Beneath Ceaseless Skies #214

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

  Issue #214 • Dec. 8, 2016

  “The Orangery,” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

  “The Jeweled Nawab Jungle Retreat,” by Priya Sridhar

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE ORANGERY

  by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

  Guardian

  I’d held my position as guardian of the Orangery for twenty years when our first intruder broke his way in through the stone wall.

  I walked among the Orangery, watching for roots reaching up from the soil like begging hands. These trees I’d oblige with stream water poured from a basin of pure gold. Then I walked the path with my great pair of shears. From the words of my ancestors, I knew to hold the shears poised at my own heart as I went, so as not to frighten the trees and set them about producing their poison. If a tree wished to be trimmed, she would rattle her branches. I trimmed until she stopped her shaking.

  After my rounds I paced the grounds thrice before retiring to my cottage beside the greenhouse to read stories I knew by heart. Little room in the Orangery meant the guardian’s library was limited. The books on my shelves I had chosen as a young woman: stories of adventure and romance, stories that left me with a pitted longing. They weren’t the books I would have chosen in my middle age. Still, I not only read them but ran my hands along their covers, rooting my fingers in their engraved spines and decorated binding. They’d been bound with the skin of beautiful people, the only skin I’d ever touched. Their pages were formed of delicate reed paper. I was lying back in my reading chair with one hand across the book spread against my chest and the other between my legs when I heard the trees’ startled shrieking.

  I jumped to my feet and grabbed my spear from the mantle and ran from the cottage through the woods and along the wall until I found the place the intruder had entered: a large swath of stone wall, toppled since I’d last checked it. The wall had never before failed. I made note of the number of strides it had taken for me to reach it and then darted off through the woods, searching for the intruder.

  I didn’t find him that night, though I searched until my legs throbbed and my eyes ached from squinting in the dark, for though the seasons didn’t touch the Orangery, night and day still folded the woods in their embrace. When my legs refused to carry me any longer, I rested against the wall, guarding the break from which I thought any intruder might, having realized the lack of treasures inside the Orangery, escape.

  * * *

  Guide

  From here you see perhaps only a forest. But come, let’s step along the path through the woods, and I’ll show you. Do you see? Their shapes, the curve of their trunks? Some were of a flowering age when they changed. These show their differences more keenly: three knots, one for the breasts, two for the hips. No, no, there are no nipples. Trees reproduce by dropping seed.

  This one is called Lotis. See there the bronze plaque half-buried in her trunk. She’s one of our oldest. Over the years she has swallowed her name, as though she wishes to forget that she ever held a form of skin-and-bone, of blood. Our books tell us that she enjoyed the drink, the drug, the dance. Our books tell us that she loved no man twice.

  If you read your guidebooks, you’ll find a story of her transformation. You’ll find a warning: don’t eat of her flowers. The story is a lie. The warning, though, is true. She’s here surrounded by those who didn’t follow it. See their shapes, too: women, men, and children. They may look the same as our dear Lotis, but they do not flower. If you look closely, you’ll see that they are hollow. These are not trees but shells. Besides, the Lotis’s blooms are said to taste of your mother’s perfume, bitter to the tongue.

  I’ll give you the real story, if you’re ready to hear it. If you prefer to follow your guidebooks, please move up along the trail. You’ll find plaques beneath, or inside, each of our Main Attractions. Those who wish to know the world for what it is, please leave your books in this basket here. Listen, then, to the story of Lotis, and follow me and truth along the path.

  Rowdy girls are always the first to go. Some men think they can tame them. Lotis’s men thought this. She had them once and let them go, no matter how they begged her to marry them beneath the lotus tree in the center of town.

  The farm boy was no different. He bred his father’s sheep, milked his father’s cows, and slaughtered his father’s pigs. He tended his mother’s apple orchard and harvested her vegetable garden. Lotis found his quaintness endearing when he asked her, with a dip from his waist, to dance. He wasn’t terrible to lay, but a rowdy girl only settles when she’s good and ready, and Lotis was not, no matter how sorely satisfied she was after their lengthy encounter.

  She expected to see him again at the festivals. After all, his farmer father sold his pigs and wool there. Sometimes she bought a leg of tender lamb from his mother to line her empty stomach before coating her throat with wine. She didn’t expect to see him standing over her in the grass where she slept one morning after an uneventful evening of lackluster socials. She had gone to the field to take in the shock of sunrise, alone. He straddled her waist, stinking of pig shit. In the distance a donkey brayed five minutes too late.

  She wrapped her hand around his ankle and dug her nails into the flesh until it bled. When he jerked his leg away, she struggled to her feet and ran across the grass, down the hill, to the center of town where Apollo played his music and mixed his potions.

  “Give me a weapon,” she cried. “Priapus has tried to take me.”

  Apollo looked up from the crafting of his new lyre and sneered. Everyone knew his story: a god on vacation in the world. An immortal who had fallen for the mundanities of mortals. Everyone knew, too, his magic. “I’ve seen you with Priapus,” he said.

  “Please. He could be coming this way.”

