Love is not always roses and moonlight; sometimes, it is tending a poisonous plant which prefers the sunlight to others of its kind.
This story was contributed by Madison Trupp
I consider my wife a poisonous plant. I found her nestled in a quiet spot, out of the way and inconspicuous, where any stray wanderer too curious for their own good may prick their finger on her. She sprouts from the dirt in all haphazard configurations, her arms twist and her leaves splay but she is content to keep entirely to herself; all else fears to touch her. She is patient, and she is still, watching the world from her guard post. I cannot get too close to her. I lay under her leaves but cannot rub my fingers on their velvet; if I should even brush past her, she leaves microscopic needles in my skin. Still I love her greatly, and I have no doubt that she loves me back, however reservedly she demonstrates this. She is my poisonous plant, my fatal Mary.
It was a crisp day, when the thin layer of snow from a recent storm made melting pools on the trodden curb, that I first took notice of her. Sun gleamed on the white siding of her building, a paleness that made her almost glow, the way she was roosted on her balcony. She sat poised in a green plastic chair, her hands folded neatly on her lap, her eyes skyward. She wasn't particularly beautiful or arousing; she wasn't doing much more than just existing at that point.
I couldn't see much of her from where I stood: beside the storefront window, watering the collection of vibrant perennials in their overflowing planters. Her balcony was a floor above the ground, and we were separated by a bustling pedestrian corridor, cobblestone and antiquated black lamps and milling tourists. The garden and herb shoppe where I worked for years was ever unchanging; we stocked the same lilies and chrysanthemums and roses that we always did, we sold kitchen basil that I could grow from seeds with my eyes closed, and people always asked the same questions when they came in like whether our flowers were local or if they could take them on a flight home. My life was predictable and straightforward, and I had resigned myself to the mundanity of it, but that day—she was the first new thing I had seen in a long time.
For all I knew, she could have lived there all the while, but I had never noticed her until then. Never really seen her, the way you truly see a person, until then.
That vision lasted only a minute—of her resting peacefully in the sunlight—before I had realized my unruly gaze and went back to my work. She didn't notice me. I was glad she didn't; I was not so ready to be seen. I returned to the shoppe and continued with the rest of my day, but every time I grazed the window, I searched for her on the balcony. She must have retreated back into her apartment within the five minutes it took for me to steal another glimpse of where I'd seen her last.
It was just a look. I never expected a minute's glance could provoke so much wonder, yet I found myself relishing that brief vision all the same, returning to it every time I had a spare moment; the sight of that fair-skinned, pale-haired ghost of sunlight.
The second time I saw her it was three days later, and I saw her by virtue of the stakeout I had initiated ever since she made herself at home among my thoughts. I could never seem to catch her until that third day, when I stood at the till ringing through the last customer in the line and snuck a glance out the window beside me, and I saw her there. My heart jumped. I thought, surely, I had been blessed by some sparsely generous deity; some all-powerful maestro had elevated the maudlin strings of my heart's orchestra into a raucous din. As that last customer thanked me and disappeared out the door, I leaned over the counter and observed at an angle that revealed no more than my glimpse before, but this time kept me hidden from view. The notion of spying on a woman from afar could leave a grimy aftertaste if one chewed on it a certain way, but this didn't feel like a perversion, perhaps because I didn't make it so. She was a marble statue modestly placed in a far-off corner. A piece of artwork beneath a dimly fluttering spotlight. A feast for connoisseurs of small delicacies. I was merely regarding her, and I did until another curious passerby turned to the door. I looked away, and then looked back, but she was gone again.
This became my ritual because of the unattainableness of her. How she could be reduced to a fantasy for such long stretches of time—just a memory, an echo of a reflection of a dream I may have had—only to suddenly snap back into existence should I look at just the right time. It was a game that I played in the quietude in the shoppe, wagering with myself whether she would be there if I should turn my eyes to the window at that moment. I liked to think that only in the perfect condition, she would materialize out of the sunshine onto that balcony, into that chair, or maybe she grew into it like a climbing vine, either way looking skyward.
But I, I was never the type to pursue. She could have stayed a dream for all I was good at nourishing and coaxing, which was not at all; I would have let her hover just out of reach forever. I would have accepted that, and yet fate still had its way of crossing strings.
Midway through February, I found myself in a nearby park flourishing with the roots of a community garden. I frequented the pathways during my evening strolls. That day was special, given the higher frequency of handholding I saw, the endless bushels of roses in clammy fists; my shift at the shoppe was busier than ever with lovers keen to impress. Valentine's Day. It never affected me. There wasn't anything I missed that day, because how could you miss something you didn't care for? But she came to me all the same, as if that winged babe Cupid had one last arrow to haphazardly fire, and it was me whom it struck. I saw her deviated from the footpath, rounding a corner adorned with polite hedges, looking as though she was searching for something. A cane in her hand surveyed the ground for some unbidden quarry.
A cane? Yes,
It was what drew my eyes back to the otherworldly stare she reserved for the sky, and not me, prying away at her from below. She never would have seen me down there. Not likely wouldn't have, not might have but ignored me; it was and always would be never, because I realized then that the stare wasn't meant for something that could be seen. This woman who I had discovered across the promenade, who I had made into my carefully crafted secret—she was blind.
At the very least, she could not perceive this garden the way I did. To ask her to pin her gaze on something, even me, was to tell her to breathe underwater. There was a split second in which I grappled with that displacing thought, but even that had not prevented my feet from moving when it occurred to me why she seemed to be searching. I was already crossing the grass for her.
