Stealing Lavender: Chapter Three

The Present
Chapter Three

“It is what you fear.
I do not fear it; I have been there.”
—Elm, Sylvia Plath

         It had been a lifetime when Mara received the call, a newborn vine for her to latch onto and be drawn into the bewitching hour. Like the red balloon, Lavender traveled some great distance before plopping down out of the stuckness of transiency. Out of air and flattened as if after radical surgery; an aura still rising but folding into itself differently. Her colorscape was a bit more burning red, remnants of fire and sage. Mara had relented against reality in the meantime, as if Lavender’s absence had left a gap in memory that only hypnotism could recall.
         Lavender was a witchy woman now and was loved endlessly by a music man who enjoyed hearing her sing. He exuded warmth and it escaped him in an ambience of marigold and melon. You could tell by looking at him that his heart was tender, his character moral, and he would smile with every crevice in his face when she opened her mouth,
         “She’s a bird,” he would dote after the manners her voice lilted, every little thing she said in hymns. There was a small whiff of oranges, the walls of their closed quarters sticky with that sap and Mara looked around to see if it reached their noses.
         “If not, she is close to it,” Mara greenly added, stolen by this lure of kinship that tangled in her throat like a knot of hair. She paused to catch Lavender watching her. Mara had stopped breathing, an anatomical promise that Lavender’s wise bird had been kept hidden. Her mouth straightened into a pursed line of remorse. Lavender giggled at that with another song,
         “Would you like a tarot card reading?” And for the first time, a hesitation to give Lavender what she wanted soaked through Mara’s skin in sweat and tears from the years they had missed. They had become strangers, and Lavender wanted to not only uncork, but knock the closed bottle of Mara right off the side of the table.
         Mara had this blood orange mane of chaotic waves that fell all around her, grasping at the hind side of her spine like a limb. It was a living thing that moved with her, in every direction, and she pulled the chaos back to think and watch as Lavender ran a deck of cards between her dainty fingers. They were acoustic fingers, meant for playing and they were pleasantly manicured. Mara’s nail beds carried histories of ink and the cucumbers she pulled from the yard earlier that day. Her cuticles were tattered and blood thirsty as far as her pain would take her; a habit built into her by an anxious mother and a desolate father.
         The deck felt foreign in my chilly hands, frozen tips even in March when the butterflies returned bouncing and the scent of freshly cut grass hung in the air like another omen. There was an old porch light, dingy and flickering above us, and I felt haunted. There were flimsy lights flickering in me, the fire in their bellies faint with spark, like I wasn’t all the way connected. I shuffled them anyway, dealt them back to her as one slipped into the unknown. A secret kept. She pulled my past from the top, then my present, and my future, the creases in her gorgeous face an array of ugly disappointment and heartening warmth. She choked back her knowledge,
         “The Devil is in your past,” a slight whisper that clung to the charged, electric space between us; a static bubble of hindsight that rattled me with its genuinity.
         “And the Eight of Swords is in your present.” Her heavy eyes trailed, involuntary and just, over the face of the only other soul on that rickety porch. My reversed King of Swords.
         Lavender and Mara both had music men. The two of them had tried to bond but there was a malignancy that lived inside Aiden and it seeped like baned verve onto everything he touched. Especially Mara. He was cruel and he frightened her, in the way his willowy darkness stared straight into her like she was bottomless. And how trying to love him was like filling that up with every time she ever cut herself behind closed doors; a sickening of shame and bigotry that stayed with her, wherever Mara went. It trailed after her like a stench she could never figure out how to wash off. Aiden wrote her ballads; stained sonatas in half-sung melodies, of all the ways he wished he could love her how she deserved. And because someone, somewhere, some sad place once told her that was enough, it was. And she endured.
         They had met online and he had asked her questions about herself that fostered self-reflection and a drive to doubt the very world she lived in. The way he pried so deeply into his own sphere of existence intrigued her. So she let him pick up that small world of hers, in his colossal hands and turn it every which way, until Mara could no longer sense where the surface started. Aiden fed on Mara’s empathetic nature, his belly bloated with succor and used this as an open window into her sentiments regarding her family, her friends, her every little thing. He stuck his filthy fingers into every bit of her and eventually Mara became more him than her; another mirror. Lavender saw this.
         Mara and Aiden brought their favorite books with them that day. Reading and the apprehension of thought was something for which they were kismet. He was drawn to her intelligence and she, secure in his reasoning to understand her. They would delve into one another for hours until finally, like an unborn babe needing to hatch, his fingers would manically kick against his bobbing knees. And compulsively, he would violently tear down her mountains; her plains of nothingness, a company he yearned for more than he ever did her. Mara gave Lavender a book of symbols she had to carry with both arms and her most beloved, Ariel. Lavender slipped Iodine and Welcome To My Country into Mara’s knapsack, promising revelries. Both of them changed Mara’s life. Nearly a decade later.
         But that evening, Lavender put them to bed with bellies full of salutary pizza; spinach, feta, and tomatoes that Mara’s uneasy stomach wanted to separate from as soon as it entered. A retching sentiment overwhelmed her. Every part of her was displaced and nauseous. Aiden was an uncanny six foot five and gained quick authority over the tendril of bedding that was the sleeper sofa Lavender arranged for them. Selfish even when unconscious. Mara was omitted from rest as the temperature of Aiden’s overgrown body gained heat while he entered REM. It all made her seasick; the reading, its resonance, the insufferable fever of her lover that shook her until her innards were churned into one.
         Suddenly, my insides were upside down and I was faint even flat like the horizon, the hues of who I was melting into the grainy fabric of her mattress. I shot up quick, an arrow with nothing to pierce, still fixed by fragmentation and caught by bowstring. Instinct found me the bathroom, but providence had me in an open doorway, Lavender’s nude form taken to clay and hardened over a millenia of myth and devotion. She was a goddess. Her hips were mirrored crescents that led into a suppled bust that made my mouth water. The sheer light of the moment struck me with lucidity like the celestial had pin-pricked me, the little bubbles of myself trickling out of me onto the white tiles. My eyes stung. She was a sun as she locked eyes with me. I ran.
         Those priceless, wordy companions were never exchanged back, much to Mara’s dismay. The next morning had felt like fraying, as if all the bloody cords that connected her to Lavender had been sucked dry and slit. Lavender had spoken to her like a mother, like Mara had some notion she needed to learn. She blamed herself, her lack of self, and she felt inferior to Lavender. It was a sign. A sign that Lavender had really left her behind; whimsical and flowery and abandoned like the child’s spoiled hands. Completely alone.
         How could she? Mara was a survivor, she had suffered an atrocity of sunsets, each one mirrored by a monster who lapped at her open wounds like fresh milk. How could she? When Mara had needed her in this unfathomable manner that lacked tongue and nous. Even then, she had known it was less about the materials and more about the pieces of herself she had willingly given away. But still, Mara festered, that wound so great and infected with the ails of abuse and mental illness. She slipped into the silky caress of her manic rage flawlessly. It had been there the entire time. She had never been alone. It had been waiting for her.