Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Four
Chapter Four: Sharp as a Razor Clam
I lie in bed, exhausted, but a discomfort stops me from drifting off. The moonlit outline of my hand-fasting dress with its patchwork skirt and laced bustier hangs on the wall by my window as if watching over me, ghost of my future. The house rests in darkness, silent other than the rattle of Father’s snores. I close my eyes and see the slash of my betrothed’s insidious grin, obsidian pits for eyes. I feel unwell. Could be nerves, could be bad meat. Restless, I get up, take my lantern and, avoiding the creaking slabs, head to Alora’s room to ask if she feels sick too.
I tiptoe through the living room where I left my betrothed. The horizontal mound of him suddenly shifts position. I freeze and wait, becoming a petrified shadow, until certain he’s fast asleep.
By the front door, the hump of my workbag on its hook. Something within me, an idea, prompts me to lift it down and carry it. I reach Alora’s room and push her door open. Two eyes are on me. Alora sits up in her crib.
“I’m scared.” She reaches up. I want to lift her out and comfort her but pain overwhelms me. I drop my bag. A punch from inside. I buckle, hug my core.
“What’s wrong?” Alora’s voice.
“I don’t kn— ”A sharper pain comes. “Look away, Alora.” My sister covers her eyes. Clutching my side, I stagger and grip Alora’s crib. My fingernails dig into the wood, drown in grain, as my stomach pulses again. Again. Agony.
I yank up my blouse and down the waistband of my skirt. Where the grip of my betrothed left a bruise earlier in the centre of my stomach, a dark ball appears under the skin. The ball swells until the skin above it is translucent. Ball, sharp tip, sharp tip bursts through. My fifth thorn jags and rams through skin until it comes out and away completely. I await the instant relief shedding brings. It does not come.
The girth of this overripe, skewer-tipped thorn fills both my hands. The exit wound doesn’t seal over immediately, leaving fresh pink-orange swirls like the times before. Instead, my skin continues to shift and unfurl. Out bursts a flesh-bud. Golden yellow petals. The folds spiral out with the symmetry and ratios of a whorled seashell. Soft tissues ripple, beat, then come to rest, setting into a small shape: an ear.
Alora, wide-eyed, grabs at her own small thorn nubs. “This…will happen to me?” I cup my hand over my new protrusion. Her quiet night voice sounds so loud.
“Yes…no…not like that.” I struggle to speak. “That one came too fast. Didn’t think I had a fifth.” The hidden whisper behind Emmanuelle’s eyes I could not quite hear—I hear it now, resonating throughout my solar plexus, a fresh subtext in every sound. The secrets of adulthood unlock.
I feel woozy, crazed, but as I look at my sister, the fear on her face, I recall the plan I formulated as I crept to her room.
“Want to hold my horn?” I ask. She nods.
“Well…you can. You can keep it, if you let me take yours.”
“My nubs?”
“And your quills.” I force a smile, explain I don’t want to pull them out, just give them a trim. Her brow furrows. I hold my fresh thorn out. Bribery. She admires its serrated ridge, the root of it, barbed ligaments still attached, yet to whither. Then I pull it back. She looks at her own quills on her upper arms. “They just get in the way, don’t they?” I say.
She puffs her cheeks. “Okay. Trim me. But if it hurts, you stop. Straight away.”
“It’s like clipping fingernails,” I say.
From my rucksack, I draw my diamond-tipped chisel.
I take hold of the brush of quills projecting from her nearest shoulder. She whimpers, tears collect in her eyes. “Squeeze here,” I say and point to the firm beam of wood which forms the lip of her crib. “The smoothness will be temporary. Trimmed quills grow back, I expect. I won’t dig out the roots.”
I rest my chisel on the floor, retrieve Thalia from my pocket, and make her teddy do a silly dance. She wipes her eyes, half-smiles. “I love you, Alora. I do this to keep you safe. Close your eyes. Hum your favourite song.”
I tug, hack, and slash. She moans gently. Her timorous sounds echo somewhere new within me but I refuse to let her wails set their hooks in my heart as I carefully sever all her quills and thorns. She doesn’t understand the why of it all. Can not. And I will not let her.
“There, don’t you look grown up,” I say, although she does not realise what I’ve done is to help her retain childhood. No girl should change their appearance to avoid the male gaze, but there’s a monster in our midst.
“Feel cold,” she says, “my arms don’t look like yours.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” I push up my sleeve and let her trace my swirls. “But one day your skin will be this soft…and you’ll choose who you let touch it. May I?” I point to the largest of her jarred beach collections, lift it down, unlatch the lid. Inside, tens of smooth pieces of sea glass in oceanic shades sting cold my fingers as I scoop out a handful. “I need to smash them.”
“Okay,” she says.
“You must try to sleep.”
As I bend to place a kiss on her forehead, I hear the subtlest of sounds. I freeze stock-still. “What is it?” she asks. It stops.
“Father snoring,” I say and mime an impression then pass the promised reward. “Take this, you’ve earned it.” She leans back in her crib and runs her finger over the edges of my thorn. “Be careful, sharp as a razorclam.”
I place the handful of seaglass pebbles in a pillowcase and jab at them with my chisel until the battered-smooth hazed chunks split apart to reveal their shiny teeth. Tiny knives. Small enough to be lost, yet so sharp they’ll murder by a thousand internal cuts.
I think, erratically, as I hack glassy pebbles into an inconspicuous weapon, how sad it is for something so beautifully smooth and elegantly polished by time, to be shattered in an instant to razor-shards, to be forced to evolve into something dangerous, vengeful. But I must do this to protect her.
Tipping my sister’s shaved loosenings into the sack of cutting mess, I shake them together, then place the sack in the corner of Alora’s room.
Tomorrow, I’ll return to Marmos and give him the rest of my loosenings, seasoned with invisible blades.
*
The noise again. My new ear throbs, a sentient pain.
A dragging sound, the cadence of a hobbling monster. As it grows louder, closer, the whirr of heavy breath punctuates each step. Alora shrugs, her face full of confusion. She does not hear it. I gesture at her to lie down, make herself small. “Do not move,” I mouth, then yank her blanket over her face. I move to stand to one side of her closed bedroom door with my back pressed flat against the wall.
In my hand, the bone-handle of my chisel sits hard, warm in my palm, its sharp blade slick with purpose. This powerful tool is now an extension of my arm, my rage. My heart has never lashed so fast. Tonight, I have felt great pain, and I, now woman, will soon feel bliss.
A third sound. I hear its truth throughout my frame. It is far from a tune of love.
Quiet, yet screeching, knife-on-plate, like a diamond-tipped blade plunging through, cracking open a sternum: the sound of my sister’s bedroom door knob turning.