Beth rolled out of her embrace and ran her fingers through the grass, pinching each flower she came to, pulling at it, ripping it from the ground and moving on to the next. She carved a barren path in the hillside.

Belle and I sat in the blue flowers and watched her trail lengthen in the stretching dark.

“She won’t find it that way.” Belle brushed torn petals from her shawl and wrapped it back around her shoulders.

“She’ll realize that soon.”

“But will she realize it before she pulls out all the roots?”

“No. Not her.” My heart ached for her, but I smiled. “That one breaks worlds.”

“Then how will we find the lad?”

“He’ll be at the other end of whatever flowers are strong enough to grow back.”

Still Life with Natalie

STILL LIFE WITH NATALIE

It’s not a graveyard, it’s an ecosystem. I mean, yeah, there are graves, all tilting across a ragged lawn, and that’s all most people see—death, stones like rows of dry teeth. And in some graveyards, that’s all they want you to see—marble stark against a blank slate of manicured grass. And yeah, the light’s better in that sort of place, where the trees are tamed into shape and let the sun through. But the flowers are better here.

To paint flowers, you need an old cemetery. A century of mourners’ offerings gone to seed, taken root. The best kind of garden gone feral. And wild, native things carried on the wind that feed on all the richness under the soil.

It’s impossible to get my easel level on the lumpy ground. All my paintings are askew, slanted—I like it that way, now. It’s a whole new perspective—a new way to look at graves, at flowers.

We don’t have cemeteries like this back home. The water table is too high. All the bodies get stacked in stone huts, or burned and stored in a field that’s paved like a parking lot of corpses. And nothing grows but infernal moss. You know how to paint moss? It’s a wash of green. It takes less skill than finger-painting.

I add a bit of blue to the petal of a tiny violet.

At home, all that heat and wet makes the lifecycle swift. Accelerated decomposition. Sprouts splitting their seed cases right in front of your eyes. Plants die in layers, black and sticky, each generation insulating the last.

It’s cold here. Things move slow. It’s only September, but the tips of my fingers ache. The cold soaks in and everything smells like ice weeks before the snow arrives. The light has changed, and I realize I’ve been here for hours, only a few small blossoms finished. My models will shrink overnight, close up, maybe get nipped with frost.