Eat Bitter Flowers

The man beside her had been in the military, Ruby decided. There was a certain way that military men sat, with their legs shoulder width apart and their hands folded solemnly. He sat in a manner that could easily be distinguished from the man who sat directly opposite from her. That man, she decided, was an ex-con.

“So which one of us is going to begin then?” Said a young woman wearing a gawky black blouse that exposed her midriff. Everyone avoided everyone else’s gaze, and Ruby stared into her cup of coffee that was no longer hot. She had always been more of a tea person, but the motel had none. The coffee reminded her of an oil well, and she wondered drily why people even bothered with bitter things. “People drink coffee so they can mask the bad taste already in their mouth” wheezed an old woman with white hair and white eyes as if replying to her thoughts. Ruby had assumed that she was blind, but maybe she could simply see and hear other things. “Then why does stuff that smells good sometimes taste bitter. You know, like vanilla extract, or flowers?” The military man beside Ruby asked, in a voice that contained a rather curious and unnatural gentleness. As if he he’d had to practice trying to sound approachable. “And how do you know flowers are bitter?” Asked the young woman with the midriff. Around the table, everyone sat back expectantly. The military man, unfolded his hands and looked around the table cautiously, and then grudgingly. He knew that it was he who would be beginning. “I suppose I’ll tell my story first.” He said, in a stark voice that sounded like it could not belong to anyone else.

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I do not have a superstitious bone in my body, I can promise you that. But I saw her. In my memory, she is delicate, like the curly bits of frost that sometimes form at the end of branches. Sometimes if you are careful, you can smooth your fingers over them, but most of the times they fall away like little shards of broken glass. Most of the time we forget that glass is also severe, that there is an edge to it.

That is why, in my memory, I am also afraid. I had been in a little silk village on the outskirts of Saigon, and the natives had warned me against her. But as I have already said, I do not have a superstitious bone in my body. So when I was told to be wary of little girls with white dresses, I simply thought to myself why should a grown man like I be afraid of a little Vietnamese girl?

My platoon had just gotten out of the bush, and we were all tired. It was as if the Vietnamese sun bled wax and burned its hot droplets on our white skin. It was as if the Vietnamese soil was able to sense our foreignness and wished to devour us. In the bush I had seen a man bite through his own tongue as his comrades were forced to saw off on of his rotting arms. I was not in the mood for legends and wives tales. I was not in the mood for the enchanting dirt roads of the silk village or the lanterns hung up on houses. I was suspicious of anyone that was not from my platoon.

That is why I didn’t accept the silk shawl when the old woman gave it to me. I was worried that under it hid something dangerous, like a machete, or a poisonous snake. The woman looked harmless enough, but you couldn’t tell. It was a country I wasn’t used to. “For your wife, soldier” she had said wryly holding the carefully crafted silk like a child in her arms. I simply shook my head and watched as the old woman walked haltingly on. “Guess you’ll be seeing that silk girl sometime soon” one of the boys beside me said with a grin. We both laughed, neither of us believing the legend that we had been told by a drunken old man outside of a pub.

The villagers called her Song Bin Mai. The silk girl, and it was said she appeared to those that did not accept gifts of silk. But later that night I saw her.  I saw her. A little girl wearing a long silk dress. The lanterns became dim in the street, and the moonlight made her skin and her dress look eggshell white. In her mouth was a black tulip, and she was nibbling on it cautiously, in the same manner that European ladies sometimes nibble at their food.

She began to walk slowly towards me, and my feet became rooted in the ground. As she came closer, the face that I once thought beautiful was contorted with malice. The tulip fell from her lips and she smiled at me. Her teeth were shaved away to sharpened points, and I became terribly afraid. My platoon men found me passed out on the ground in the moonlight. They had simply assumed I’d had too much to drunk. I didn’t tell them otherwise. They had said I had been holding a bouquet of tulips, but when one of them had tried to touch them, the fresh petals had suddenly wilted away. Tied with a silk ribbon onto a stem of the bouquet had been a note, printed in English.

Flowers are bitter, soldier. It read. To this day I will never know exactly what happened.

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 The members of the table pushed their chairs back with a sigh. The story was done, tomorrow there would be another one. The military man was the first to leave, and Ruby wished that she could follow him. Instead she took the stairs up to her room. The radiator did not work, and yesterday she’d had to sleep in the cold.

She was thinking about Richard, the boy who had tried to give her a silk scarf before she had left. She had not accepted it because it had belonged to his dead mother, and because she knew that he loved her and that she could never love him. The soldier’s story had been a haunting thing, but it had also been a foreign thing. About a country Ruby had never been to and a legend she had never heard. Obviously nothing like that could happen in America. This country did not have old magic or old Gods.

But still, she had been offered silk, and she had refused it.

Ruby walked into the room with a broken radiator and welcomed herself to the familiar cold. The window was open and the breeze made the light coloured windows flair outwards, like a willow-the-wisp. Under her feet something crunched. Ruby stared down at the pile of wilted black tulip petals.

