This free fiction appears here as part of The Infinite Bard, a project of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. This project is to let us showcase original work, as opposed to the work we do for commercial media. Here are links to other excellent stories by members of The Infinite Bard. Be sure to visit them as well, for some first class FREE fiction:
A Warm Tale for a Cold Night by Debbie Mumford
All Kinds of Ghosts by Reid Alan
Blind Spot by Donald Bingle
Diamond of the Sky by Azure Avians
Author of Murder by Jean Rais
First Command by Chris Jackson
Enjoy, and remember to leave feedback at The Infinite Bard!
MOONGARDEN
by Sarah Stegall
She can’t sleep–too hot, too cold, too something. The call from her doctor this morning plays over and over in her mind until she knows each word by heart. A fragrance wafts through the window like a dream of paradise, spicing the air, drifting in from the garden. She rises and puts on a cotton robe, descends the stairway as though she’s sneaking out of the house. She unlocks the back door quietly, quietly, so that her husband won’t wake up, won’t wonder why the hell she’s out of bed at this hour of the night, or rather morning. She does not have his permission, and no explanation she can really think of except that the scent is calling her. He wouldn’t understand. He’d think she was crazy.
She wonders how she can tell him she is pregnant. He will be very angry. He has said repeatedly he does not want children.
The lawn is obsessively neat, with rigidly defined borders reinforced behind plastic strips he spent weekends pounding into the soil. The grass is allowed to go so far, no farther. On this side, only patented hybrid grass is allowed–smoothly clipped, fertilized, watered, aerated. Beyond the lawn edging is Flower Territory, where no blade of grass is permitted. The roses are trimmed, shaped. The trumpet vines are staked. Neat daises, tidy pansies, self-confident delphiniums–organized by color and height, the flowers are asleep under the moon.
Except the white flowers lounging over the back fence. Bells open like the tubas in a parade, the creamy blossoms nod at her from their vine. They’re not even hers. They belong to the neighbors, untidy folk who mow their lawn once a season and water only occasionally. Their Bermuda grass has been stealthily invading this yard for years, beaten back only by the relentless attacks of her husband and his Round-Up. Now, in the space of a night, a couple of tendrils inching over the back fence have produced two flowers the size of her hands. She tiptoes up to the edge of the plastic lawn boundary. She glances over at the second floor bedroom window, still black. She listens, but the only sound is a small breeze whispering in an alien tongue.
She steps over the plastic boundary, hearing her feet crunch in the redwood bark mulch. It’s like walking on broken sticks, so she places her feet carefully. In the moonlight, her feet are as white as the flowers, even the toenails with their sensible pale pink polish.
She stretches, on tiptoe, trying to get closer to that scent, that wonderful, intimate, teasing scent. But the tendrils droop only so far; the blossoms dangle overhead. She stretches up a hand, strokes the creamy bell of the flower, sees the star embedded in the petals, reaching outward, as though reaching for her as well. The smell rises, stronger now, and she realizes that it cannot all come from these two flowers; there must be several, perhaps a dozen, on the other side of the fence. She steps closer to the fence, peers through a hair-thin slit between one board and the other. Years of rain and hot sun have warped the fence, so that the board bows outward towards her. She presses her face close, angling for a decent view, but all she can see is a leaf shining in the clear moonlight. The scent is all around her now, though. She is convinced there are more blossoms on the other side. But she can’t see them. She can’t get to them. The wall does its job too well.
The next morning is Saturday. She rises early, even before the summer sun, making sure the kitchen and downstairs are spotless when he comes down. She knows better than to give him reason to criticize. When he strides in, already showered, shaved, and immaculately dressed, the bacon is crisp, the eggs over easy just right (she threw out three eggs not cooked to his standards). The toast is slightly too brown; when he frowns at it she feels a tiny earthquake go through her abdomen. Fortunately, he shakes out his paper and starts to read. He says nothing to her, finishes breakfast, and strides out to begin his yard work without a backward glance.