  “He’s told us all of his intention to marry you. Beneath the lotus tree.”

  “I don’t want to marry him.”

  “Why not? He’s good to his family. He’s handsome and healthy. He’s said to be good with his spear.” Apollo winked. “You’re running out of time.”

  Lotis grabbed his wrist with both her hands and twisted the skin in opposite directions.

  “Stop, that hurts,” said Apollo, too calmly.

  “I won’t stop unless you help me.”

  “Yes, fine.” Lotis let go. Apollo’s wrists bore the imprint of Lotis’s fingers. He uncorked three bottles and poured the contents into a golden bowl. “Drink this.”

  She gulped the syrup down like wine. Her legs fused into a trunk. Her fingers split and split and split until they were fans of green leaves. Her eyes popped out of her tree-skull and bloomed into the beautiful white flowers of the lotus.

  The townspeople were overjoyed at the appearance of another lotus under which to marry. They erected a statue of Priapus beside the tree.

  * * *

  Guardian

  I knew him first from his music, the haunting voice that came to me through the air. I followed it until I saw him leaning against one of the trees as though he hadn’t given chase all night and still possessed all the energy of a well-rested child. His fingers trespassed in a blur across the strings of his lyre. He’d draped his blue button-down over one shoulder, but his chest was bare. I approached, spear at the ready though I didn’t want to pierce him, for doing so would stop his singing, or at least change it irretrievably into a ghastly moan of death.

  “Oh, guardian, guardian, where has she gone?” he sang. “I’ve journeyed long but my girl won’t come out to accept her song.”

  “Who have you come for?” I said, pushing the spear’s point into his nave
l. He didn’t have to tell me his name; one of the books I’d brought with me to the Orangery told the tales of old gods and men and names I’d seen etched in our plaques at the bases of our named trees.

  “You know who I’m here for.”

  “I do not. As I understand it, you’ve had your fill of many women, perhaps half of our named. How am I supposed to tell from the stories which maiden you really had your heart set on?” I pushed until a drop of red blood dripped from the button hole; it traveled down the shaved trail and disappeared beneath the waist of his overalls. “Tell me her name and I’ll show you her resting place.”

  “Daphne,” he whispered, boring his eyes into mine. He let the lyre fall to the ground. He grasped the point of the spear with both hands and pulled it further into his belly. “I’ll die before I leave without her.”

  I’d dreamt of him as I had dreamt of all men who graced the reed pages in my books, deprived of the company of men for the whole of a life and feverous with curiosity. If only the spear were my hands digging into his flesh, I would pull his stomach out and make of his body a new book. Instead I pulled back my weapon.

  “I’ll take you to her in the morning,” I said. “Until then you’ll go to my cabin and wait for me while I mend the mess you made in my wall.”

  “I don’t want to be alone. I’ll go with you.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. I know where your Daphne sleeps. Either you go to my cabin and wait until I come back for you, or you taste the point of my spear.”

  “I don’t know the way,” he said, but already he bent to gather his lyre into his arms.

  “Follow the path,” I said.

  He hesitated then nodded and turned to follow the path. I watched him walk until I could no longer see him.

  “Daphne,” I whispered. “Show me where you’re hidden.”

  In the distance I heard her rustling. I walked the path until I came to a grove of stumps with a single laurel queening over the dead. Unlike Lotis, Daphne did not tempt with poison blossoms, but still those trees that dared to drink from her soil perished before her terrible beauty; her virgin innocence sucked too much sustenance. I touched my palm against the rough of her bark.

  “It’s not a sin not to want the way other women want,” I said. Across my chest I could still feel the weight of a book against my skin. I thought of how she’d rejected the man whose skin surely felt as good, or better, than those long-dead books’ skins. “It’s okay to want, too.”

  I removed the plaque submerged at her roots, prying it from the place where she had begun to wrap her wood around it. I traveled deeper into the trees until I found one of the nameless, a dwarf of a laurel. I placed the new plaque at her feet, kicking dirt over the name so that Apollo might think it had been there long before he had burst through my wall. I buried her original plaque ten strides from her base. I patched the wall as best I could with spit and stone and dirt until the evening returned and I could no longer see the hole for the darkness behind it. Then I followed the shelter path and found, in my bed, a naked man with both hands drawn beneath his head.

  * * *

  Guide

  This space here, see, this empty hole where once roots reached deep into the soil, once held a tree with the wounds of a mother upon her bark: a scar near her roots where she tore between the legs. Dryope wasn’t like the first we saw. She loved only two men. The first, her husband, had already fathered her child when she stumbled upon Apollo with his lyre. Her husband was good to her; he cooked the meat he hunted, fed the child so that Dryope might claim a moment to sleep or weave or lay with Apollo in their secret glade.

  An artist, Apollo had little to offer Dryope when his clothes cloaked his body, but when he removed them he offered her what she could not weave: a pair of eyes that didn’t know her in her worst moments. Astride him she was invincible and untouchable, though she did allow him to run his hands across the stretch marks that streaked her hips like constellations. Her husband named the marks; Apollo didn’t notice them. When he asked her to leave her husband, she refused.