I would tell you that thoughts raced through my mind on my way to her. I would say that my stomach churned with nerves and my heart shriveled with the fear that my approach would be unwelcome, but none of that really mattered; the world had stopped spinning when I first saw her, and when I crossed the threshold of closeness to her, it began again.
We were two elements that clashed with physical division, so rendered by our inherent atomic properties. With her light skin and light hair and pale lips, her hazy eyes that had ensconced daybreak within them, a frame so thin that the wind might take her away and clothed in a blue sweater and white denim jeans. But me? I am black water in a polar ocean. I was juxtaposed in front of her: dark hair and scuffed skin and brooding eyes, with the affability of a cold brick wall. So, you see—she was comprised of those cells nurtured by sunshine, and I was what remained when the light left, that organic matter festering underground. She was a plant sipping sunlight, and I was the rot of a forgotten carcass.
"You're looking for the path?" I asked, in hindsight, somewhat presumptuously.
Perhaps that is why she tilted her head toward me, but didn't move her eyes, and frowned. "Merely admiring the scenery," she spoke in a lofty and celestial voice, and then gripped her cane and tapped pointedly at the grass around my feet, inducing sarcasm. Sarcasm so light that the way it feathered the breeze could have masked it as a soothsayer's whisper.
I felt myself wanting to smile, but was afraid to, for fear that she would parse the gesture as mockery even if she couldn't see it. That the minutia of my appreciation would stir the air and she would feel it.
"My apologies," I said a moment later. "Please, allow me to walk with you."
And she permitted me, albeit with mild exasperation. She didn't bother to hide it. She must have thought all such helpful, hopeful guides were just intruders.
I touched her arm, gently enough to let her know where I was. At that point, I didn't know how much of me she could detect. Her sweeping cane, her unfocused eyes, these were all figments of novelty to me, and I watched her like a bird watching its chick take flight for the first time. "I'm Lárus," I introduced. "I think I've seen you before. Sitting on your balcony."
She drifted alongside me. "It would not be a difficult feat. I do it quite often."
She was deflective of me at first. Uninterested, as I suppose she took me for somebody who could only be uninterested in her back. Or maybe interested, but for the wrong reasons. I didn't want anything from her except perhaps words. She was the subject of my reveries in those odd minutes at the shoppe. I am ashamed to admit that I may even have regarded her as a specimen, but I did want to know more. It took some winding on the part of our brisk conversation before she gifted me with her name: Mary. And though I invited her into the flower shoppe that eve before I said farewell, it took even longer before she gifted me with her company.
I learned, as she began to visit the flower shoppe over the coming weeks, that she had a peculiar fondness for the plants. Mary's presence was always foretold by the tapping of her cane outside the door. I'd see her walk inside, and I would greet her, and ask how she was doing. She only spared me one or two words before she would turn her attention to the flowers. And I would patiently observe her, the way she wandered up and down the aisles, leaning into their smell, touching their petals; I was glad that she would choose to grace me with her presence, even if she didn't speak often. Even if, sometimes, when I did speak to her, she would silence me with pinched lips or a cutting dismissal. In spite of her bristly countenance, I felt there was something that united us. Something unspoken, respected for its never-breached confidentiality; the distance she liked to maintain. The distance I kept. I believe it was my apprehensive reverence of her that gave her the resolve to lower her walls for me.
She asked me when my shift was to end, and she perused the shoppe until then. This was some time in the middle of summer; I remember, because the sun was coming in as it set, and its magnificent pink light touched her and she absorbed it like she usually did, pink on her narrow chin, surreal depth in her half-lidded eyes. She asked me to walk her back to her apartment. It was a trip she had made alone a thousand times, and yet that evening, she wanted something else. Not solitude, but my company. And when we reached the entrance, she invited me inside, and as I hovered behind her while she unlocked her door, she waved at me to follow. I gleaned even more of her from her living space: bare, but comfortable. She worked remotely as a Greek-English translator, transcribing Greek literature into English braille. Mary stated that she had a predilection for historical texts. She was archaic and mythical and simple. She told me that when she needed to rest her fingers, her favorite meditation was to sit on her balcony and feel the sunlight.
I have wondered what sort of plant she would be. She never owned plants, but she has claimed the sweet-smelling flowers to be the most pleasing. I am quite certain that she isn't a sweet-smelling flower. She is hardly a flower at all; not intrinsically easy on the eyes, nor something you would present your beloved, as she would sooner bare teeth than moon with affection. I have looked through all the flowers we keep in the shoppe, and none of them quite strike me as resembling her. We have other plants. We have succulents, but their warnings are garish and she is too delightfully subtle. There are the kitchen herbs, but I feel they are too openly gracious of their bounties, and Mary is selfish and possessive of what little she calls hers. And then there are those plants which I have cultivated myself, in secrecy, in curiosity: I will admit, I have dabbled in poisonous husbandry. One comes to mind: death camas.
It is surreptitious. Tall green stalks and tickly white flowers. So easily overlooked, underwhelming in appearance, but every part of it is made to kill. That is Mary. Quiet and guarded, most at peace when left to soak in the sun. I cannot ingest her, or touch her; I cannot even smell her, or else she will turn me inside out. But that is fine.
Years from when we first met, I still just watch her. I stand at the doorway to our private abode near the edge of the village and see the way she sits on that blanket in the lawn. Her light hair falls upon her shoulders hugged by an itchy orange jumper. Her chin is cocked up, and her eyes are closed as the sunlight kisses her cheeks. She smiles, and so do I.
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Madison Trupp is a simple human with a love for animals, magic, and the Canadian wilderness. She studied Biology at the University of Manitoba and spends her days writing, reading, and observing. Read more from Madison here.