By the time she has washed up, the day is already hot, the sun bright and merciless in a brass colored sky. Her husband has finished his yard chores and has neatly bagged the lawn clippings, weeds, and other undesirables. She leans her elbows on the kitchen table and stares out at the yard. She can hear her husband whistling as he starts up the edge trimmer, renewing the neat rectangle of lawn that separates the house from the street. The morning paper, already read and refolded into its original layout, looks unused. She ignores it, stirring her coffee listlessly. Something — a dream — kept her awake. She yawns.
The sweet-smelling white flowers. That was it. She glances at the back fence, expecting to see them. There is nothing there, only the unbroken line of boards separating her yard from the chaos of the neighbors. She wonders if they close in the daytime, like morning glories. Maybe they have shrunk down where she can no longer see them. She feels a small pang of disappointment.
All day she feels sluggish, thick headed, the usual prelude to her period. But she knows now that this is something else, something wonderful. She cannot bear the thought of telling him. She knows his anger. He will beat her. She weeps silently, hopelessly as she sweeps and dusts all morning. She takes the sweepings and vacuum bag out to the trash cans lined up at the curb. She lifts the lid of the largest one. She is overwhelmed by the smell of fresh-cut grass. Her husband has dumped the lawn clippings into the trash.
Lying on top are the crumpled ghosts of two white flowers.
She picks them up; the stems are broken. No one has used clippers to trim them; they have been savagely wrenched off. They are wilted, sagging. There is no smell at all. She stands there a moment, feeling lost and sad and angry and not really sure why.
That night she lies awake, staring at the ceiling. The breeze floats her window curtains lazily into the room, sucks them up against the screen, floats them out again, like the night breathing. Beside her, her husband snores softly, rhythmically. Restless, she gets up and goes to the window. From here she can see the back fence. Is there a hint of white peeking up over the boards? She hurries downstairs, without bothering with her robe. Again the grass is cool under her feet, the redwood bark sharp and uncomfortable. As she nears the fence she sees the top half of a solitary bloom, nodding at her companionably. She smells the faint echo of the scent of last night, but even as she inhales more deeply, bringing the molecules deep into her nose, the odor fades. A breeze tosses the bloom and it sinks down onto the other side of the fence.
The next morning she burns the toast and he hits her, hard, in the belly. He hits her there because he knows that if he hits her in the face it would make a bruise someone might see. He smacks her breasts with open hands, leaving red patches that leave no lasting sign. It is a dance they do, of secret shame and humiliation and pain, a dance he has taught her well over the years. She knows better than to scream.
Late that night she lies awake, covering the same options over and over, worn threadbare and useless: parents dead, no close friends. He is powerful, well-liked, articulate. She has no proof of his violence: he is careful to hide it, as his father hid his violence. He grew up knowing where not to hit; she was unprepared and now hopeless. The night air is bitter, salty with tears.
The next night it rains. And the night after that. Standing in her window, watching the rain run down the glass, she glimpses a smudge of white nodding, nodding in the rain at the top of the fence, but when she runs downstairs, raincoat held over her head like a roof, there is nothing there. The night smells only of wet earth.
One morning, gathering the mail from the mailbox, a seed catalog falls out of the stack and hits her foot. She picks it up and sits down with a cup of tea to read it. She turns the pages nervously, going back and forth, not really reading, just scanning the pictures. Day lilies. Sunflowers. Morning glories. Ah, here it is–the large white flower fills a quarter of the page. Ipomoea alba, the night-blooming moonflower. She was right, it is a cousin of the morning glory.
She notes the price of a seed packet. The huge white blossoms hypnotize her; she can almost smell them, here in her kitchen, although it is broad daylight. Finally, she takes a deep breath and turns the page, still seeking something. The words now catch her eye: night-blooming. Nocturnal. Evening. She finds herself scribbling a list in the margin of the morning crossword puzzle: Oenothera pallida. Matthiola longipetala. Nicotiana alata. Angel’s Trumpet. Night-blooming jasmine. Soon she is on the telephone, placing an order by phone because she isn’t allowed on the computer. In the backyard, sunshine bombards the garden with ultraviolet rays.
