The midsummer sun hurts the eye.
At least that’s how it has been for the last decade. A decade of flowers blooming in snow. Soft, precious, fluffy snow. These flowers have frosty edges, as if someone stunned them into silence on a cold night and summer failed to bring back their voice.
The last time I stepped out in the sun was ten years ago.
And it is the sun that belongs to an afternoon in June, as it merges into July. And it is still the same, one decade later.
My windows are shuttered. My blinds are the darkest shade of black. The sun isn’t a visitor. It is a ghost. And it creeps upon my walls at midday, leaving footprints that I count at midnight.
I haven’t seen the sun in a decade. Would you believe that? I know you won’t. But I’m not lying. No, really. Not lying at all. People don’t tell lies at eighty-five. They don’t want to.
They ask me; my grandkids. Oh, I have loads of them. I bore seven kids with Mark, my husband. Three boys and four girls. He used to love kids.
Precious kids, with tiny chubby toes that pattered on the wooden floor all about the house. Sometimes they knocked over a flower vase; a painting would be torn, walls dirtied with muddy hands.
I have known those times, and I have loved each moment. I am not someone who gets upset easily. I don’t remember ever yelling at any of them.
And now they have kids of their own, but none of mine have my patience. The grandkids call me. I scold my children now. They are grown up. They understand my anger now.
It’s been floral all these years, but when it comes to grandkids, not many grandmothers can tolerate anyone losing their temper over them.
Grandsons and granddaughters; they find peace in me. But the sun outside doesn’t let me visit them often.
Mark died when I was seventy-five, and he was the best husband I could have asked for. We enjoyed midsummer and would spend at least half of it abroad; among waterfalls, beaches, or camping in the mountains. Mark loved summer, and I loved Mark. I was a winter person, though.
Somewhere deep inside me, I had a frozen soul. Perhaps Mark knew about it, but even if he did, he never showed it.
It takes tons of sunlight to thaw an iceberg. His wasn’t strong enough, maybe.
So when he died, I somehow started hating the sun. Perhaps it was denial. Or revenge. Or both.
I have nothing against Mark. He doted on me. He brought me carnations and lilies. He spoiled me with fragrances; beautiful dresses, silken, billowing, fancy ones. And we made love under the moonlight. Mark was good. But he could have been better.
And then, I didn’t have his temper. If I stepped on a thorn, he would buy me roses. But he left it there; the wound, bleeding, never handing me a bandage.
Mark could have been better.
I don’t regret a single moment spent with him. And why should I?
He taught me to love the darkness; to find peace in the calm, blurred corners of my house. How many times have I sat in those corners, hearing the soft tread of little feet, up and down. Up and down the stairs. Sometimes I would cling to my youngest daughter. She knew less. She was only four. I was forty-four and tired.
By that time, we had been together for twenty years. That was seven kids in twenty years.
Mark was proud of my womb. He wore it like a medal on his coat. And I let him.
I was happy that he was happy. But wombs don’t stay the same. Ants start crawling into them. Tiny ants that you don’t even notice, and then they begin biting into your insides, and you bleed more with each passing month.
I told Mark when I felt those ants the first time. He didn’t believe me.
“You need a vacation with me, in my arms… and we will go this summer.”
I remember putting my head upon his chest, tears running down my face, getting absorbed into his shirt. Perhaps he noticed. How wouldn’t he?
It was freezing cold outside that night, and my tears were warm.
“Perhaps a baby would fix everything,” he said, fingers running down my waist.
I didn’t move. I wanted to. I just clung to him, as he did to me.
But the ants did it for me.
The next month, they went right through my womb, stripping the unborn life away from my insides.
I felt the pain. The agony of losing an unformed child.
Mothers are weird. They mourn tiny losses.
In bits and pieces came the unformed child. Mark was unhappy. We didn’t speak for ten days.
Not my fault, I tried explaining.
But words became a barrier, my silence a wall. Nothing I did made an effect. Nevertheless, Mark forgave me. I told you; he loved me a lot.
We married off the kids one by one, in huge festive weddings. They walked away, leaving behind roses at the doorsteps of their bedrooms. Their fragrance in used clothes. Dust on their pianos and guitars.
They began unwrapping a new life as I began folding up mine.
They were happy. I made sure of it.
Mark said they would be fine, each one of them.
“They got my blood in their veins,” he said.
I smiled. But there must be a bit of mine as well, I thought, though I kept it to myself. I just wished mine would last longer and be easier.
Mark’s would be fiery and warm. He was always a summer person.
Then one night, I think a year after we married off the youngest daughter, we sat across from each other near the fireplace. I was almost fifty-six. Mark would have been sixty.
I snapped. I don’t know what happened.
It was just a twig that he threw into the fire. The spark hurt my eyelid. He laughed.
Maybe I should have laughed too. A spark can’t kill, can it?
And then he didn’t do it on purpose.
I yelled.
I think I yelled at the fire for shoving a spark in my direction. Mark would have found it funny. He must have.
That was a vague thing to remember.
Mark knew I loved flowers. I told you; he brought me plenty.
My bedroom window never lacked them. They were everywhere. From the main door to the terrace.
I wished I was a flower too.
But he treated me like a queen. Even when I stopped bleeding, got wrinkles on my hands, the bouquets never stopped coming. Flowers everywhere. It looked like a tombstone, my house.
“You should start wearing white,” he told me when he was seventy. “You’d look like a white lily, aging with grace. You know, to me you’ll always be a red rose, though.”
I smiled.
“And you should start wearing red.”
I wished him well.
Until his seventy-fifth birthday, I would have sworn I never wanted him to wear white.
The kids were home. It was our anniversary. One by one, we collected gifts. Our hands united.
Little ants started crawling on my hands this time. I didn’t tell him, though.
We cut the cake, but the ants… they wouldn’t let me.
I waved the kids goodbye. They wanted to stay. I didn’t want them to.
“It’s a weekend,” I told them. “Mom and Dad want to be alone.”
They understood. They knew how much we loved each other.
It was a cold weekend.
But it froze that night.
And today, after one decade, I step out into the sunlight.
Blood; cold, thick, frosty blood drips from my hands. My hands are icy, and there is no one to warm them, thaw them in the midsummer sun.
Mark died on that cold winter night ten years ago, and he took his summer with him.
Mark’s blood still feels tepid on my hands.
Have you ever slaughtered a rooster?
You know that sensation. The warm blood cooling down in trickles over cold snow. The body slowly losing its heat; slowly, gently, irreversibly.
And then it’s gone.
And we forget.
The blood stays still, seeped into the hundreds of pores inside the earth.
And the ants.
Yes.
The ants keep crawling.