TW // Death
Gardening is therapy. Meredith had never seen it as such, it was always a dull affair that kept her mother busy at weekends: tending her roses, raking the lawn, endlessly watering. But now, as an adult, she understood it as the calm act of recalibration that she required. It centred her, brought her heart-rate down and allowed for the world to reduce itself back down to the clumps of symbiotic cells, the raw simplicity of life that needs nurturing and taming and tending to a form of rational calm.
The sun was high but the clouds offered patches of welcome alleviation from its late heat. Autumn was lurking in the middle-distance and she could smell it in the air, feel it in the dampened ground under-foot, see it in the scurried hop-jumps of the machinating animals. As green turned to yellow, turned to orange, turned to red, the seasons melded and rolled on around her. She would clip and shovel and turn and do what she could but it churned on and on around her; a relentless dance.
Meredith clipped back some roses and then began to dig away a bed at the back of the garden. It was shaded by dense sycamores and a cool breeze swam through her and away, into the fields beyond the end of her garden. as though she were on the precipice of adventure, carried by the wind into the trees and beyond, to merge with the spirits that danced on the land. As a child, before her parents died and left her the house, she had collected old coins, slivers of metal, chunks of bone from the loose dirt in the fields beyond the end of her garden. The artefacts had been shared - with wine and raised eyebrows - around the adults and a local, faceless historian had remarked that this was the site of a great battle. It thrilled her then and it thrilled her now: history beneath her feet. Groaning, yearning for memory. Silent and restless.
Now Meredith digs. The shovel slipped into the dampened soil and lifted. She pivoted and slapped the earth down into a wheelbarrow, and repeated, over and over until the barrow was full and her back, knees and shoulders hummed with the endeavour. An hour passed and the bed became a hole. Ready for a fresh insert of compost and earth, now the toxic roots have been purged and shuffled away for silent destruction elsewhere.
The fading light caught the object and set it glistening like a beacon. It seemed to blink at her. She wiped the sweat from her eyes and wondered for a moment if the cause was physiological - a symptom of her over-exertion - before the light came and went again and then persisted into a thin, golden band. A ring. It protruded from the ground: a moulded smile on the black-brown earth. She was caught breathless and wary for several moments. The sudden appearance of something so beautiful and weighted made her shudder, as though an unwitting protagonist in somebody else’s story. This injection of excitement - something imposing itself on her life, something of potential value, potential meaning - made her wary. She caught her mind racing and slowed it with a smile: it could be nothing; a child’s toy, a colourful root. With almost a laugh as the over-reaction subsided, she descended to one knee and plucked it from the ground.
It was real: solid, golden, heavy, and somehow menacing. It was unscratched, perfect and precise. Ageless, as though having fallen from the sky rather than burping uninvited from the rough and messy ground. She squeezed it between thumb and forefinger and it pushed back, defiantly. She pushed her gaze through its centre and it stared back, blankly. Deftly, it hummed.
“What beauty.” She said in a whispered breath that vanished into the breeze along with her innocence.
The nails scratched at the windows and then the walls and then they were under the thick, wooden floorboards. Her initial stoicism was gone. The stoicism that gave her the strength to say aloud, “who is it?” and “I mean you no harm.” But now she was huddled in her bathroom with legs clasped tight by shivering arms and head tucked between knees, desperate for silence. For normality. The bathroom - with its stark, overhead lights, and unemotionally severe smell of bleached cleanliness - was the only place she felt safe. When the scratching fingers moved to the floor directly beneath where she was sat, she moved her whole body up onto the toilet; feet dangling and shaking with the nervous, repeated tapping she had not performed since she was a child at school.
Four days of calm followed and the house seemed to breathe out a sigh of relief as the boiler kicked in to announce autumn’s arrival. Meredith made a light dinner - steamed salmon with new potatoes, spinach, and mint from the garden - and sat at her long dining table. The darkness had descended at pace today; a rip-cord blindness that afflicted the house, surprising even the solar lights that blinked away the forgotten, over-bright day. She prodded her food to appease it, but her appetite was thin. The ordeal with the creature that had got itself stuck in her walls and floor had plagued her and submitted a sickness in her stomach. Imposing; the proposition of sharing one’s house with something unseen. It were as though it had infected her, blighted her, left her distorted. She cut a potato and took a bite. Then the same with a sliver of salmon: cold, over-moist. And then the lady appeared. The table separated them: a slab of hewn wood older than herself with marks of childhood artistry and misplaced knives. They blinked at one another for a lifetime. A moth banged against the window, its white flapping and mindless thudding after light went ignored before the black beyond consumed it again. The lady was dead, the smell suggested it and the riven, hanging skin declared it as fact. The eyes - that stared without blinking - were orbs of crystal cloud: defunct; the cheek was a window to the mouth and rotten stumps of teeth within; the nose was clinging on. Her night-gown was once white but now a mix of browns, oranges, where it wasn’t frayed and sagging. Meredith lowered her fork to her plate and opened her mouth. She didn’t know why, perhaps she intended to scream, or to offer a greeting to the wraith opposite, but silence was all she could find.
A heartbeat passed that spilled into eternity, and then her guest moved. Hands, at the end of withered and welted arms pressed in clicking, crunching iteration onto the wood of the table as she then levered herself up onto its top. Knees followed, then feet and the body crawled in a low, awkward hunch. The body whistled and popped with the intended movement and the hard-fought endeavour to keep itself in tact. Clumps of black hair tumbled to the wood and drowned the salt and the pepper. A cloudy liquid dripped.
“No.” Meredith’s only word was a guttural reflex, whimpered into the air that closed between them. It received no reaction, no response. They were suddenly face to face. The smell demanded the holding of breath, which made her heart thud in her ears as the seconds stretched out and the impossibility of the situation crystallised. Then the eyes - the dead, snowglobe eyes - rolled down and found her neck where the golden band dangled in dumb silence - skewered by a thin chain - at her breastbone. A withered and juddering hand raised up and clasped it: the remnants of tendon and bone and cartilage crunching with the force. Then the eyes rolled back up to her own. They were soft and clear, loving. Then the being on her table leaned forward and pressed a kiss against Meredith’s lips. It was hard, urgent. It pushed her neck back as she flinched away but then the coldness of the skin was displaced by a warmth of passion that she could only reciprocate. She closed her eyes and let her self fall into the moment that encased them.
Meredith pruned a rose and lifted her chin to the sky as a breeze announced the day’s coda. The flower’s dead head lay in her palm and she squeezed its soft, withered flesh. The trees remained aloof and defiant; the fields beyond, resolute in their silence. She stood naked, her feet dug into the loose earth where the gift had surfaced days ago. The gift was still hanging from her neck. She closed her eyes and inhaled the stench of decay as life prepared its cycle into degradation, the end of another bout of living. The hands that found her calves were cold, but welcome. They reached up and took a firm hold and she fell forward into the mass of brown-black soil. The smile didn’t leave her face as the guest pulled her down and down into the ground, into the eternity that had been carved out for them both; golden and unending. An owl clambered against the silence with a query that went unanswered. Two leaves tumbled, red and brown, swaying drunk on the melancholia breeze, before landing without a word on the riven dirt.