time.
I sat with Aunt Eva in her garden. She made homemade lemonade and put something alcoholic in it. She wore an extravagant, very low cut green dress with a string of fake pearls. She smelt of honey and spices. The heat beat down on us; we were two eggs in a frying pan sizzling gently. A quill rested in her hand like a wand, tapping against the garden chair. I think she would be capable of serious witchcraft. She wiped her lips with her sleeve and looked at me. “Darling child. Do you know that I own a shotgun?” I shook my head, I didn’t. She looked at me quite seriously. I could feel some dark magic humming under her words.
“I want you to listen very carefully to me, Pomegranate. I think something very bad is going to happen to you today. I have heard it in dreams. I have seen it in the smile of cats. Read it in the frog spawn.” She sat back into her sun chair and glugged down the remainder of her lemonade. I didn’t know whether to be worried or to laugh.
“Will you protect me, Auntie, with your shotgun?” I said, almost mocking her.
She stared at me. She had something alien in her eyes, something from a remote star.
“When he comes for you, I will be with you, and I will stop it.”
A long silence ensued between us. I could hear the wind pick up over the water, rustling, secretive. A cool sleepiness. She yawned and brushed strands of hair out of her eyes and then smiled a deep secret smile like a crocodile, and looked upon me. “I am going to tell you a story about me and your mother, when we were young girls in Appledoor. Would you like that, Pomegranate?”
“Yes,” I said, not really thinking. The sun was in my eyes, making me sleepy, making me dizzy. And so she began. She told me the tale, which she had told me many times. She told me the tale of the Lightning Tree in the field of flowers. And she said when she had finished the tale, she would take me to the field and show me the tree. And so I listened. I shut my eyes and let myself slip into the words, like maple syrup oozing over pancakes, with satisfying easiness.
When Eva and my mother were ten years old they went to live in a foundlings home called Honeybee House, the other side of the river. Their parents, my grandparents, had died in an accident. A train had derailed off a bridge; they had been trapped inside and drowned. Eva and mother never talk about their parents and they have no pictures of them. I wonder sometimes if they ever existed, if they are both strange women from another galaxy, touched with stardust. Maybe all my ancestors are borrowed from other people, photographs Aunt Eva has collected from her flea markets and adopted – made into an intricate jigsaw past. A fake scrapbook of memories. I wonder then, who are these women really? Maybe they are not human. Maybe they are the daughters of gods dropped from the heavens. And then, what would that make me?
The Lightning Tree
Aunt Eva – as lazy as a cat, as beautiful as fire roses, as mad as the buzzing of bees – began her story. A mile outside Appledoor was a huge field, lush with wild grasses, with a solitary tree. A tree that had been hit by lightning and was black as charcoal and fifty feet high. If you placed your hands on it, it felt warm. Like apple pie from the oven. And it smelt. It smelt of syrup and of blood. When Aunt Eva and mother were little girls they would come and visit the tree and play in its branches. They would cast spells by its roots and make wishes in its secret holes. It never spoke to them. It just listened and watched. Aunt Eva said she would leave secret messages for her sister, and sometimes gifts. Once she hung a jade hairpin from its branches, a dangling gift on a pink ribbon.
On the summer of their eighteenth birthdays, my father arrived into the village selling soap, and wooed my mother with his crooked charming smile and perfumed words. He stayed clear of Aunt Eva. He was frightened of her, thought she was a witch. He thought of her as one of those women too beautiful for men. Only the gods would touch her. My mother took my father to show him the lightning tree. He had no interest in such things. He held her hand by the roots of that tree, promised her a thousand things and then fucked her. It was over quickly. He left in the morning, soap samples jiggering in his bag.
But Aunt Eva had done something. She had carved an image of him out of the tree. She had dug in the earth where he had cum by the roots and smeared it over the doll. And she had chanted under a red moon and hung him from the tree. While my mother wept, pregnant with me, Eva was enforcing revenge. And the gods listened to her.
He was made impotent and diseased. And Aunt Eva laughed. And the gods laughed. And my mother wept.