In a few weeks, the tiny seed packets arrive in the mail. Her husband is at work. She carefully buries the packaging in the trash, not sure why she wants this secret seed all to herself. Behind the shed, near the back fence where the moonflowers grow, is a spot where he has not planted anything. It is too far for the garden hose to reach, so he ignores it except to weed it. The soil is rich and deep, however, well-worked and fertile. She carefully plants her seeds. Some of them, according to the package, have to be chewed a bit and spat out to prepare them for growth. She feels the tiny seeds popping under her teeth, spits them carefully into her palm. She covers them with warm earth and waters them from an old plastic milk jug she fills from the faucet. She thinks about how the flowers will smell at night, when they bloom for her and only for her.
That night she sleeps deeply for the first time in many weeks, dreaming of vanilla and almond and honey scented flowers. They fill her world, nodding at her, turning their faces to her, friendly. She feels loved, comforted, embraced by alien green intelligences. The dreams are vivid, loud in her memory the next morning. When she brushes her teeth, she dislodges one of the tiny seeds wedged between two molars. She remembers that her grandmother used to make salads with flowers in them.
Rain again, and then the first green shoots come up. She spots them first thing, since it is now her habit to check the corner behind the shed every morning after he leaves for work. This is the moment she has been waiting for, dreading how to tell him about the new planting. These flowers are hers; they spoke to her. They do not belong to him. She does not want to share them. Maybe he won’t notice.
That night she fixes his favorite dinner, rubs his feet at bedtime. He gropes her, his hand creeping up under her nightgown. She stifles her disgust as he grunts and sweats on top of her, then listens while he snores deep into the night. When the moon peeks over her windowsill into the bedroom, it’s like a beacon. She doesn’t even bother to check the window, she knows the flowers are there. She runs downstairs, and finds that she is right.
Five huge white blooms are hanging over her fence, swaying gently in the breeze. Their scent is all around her, stunning, overpowering. She wonders if it will be on her nightgown when she goes in, in her hair and her pores. Standing in the night-scented breeze is like standing in a perfumed mist. She pushes the blossoms carefully over the fence, hiding them behind the boards so that they cannot be seen. She remembers the savagely broken stems of their sisters, and handles them carefully. The last blossom strokes delicately, lightly across the back of her hand, a kiss of farewell.
The next day she moves the laundry clothesline, an umbrella of wire and birch, from its usual spot to the area behind the shed. With the lines loaded with sheets and towels, no one can see the corner plot with its baby plants. She tells her husband that there is more sunshine in the new location, that the laundry will dry faster there. He grunts and turns the page of his newspaper, and commands her not to trample on his zinnias.
In a week the tiny shoots of jade and emerald have grown into vines and stalks as high as her knee. She is astonished at their profusion, their exuberance. None of the other well-tended flowers in the garden are as vibrant, as though they held within themselves a controlled explosion of green. She strings bits of twine around a couple of old tomato stakes, but they soon over-climb her feeble threads to set their own strong filaments into the cracks and crannies of the board fence. Soon their tendrils are insinuating themselves around the posts, filtering through the cracks in the fence to communicate with the overgrown garden on the other side. She wonders if they can talk to the moonflowers.
Sadly, her own moonflower seeds do not germinate. The lilies, the night-scented stock, the evening primrose are robust and hardy, urgently spreading upwards in the long days and cool nights. All of her seeds are growing spectacularly, except for the moonflowers. She takes comfort in knowing that they are still there, still waiting for her on the other side of the fence. She can smell them at night, their perfume wandering through her windows on the breeze like a messenger of peace, although she never sees the flowers nodding over her fence any more.
She still cannot bring herself to tell her husband she is pregnant. She cannot think about it without shaking.
