There will be no survivors.
The cloak she wears is one of brooding indigo clasped by a single withered rose at her throat like dried blood on a wound. Bearing a face as pale and unforgiving as a February moon, she sits on a rock and toils at unfurling a tender white bud. Without mercy or regret, she pries open the tightly laced petals, peels each one back and rips out the burgeoning stamen within.
There is a gentle savagery in the act that is somehow satisfying to the queen.
She is emptied; spent. Observing her reflection in a dim pool she discovers that she has adopted the slump of a losing general after the war is over. What she sees in herself is the husk of her garden’s former abundance.
Once wildly fecund, she now lies dormant.
She doesn’t want to remember the faithful tide of campanula and violets, morning glories that had shrouded the gates in a vapor of cerulean. She senses that she knows something about the way the tulips spread out their waxy fronds to capture the rain, but she does not want to possess such knowledge any longer. The lilies, the lilies she wants to forget most of all; the heady festival those extravagant flowers dared to promise. This sadness within her is as deep as the sea and it creates a pulsating in her chest like a song she can’t help humming. Her heart is a fluttering insect caught in a fist.
What she tries most not to remember is milky skin, a luminous veil beneath which radiated the heat of a newly formed star. There were moments meant to be sealed in amber and laden with the flower haunted breath of bees that she thought would be hers to savor again and again. She now wonders whom it might have been who had come in the dusk to return her to a biography of spring. Had she conjured this other who had come and filled the shade with a timorous light? She is possessed by a simmering wind carrying the scent of so many quaking bouquets, a wind that had swallowed her voice as she pleaded with the river gods to not reclaim their maiden.
The queen, who had always been weary, had not felt so in the presence of the girl. Something in their meeting had allowed her to feel mythic and extraordinary. With the girl, she was a woman with snakes in her hair; red and winding with silver wings. She was the lone moth who had escaped the tyranny of the silk trade, satiated until her life waned on mulberry and sunlight.
A primeval knowledge had glazed her lips like nectar stolen from the rarest of orchids. Then it was washed away by a day in the sun, a change in the moon.. She throws the shredded flower to the ground and with eyes almost transparent in the light, she regards her world with a painful clarity. She knows now that with plentitude follows loss and regret. She fights an urge to wail and lament like the women of ancient tribes. Instead she silently longs for the desert, the weight of the sky pressing into the earth, the rhythm of the dunes, its constant erasure.
She breathes into her hand leaving a drift of violet-tinged soot on her palm. I am so thirsty, she had said to her mother as she drank from the well. She drank deeply and still it was not enough. She dips her hand into the pool at her feet and watches as the dark water is resurrected as a trail of green fire.