“Flowers are bitter. Ruby”

From The Memory of Conrad Dalton

The hospital was not really a hospital.  It was a dainty little thing, built in a style that the Americans called Queen Ann. Once it had been called Germaine’s School for Girls, but that had been before the revolution. The only remnants of the hospitals academic past were the girls who had stayed to become nurses. Girls like Molly Rhine and Frances Hearing who hated the war because it had taken their brothers, and hated the red coats, the enemy forces, because they were morally obliged to save them- if they could.

Of course Conrad was not in the state to know that he was hated by all of the nurses, except the ones who were secretly loyalists. He was not in the state to do much at all- except wait to die.

He had never really thought about dying. Conrad had joined the army because that was what his brothers had done. Initially, the whole fighting and dying part hadn’t worried him. He had been worried about having to share a tent with four men at a time and having to smell them and change in front of them and awkwardly watch them change in front of him because there was hardly space to politely turn your head.

Jeromy Sanders, a boy who like he, had probably lied about his age on the papers, was one of his army mates. He’d been from the countryside near Effingham and had talked with a strange lisp that might have been caused by his oddly shaped front teeth.

Conrad had been changing out of a sweat stained shirt and into his new red coat, carefully scanning the brass epilates and matching buttons when Jeromy’s head had first popped through the slit of the tent.

“Don’t let me bother you. I’ll probably see you naked a million times before this is all over” Jeromy had said with that strange lisp of his. Conrad had blushed. He had been surprised he did so- now that he was a soldier with his own coat. He hadn’t thought that soldiers could blush.

Jeromy was dead now. Conrad had watched him die, and he had been shocked that he hadn’t been able to feel anything. He hadn’t had time to feel anything, not without dying himself. So Conrad had turned Jeromy’s head downward into the mud- into the mud so he couldn’t see his face, and trudged on.

Now as Conrad lay in the hospital that was not really a hospital, he did have time to feel, and the emotions struck him as the bullet had.  Suddenly he was aware of everything at once. The agony he felt, not in a specific place, but woven into the fabric of his being. The course gauzy bandages he felt that were wrapped around his body. In the corner of his mind he felt the presence of the nurses, girls who had traded in their knit academy socks for bleak white uniforms.

Conrad could hear the pair of them talking about him. He wasn’t sure how he had heard them because he knew he certainly wasn’t conscious, but he heard them. Heard their hushed whispers and felt their sideways glances in his direction.

“Those army Generals. They do the only surgery they know how to. Amputation. Poor fellow. If he wakes up, he will live his whole life without a leg”

And now Conrad knew that one of his legs was missing and suddenly, in a way that was different from Jeromy’s death- he felt nothing at all.

Instead of feeling, he thought of his childhood, and a fairy tale about a tin soldier with a missing leg that his Nan had told him when he was small. He thought about the summer that he had spent loving Clara Olson’s cousin. A girl of fourteen, who at the time had been two years older than him. Her name had been Frances Hearing and all of the other boys had agreed that she was an exotic creature because she was from the colonies and didn’t wear a bonnet and didn’t mind swearing. Conrad had spent the whole summer, not talking to Frances, but staring at her silhouette in the windows of Clara’s house. Once he had seen her open the windows to smoke a pipe that was obviously not hers. He had been staring, and when she saw him she had waved.

It was then that Conrad had decided that one day he would marry Frances Hearing, but that had been the summer when he was twelve. Before the first frost had fallen she had taken a ship back to the colonies to rejoin her family in the wild place where girls swore and smoked.

Slowly the bandages around his mouth were unravelled and a bitter tasting liquid was pored through it.

“I can make it go away.” A soft female voice said. “All of it. If you want to. It would be peaceful. . All have to do is imagine the world as an ice crystal. Perfection. Smooth places. All you have to do is imagine yourself out of it.”

From the faraway place that his mind was in, Conrad thought that he nodded. More bitter liquid was poured into his mouth and he felt hot raindrops on his face, on the places the bandages did not cover. No- not raindrops-tears.

In the hospital that was not really a hospital, a girl named Frances Hearing sobbed over the body of a dead British soldier. A friend of hers, Molly Rhine, put a hand on her shoulder. The girls had done the same thing many times before, but that was when they had both been classmates, and the things they had been sobbing over were exam papers and not dead bodies.

Molly had not cried since her brother had died four months ago, but Frances still felt too much.

“Oh Fran it happens” Molly said mopping up her friends tears with the white kerchief in her pocket.

“I know Molls. But this one was different. He felt so familiar. He was unnerving- you know. Just staring at him made me feel incomplete.”

Frances continued to stare at the bandage wrapped, one legged soldier and wondered if she had seen him before. No that was impossible. He simply reminded her of a story she had read once

Matches- Matches

Frost drips into melting Cedars

we brave soldiers we search forever

for what we lost those years ago

for what we lost with battled foe

matches-matches strike just one

to see the earth before the sun

to see the world beyond the trees

and watch the saints drown inside the sea

matches-matches strike just three

to pave a path for you and me

to earn a place among the done

to kneel before the rising sun

matches- matches all burnt out

no one is there to hear you shout

no one is there to hear you plea

at least thank us for your apathy