She comes home from the market one evening and hears the sound of a trimmer in the back yard. Panicking, she drops an armful of paper towels and detergent and runs through the house to the kitchen door. Her husband is on his knees, hat pulled low on his forehead, his gardener’s kneepads cutting into his fleshy calves. Carefully, he is edging the lawn, marking out the boundary of Grass and Flower bed. There is no room for compromise; already a small pile of weeds and dead flowers has accumulated behind him. He is close to the shed, in a few more feet he will see her treasures.
She dashes back into the house, picks up the cordless phone and speed-dials her mother-in-law as she is stepping back out onto the lawn. She calls his name, and as he turns around hands him the telephone. While he and his mother are working out who called whom, and then wandering off into conversation, she quietly gathers up the trimmer, the clippings, his discarded gloves and walks back to the garage where they keep the trash bins. She dumps the clippings and the trimmer into the trash, adds a layer or two of yesterday’s newspapers just for good measure, and carefully puts his gloves away where they belong. Then she goes back into the house to make spaghetti.
When he discovers what she has done, he slaps her for ‘mocking him’, but does not return to his weeding. She smiles in secret triumph and bears the pain without a murmur. She has saved her baby plants.
Two weeks after planting, the first blooms on her secret garden appear. The first is the nicotiana, opening white, tubular blossoms at dusk one evening. The air is filled with the smell, like jasmine warmed over gardenia. It is spicy, exotic, intoxicating. That night she stays in the garden until dew fall, breathing deeply, relaxed and happy. She rests her hands on her belly, wondering if the baby can smell the flowers.
She smiles all day the following day, humming as she remembers the flowers like white moths. Even though the blooms are withered the next day, she remembers their brief, beautiful life. It is like a gift to her from some shaded world just beyond sight.
That night another scent calls her out to the garden: a cloying, sweet tropical smell that speaks of Southern belles, white-pillared mansions, honeysuckle. It almost hurts to breathe in, the smell is so strong, but she breathes shallowly and it is all right. The smell comes from a small shrub with indistinct white flowers; the night-blooming jasmine has announced itself. She pulls a short branch and finds it pliable, strong. She finds she can bend it into a circle and it becomes a wreath for her head. She strolls around the garden, wearing her crown of perfume, and feels like a queen. Faintly, she smells an echo of the moonflower’s scent as she walks by the place at the back fence where she knows they are growing. It smells like laughter.
The next morning she wakes with new energy, despite her shortened sleep. The air sparkles; the day pours freshness and newness into her. She makes her husband a superb breakfast, finishes her morning chores in record time, pours herself a cup of tea and sits looking out at the garden. From the kitchen, the patch behind the shed is invisible, but she knows it is there, feels it, palpable, her own secret moongarden. She misses the perfume of the plants, which dies in the daytime. At lunchtime, she makes a salad for herself, slicing tomatoes and cucumbers out of her husband’s part of the garden, adding some olives and croutons. But she recalls her grandmother again, and decides to add some flowers.
She walks barefoot into the garden, feeling the sun on her head, looking at the blooms with a new eye: which ones would be good to eat, pretty in a salad? The pansies nod at her, and she gathers one or two, but she is inevitably drawn to the moongarden. The plants look dull, sleepy in the daytime. She finds a few tan remnants of last night’s jasmine, gathers the shiny leaf of a solanum. Her crown has grown sere, but she carries it inside, with its echo of last night’s seductive scent. Perhaps it will leak a bit of its seduction into the house, she thinks. She thrusts it into a vase on the table and adds water.
She eats her flower-bedecked salad but can detect no interesting variation in taste. Disappointed, she cleans her dishes and sits down to make a to-do list. The afternoon is warm and somnolent, the drone of the ceiling fan and the faint whisper of a breeze from the back yard combine to make her nod. She yawns, yawns again, and a feeling of great peace steals over her.