  “What good will that do me?” she said, gathering her clothes. It was time for her to return to her family in the hut they’d built upon land that was once the center of a bustling town, empty now of all but a lotus tree and a crumbling statue of a man with a cock that cast a shadow larger than the statue’s height. She and her husband mocked the statue when they were light with drink.

  Each time she left Apollo, she told herself it was the last. Then his song called her across the river, and her husband would know the wild look in her eye. He would take the child from her breast and tell her, go, go. Disappear. We’ll be here when you return.

  The night of her transformation she asked Apollo for a dance. He obliged. He wore the leather she’d brought for him, made by her mother. He allowed her to tie his hands with reeds. When the drizzle had ended, leaving only dew across the grass, she stood to leave but was pulled back into the dirt by an insistent hand.

  “You’ll stay with me,” Apollo said, digging his nails into her wrist.

  She wrenched her wrist away. Apollo grabbed her hands. She tried to leave, to roll away, to run, but he wrapped a reed around her wrist, around her feet.

  “I’ll make you stay.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for her life to end, for the devastation of losing control of her body, but she heard only the sound of feet sloshing through mud then nothing. When she opened her eyes, Apollo was gone.

  When finally she broke the reeds and ran back to her family, she found her husband’s bags gathered, the baby strapped to his chest.

  “You should have told me it was him,” he said. “I only ever wanted you to be happy.”

  “I don’t want him,” she said. “He doesn’t know my constellations.”

  But her husband no longer trusted the words from her mouth, too tainted were they with the spit of a god-man.

  Dryope wove until her fingers bled. She sunk her fingers into the place her daughter had first glimpsed the world until she slept. She dreamt until Apollo came for her.

  “I don’t want you here,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be here. I brought you a gift.”

  “What is it?”

  “To ease your pain.”

  “I don’t want anything you have to give.” She pulled a blade from her bedside table. “Leave.”

  When he went, he left the vial beside the place from which she had pulled the blade.

  Hours passed. Days drifted like wayward clouds. One month without her family made of her a waif without the will to hunt on her own. She had asked the gods for freedom and had been granted an excess. She had asked to be looked at and now faced the sorry stone gaze of each villager she passed any time she left her hut. No one helped her. No one spoke her name when she was there.

  She drank the syrup. Her branches broke through the thatched roof of her hut. Her roots broke through the stone of the floor, sending cracks like lines drawn to indicate the dreamy shapes of constellations. For years no trees grew around her, until her name had been forgotten and her legend erased. We uncovered it, of course. We uncover all such legends and bring them here to the Orangery where they might live again.

  And what of the roots, the empty hole? She did not die in her tree-form. No, she was cured. Yes, there is a cure, or was. There is one man who knew it. One man who brought it here, who thought to use it to fuel his own long-lost desire. But should we name it cure or curse? Who’s to say that the trees don’t prefer being trees, that the burden of womanhood is too much for some to bear?

  You understand. I see the way you touch these trees. There is no coming back from it. There is no escape that erases all the memory from your bones, even when you no longer have bones, even when you no longer have memory. There and back again. I still feel his hands, burned like imprints in my skin.

  * * *

  Guardian

  To say I didn’t long for him would be a lie, for I ached deep in my b
elly to feel the prick of that spear. But it could have been any man, any skin so much like the skin of my books but warmer and softer to the touch.

  “Come here.” Apollo beckoned with one long finger.

  I stood beneath the cabin ceiling so low it brushed the top of my head. Cracks in the wall zigzagged like lightning bolts. The trees held this place together while tearing it apart. Through those cracks I glimpsed the limbs of trees poking through, more insistent than a single man’s finger.

  “I will not,” I said, crossing my arms to cover my chest.

  “Why not?” Apollo propped himself up on one bent arm. “The looks you’ve been giving me.”

  I looked from crack to crack, tree to tree. “Aren’t you here for someone in particular?”

  He raised a single eyebrow, a pirate villain, a lothario, a lion in man’s clothing. The books, at least, had prepared me for men like him, if my lack of contact with them hadn’t.

  “You’ll take me to her? Even without my offering?”

  “What else can I do? You’ve come all this way.”

  He stood from the bed and slipped on his blue shirt, pulled on his overalls. Through his belt loop he wore a tiny ax. How had I failed to see it before?

  “I didn’t come a long way,” he said. “Don’t think I’ve been missing her my whole life or anything. Had a job near here is all. Thought it’d be silly not to look her up, see how she’s been.”

  “I think you’ll find her less than communicative about her life since you.” I gathered my shawl to cover as much of my body as I could, to protect against both the cold and the man. “What’s your work?” I held the door open for him to pass. He brushed against me as he exited the cabin.

  “Lumberjack,” he said. “Well, I operate the lumber company.”

  I stopped and gripped harder the knife at my hilt.

  As he turned to me, the shadows fled from his face. “That’s not what I’m here for. It’s just another strange job for a strange life. To stay in the mortal world, one must play the mortal game.”