy in her garden she liked to use the internet. After all, not everything she planted took root in the savage garden of wolf bane and primrose, coneflower and bergamot.
Match.com was another kind of garden catalogue full of lonely hearts and dormant bulbs. She thumbed through pages of Jonathan, Rick, Brian, Phillip, and Miguel, hardy in the early spring and tender in the summer sun. Handy in the tool shed and useful round the kitchen. She selected Paul and Robert for the front yard and Bill and Tom for over by the mail box. Matts and Mitchells, Randies, Nathans and Jims. A cornucopia of blooming men currently available at the click of the mouse, at the drop of a yes, until later, more please, here is my address.
And there on page seventy-six was Danny. Only one Danny and no picture there. He was probably a late bloomer, unknown in his family and genus, impatient in his horticulture, persistent like a weed, important like clover, holding earth away from gravity.
Maureen told Danny stories about cowboys and waterfalls, gold fish and peach trees. She described her garden and mentioned the mud. Danny told her that he loved these stories. He could read them by the hour. He said he liked to think of her, clicking keys late at night, when the garden was sleeping and the real harvesting began.
In turn he told her about dark forests and green wood, old stones and bird whistles. He took her walking in a coal mine and showed her pink diamonds washed upon unlikely shores. A moon flower Danny, shining in rough leaves and dark stems. So she picked him from this catalogue, just him, wanting him to come up the stairs and watch her hot flower in its wet bloom, opening.
But a prickly thing this internet. He stopped writing her. Maureen traced her finger over her keyboard in a slow conjuring of words and whispered, “Are you still awake? Are you missing me? Do you want to hear another story? I haven’t told you my best stories. I haven’t shown you my true face.”
Danny lost to the ether of the internet. Now her last chance was her first place. She could maybe grow his twin, a clay man in a dry year, birthed by feral weeds from the rush of earth and water, from the calling of desire, from the whisper of his name.
Storm coming. Night again. Rain to drench roots and leaves, to tamp down the dust of dry seasons, and to soak deep into the mud of the last possibility. Maureen listened to the rain pouring off the gutters and counted the seconds between lightening and thunder. Close now getting closer still.
She woke with a start, hot despite the storm, her hair a banshee tangle falling down her back. She slipped out of bed, pulled open her shade and looked at the garden below. In the white sky of a lightening flash she saw him. His arms were covered in snakes and roses; his face was tilted to the sky.
She went down the stairs and unlocked her door. She said: “You stopped writing to me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was making my way out here.”
“I thought you’d gotten bored, met someone else, maybe I said the wrong thing. Didn’t like my picture. You never sent a picture. How long were you out there? In the yard. In this storm. Were you out there very long?”
“I liked your picture and I don’t know, not very long, maybe.”
“I saw you in the lightening. I saw you from upstairs.”
Maureen looked at his body, dripping water and mud on her kitchen floor. “Did it hurt? All this? Did it?” She asked as she ran her hands along the length of his arms. She stopped and traced the outline of a fiery orange bird. The bird was caught in flight, spread wings, flying along his skin. She moved her hands up to his shoulders and touched the wheels and spirals, perfect in their symmetry. Spinning weave of plum and teal, sky blue and green water, the color of cloud and stone, horizons of earth and sea against a burnt red sky.
Waves of ancient oceans beating against black rocks moved under her hands. She smelled ocean and dirt and the color green. She touched a bright orange ball and felt the heat of the old sun radiating from his skin, heating her hand, and she felt old summers bronzing her own skin.
She traced the colored knot-work of stars and vines woven into his geometry. She found horses, frogs, peacock feathers, deer and wolf, patterns of vine and leaf, stone wheels and golden amulets. She moved her hands over the thorny bracken of his collarbone and in the tangle of branches she saw her garden: a thousand tiny flowers, cosmos and bleeding heart, aster and bonnie bell, and she could smell her garden blooming right there on his skin.