Her head bobs once, again, and this time as she snaps herself awake, the withered branch in the vase mimics her motion. Amazed, she turns her head to the right. The branch slowly curls to her right. Somehow this is not frightening, only amusing to her. She turns her head to the left, up, down, leans her head sideways towards her shoulder. The jasmine branch follows her movements faithfully, albeit slowly. She laughs, and from the tiny withered mouths of the blooms comes a silvery tinkle of laughter. Something in her mind is screaming that this is wrong, mad, unreal, but she isn’t listening. She hums, and the shriveled blossoms trill a high, shimmering note. Again she laughs delightedly, and the flowers echo her. She wants to jump up and whirl, to dance, to lift her arms, but a great lazy feeling is wrapping her up like a warm blanket. Her head is so heavy, so heavy, and it nods forward…
She dreams of fields of white flowers in moonlight, of tall strong trees whose trunks are twined with climbing vines laden with cream and yellow and pink blossoms. She walks through the fields and the night air is cool; she looks down and sees that she is naked, but that is all right. The flowers brush against her skin and each touch releases a new perfume: rose and jasmine and honey, musky vanilla and the dark, mysterious incense of myrrh. The petals are cool on her skin. They touch her softly, daintily, as though they might dissolve on contact. The petals melt against her and she absorbs their essences; she grows lighter and lighter, lifted like a petal floating on the breeze. And then she is flying, sailing smoothly above the fields that go on and on and on to the horizon. Above her the moon is cool and the stars are bright, and her heart is as light as springtime.
Then her husband’s red face is thrust close to hers. He is shaking her shoulder, yelling at her, asking why the house is dark and cold, why dinner is not on the table, did she sleep all the damned day long. She groggily wakes from the dream and finds her joints stiff and sore from sleeping with her head on her arms. The branch in the vase is sagging, dead. Her husband, frowning, snatches it up and tosses it into the trash before she can stop him. She wants to move, but feels a great slowness and heaviness in all her limbs, as though all the light parts have floated away and left only this heavy flesh and bone.
He is shaking something in her face: paper? An envelope is crushed in his hand, he yells at her, slaps her viciously across the face. She recognizes the return address — her lab report from the visit to the doctor. He rips the report in two and throws it at her, slaps her and stomps off upstairs. Her cheeks stinging, eyes blinded by tears, she slowly gathers the fragments of the report and pieces them back together. From the stiff, dry clinical terms she teases meaning: she is pregnant.
Now he knows.
The task of making dinner seems beyond her. She stares numbly at the cold, greasy chop, the canned vegetables with their faded colors. The bread mocks her with its banality. She remembers her remarkable salad, so fresh, so vital. She steps into the garden to gather tomatoes.
She can hear him cursing upstairs, hears the slam of the closet door. His cologne, harsh and artificial, hangs in the air after it is gone, failing utterly to mask the smell of sweat and stale cigar smoke. She finds it hard to breathe.
She is pregnant.
The moon has risen, full and round, taking over the night as the last of the light dies in the west. As soon as her foot hits the grass the smell assaults her, overpowers her: the pure white fragrance of the moonflower. Above the fence they nod to her–ten, twenty, two dozen huge white blossoms, like doves that have settled along the top of the boards. Their delicate, intimate fragrance is sweet and queenly, reminding her of first love and deep comfort. She gathers one gently in her palm, an ache in her heart she cannot explain. The bloom falls softly into her hand, a volunteer. Another one detaches, floats past her; she catches it before it reaches the ground.
Now other fragrances reach her, from her own secret garden. She steps quickly to the back of the shed. They are all there: Angel’s Trumpet, with its large tropical trumpets pointing at the ground, swaying. Oriental lilies, with big, beautiful pure white blooms. The night-scented stock’s double flowers give off a cute, spicy-sweet smell that makes her think of a giggly teenager. A thousand blooms, a thousand scents welcome her, call her, entreat her. It’s like coming home to a party.
She is pregnant. A child, a blossom is growing in her.
Behind her, the second floor bedroom window flares harshly as her husband turns on the ceiling light. The moongarden is washed out, and is suddenly pale and wan without the magic of moonlight. The scents fade.
She gathers berries and leaves, stems and seed pods. Dropping to her knees, she gathers a few roots. They come away easily from the soil, almost leaping into her hand. Finally, she gathers the last remaining blossoms of the heady night-blooming jasmine. Arms loaded, she returns to the kitchen.
The roots are scraped, chopped, dumped into boiling water along with the potatoes. The leaves and flowers are washed, carefully to keep from too much bruising; they go into the salad along with the tomatoes and cucumbers. The tiny seeds from the pods of the four-o-clocks are sprinkled delicately over the top of a casserole. Now, no matter what dish she eats, she knows her garden is with her.
He stomps downstairs, shaking a fist in her face because the bed was not made. He grabs her upper arm and twists it savagely; her arm spikes with pain and then goes numb. He aims a fist at her middle and she dodges aside with panic speed, fearful for her passenger. He slaps her instead, yells at her again for getting “knocked up”. He demands that she “get rid of it”. She says nothing, but tears roll down her cheek. Scowling, he sits down at the table.
A white spray of evening gardenia scents the entire room, shining in a slender vase in the middle of the table. The plates are loaded with mashed potatoes, salad, chops. He eats; the atmosphere is tense but nothing is said. She stirs her tea, sweetened with a dollop of honey; she wonders if bees make honey from night-blooming plants. She is not hungry; she feels queasy from fear. Her husband does not notice and cleans his plate. When he is done, he gets up without a word and stalks out of the kitchen. She hears the television click on loudly.
She is almost finished loading the dishwasher when he stumbles back into the kitchen. His face is gray, blotched; his eyes are red. He does not seem to realize that he is walking sideways. He opens his mouth to speak, but only drool comes out. He clasps his belly. His hand is shaking. She stands still as he steps nearer, nearer, his eyes showing bewilderment, confusion. When he is close enough to clutch convulsively at her shoulder, he opens his mouth to speak. No sound comes out, but she smells a faint echo of vanilla and peach on his breath. His body gives a great jerk and he falls down, crashing to the floor like a collapsing tower. Foam appears at his mouth and his body shakes uncontrollably. A high gasping wheeze is the only sound in the room.
One final, agonized gasp, a shudder, and then there is only silence.
She stands silent, numb, as detached as if a wall of glass separated them. She moves, as though walking through waist-high water. She turns not towards the man on the floor, but towards the back door.
She steps out. The night is clear and midnight blue. The moon is cool and remote and untroubled. Above the back fence the moonflowers sway, a host of them spilling over the fence, splashing almost all the way down to the ground on her side. Their faces are open, welcoming. They smell like a smile.
Her shoe comes off as she stumbles across the grass, and she kicks off the other one. She pulls her apron off and tugs the T-shirt off over her head. By the time she reaches the shed, she is naked and the night is cool on her skin.
The garden is alive with blossoms: white, glabrous spikes of flowers, large petaled blooms, tiny purple and pink flowerets peeking precociously out from behind hairy, large leaves. Already the signs of her earlier digging are hidden by the overgrowth. Everything is alive, blooming, almost moving before her eyes.
She touches each flower and names it, their voices clear in her head: Nicotiana alata: flowering tobacco, whose leaves cause convulsions and paralysis. Mirabilis jalapa: the four-o-clock plant, whose blossoms range from pink to purple to white all on one plant, whose peppery seeds cause vomiting, diarrhea, and death. Cestrum nocturnum: glossy, overpowering night-blooming jasmine whose unripe berries cause hallucinations, paralysis, coma and death. Atropa belladonna: whose luxurious flowers and leaves contain enough atropine to convince a man he is flying even as his heart stops. And queen of them all, Angel’s Trumpet, Datura solanacea, whose seeds cause delirium, vivid dreams, and death. All of her pets, all of her treasures, all of her death-carrying friends.
She inhales deeply to gather their essences deep into herself again. She is calm, centered, at peace. She lies down on the soft brown earth and the flowers bend over her, brushing her from head to toe, caressing her, finally covering her. The only sound is the breeze playing in the leaves, as the great moonflowers nod above the wall.
THE END