Maureen looked at the man’s face and watched him watch her as she moved her hand along his chest until she reached the stag. She felt the slow steady beat of its heart. Two hearts beating there.
The animal’s chest rose and fell, breathing the man’s breath. She ran her hand along the stag’s back, traced her way up its taunt neck; she pet its head and could feel a slight ripple of attention. She touched its lips with her finger, a feather touch, afraid almost that it would bite.
The stag arched its neck for fruit hung from a tree of impossible twining, reaching for a red pomegranate now ripe. The stag forever reaching for the pomegranate, its mouth open to pluck the fruit and drink the blood-red juice.
Maureen ran her fingers along the back of Danny’s shoulders: she touched without seeing antelope, rabbit, hawk, raven and rose, swirling patterns of light and dark, vine and trunk, ocean crest and snow mountain, painted forever on the surface of smooth skin covering hard muscle.
She moved her hands along clover and thistle, passionflower and lavender, orange blossom and columbine, forever blooming their first day wet sweetness of opening. She traced spirals and wheels, circling waves of darkness and light.
She closed her eyes but still felt his colors in deep long pulses and felt the hot orange and the cool stone.
Danny felt her hands reach the stone face painted there on his back: she touched the closed stone eyes, ran her fingers along the bones of an ancient man, eyes unseeing, eyes opening now after a long darkness, eyes now wide under the assault of touch and pleasure.
Maureen moved closer to him, closer to his burning skin, and she looked first into his eyes, then into the eyes of the stag and moved closer still. She kissed his nipple then before the stag could steal his pomegranate. Just her lips brushing color with her breathe.
“Does it hurt?” she asked again.
Not before, Danny thought. Not before this touch this kiss this breath, not before; now, yes.
“So did this hurt? All this?” she said as she watched the breathing canvas forest of his chest, her finger brushing tiny stars that framed his temples.
She touched his constellations, ran her fingers along his jaw and touched for a moment his open lips.
“Didn’t hurt much,” was all he could say then. Stories he would tell her later, maybe.
Could he tell her about sewing needles? Too damn small to hold in his clumsy, just-born hands, his fingers slipping on the blood and ink, too tiny in his fist to shade invisible skin, his eyes closed, watching his clumsy progress on the white time-space of his body.
He could point out to her sometime the first sloppy wheel, a frog meant to be a deer. He might show her how to tap the color in, worlds of hours creating this fresh skin.
He could tell her about how he had needed first to invent a new tool to cut and pierce and lay down the ink of ancient gods and old stories. He needed a new tool, a partner against his own flesh, his body drawn to self in blues and greens, in orange heat and deep ocean black. A new tool in an ancient hand to draw his history and call back his lost time.
Danny could tell her stories about the color red: red heart beating in the wrong time of birth and waiting, still beating in no rhyme. Remembering still the subatomic beat of his mother’s heart in his blood, his heart no match for her loose rhythm of despair.
Once a new baby, born then dead, and a soul locked in empty drawers, waiting for a new history of wanting and loss, half-remembered voices all ticking like a clock wound and left in a hollow chest, waiting.
And later, in his hand a dripping bone, his rib stolen from his newborn self, gray brown almost returning to ash, not lost yet in this memory; a new tool in an ancient hand, his own first bone tapping color into a new self in a fresh time. His bone drawing heart and eyes and mouth, creating new memory in the heat of conjuring self. This dark flash of bone weaving blood and borrowed memory, sparkling in a magenta pool, cupped in a new palm just made then in the tapping.
Did it hurt? No, not then; then was a surprise time of watching the uncovering of self through the covering of skin. Now a different thing.
Danny looked at the woman who had been on the other side of the internet, the woman in the mornings with the garden hose, and he said: “Does it hurt? No. What hurt was when you lifted your hand.”
Maureen rested her hand in the wheel of his palm. “Do you want to see the garden? Do you want to come upstairs?”
“Yes.”
Copyright 2007 by Maggie Shearon
Maggie writes:
