The sky was ripe that morning. Her colors flushed so warmly I could smell them. I knew in my bones: planting day.
I bathed in that rare morning sun, cleansing myself for the ritual, drawing the sweat from my body that would open the pores of the hard ground.
Just as my brow began to shine, he appeared before me, his shadow interrupting the light. He looked at my uncovered skin. He looked at the trees.
"They will take you a lifetime, and you will pass into nothing before they are done with their growing."
He said he could give me a magic quicker and more brilliant.
He moved so easily, effortlessly, carelessly. He showed his white teeth and swung his arm and the seeds flew and dived in obedience. But they did not grow. They buried themselves and waited.
"How long does it take?" I asked.
"That depends on you," he said, and he leaned to me and kissed me. When I did not move, he bit. And I did not know I cried or bled until he had gathered my tears and blood into his sowing hand and thrown them out with that same easy toss.
Only then did the seeds begin their birthing, pushing out their inner lives, ravenously grabbing for the sun at a rate that made my heart stutter. From the confusion of the twisting and reaching, flowers hurried out. Some came so fast they bent their immature stems to the ground until the growth caught them up and pushed them into salute.
"Any magic worth your time will cost you,” he said.
I licked the blood from my lip; I couldn't taste it for the scent of the flowers.
---
Every day they cried out for more, as if yesterday and the yesterdays before that had never been. Never enough. Not even everything I could give.
The day I refused my tribute of blood and tears he left, and the garden began to show signs of fading. It was soft at first, and lent a strange, ghostly beauty to what had once been robust, ravenous life; the leaves began to appear translucent, the thorns thinner and sharper, the colors strangely lush against the creeping pale.
Was I fading, too, my life-force tied to this place? I drew just the smallest blood from my finger at the tip of a thorn. A momentary flush took the rose as it drank this last offering. I held my hand up to the gaze of the sun and found strong flesh, with none of the translucence of the leaves. Alive then, in body.
Alive.
And lifeless.
It all bled away with each sunrise and sunset, slowly, subtly, without awareness. Only my unmoving eye, trained on it every waking hour, could perceive it, until it began showing crude signs of decay. Leaves and petals suddenly gave their will to gravity. Whiteness took the stems of every plant, starting from the earth and reaching upwards against the deep green that still fought the waning. The scent turned from its heady play, until it became indistinguishable from rot.
The rain assaulted the dying things, and the sun burned them.
Then there remained only the chaos of the blank stems and cracking leaves, pointing up at the heat of the day in many-fingered accusations. The roots showed, running through and into each other, escaping into the receding ground, which cracked and gaped and received them still.
Heavy rain flooded their corpses, and the desiccated ground, unable to drink, released its last hold and let the water carry them furiously into another world.
Here was brown earth again now, blank, smooth, hard. She had sealed herself, almost as she had been before that strange beauty she and I had so briefly thrust into being. I stood at the rim of the clear-swept ground. Cleaned by the rain, by the wind, by the sun.
Empty.
She had found her old shape, but I felt the change; I felt her tiredness. It echoed in the deep weariness which sat now in my bones.
I cannot be otherwise, I whispered.
Then be, she whispered back.
Be.
Existing alone as a breath, filling myself empty, without thought, without feeling, without even pain.
Pain is life-force.
Pain weaves us into Life’s fabric.
Life… no. No time for that now. Time to close in and sit with the stillness of death.
I slept through uncounted days. I woke in the nights and sat in the shadows. When I began to feel my heart beat again, I sat in the moonlight. When the warmth returned to my breath, I woke in sunlight and sat in the shade. When I began to shed tears, I sat in full sun and my whole body wept.
---
I felt the call of the sun while it was still dark. It pierced my heart and I knew: the sky would bleed today.
There was none of the blue early light. It was red from the moment it began to overtake the darkness. It grew and pressed forward, eating the black sky until it ran with color.
I heard the heat before it broke through, as it thrummed behind the mountains and then spilled over and caught me full-face. My heart knew the call. Its movement drew me upwards, and my body unfurled in the light. As the sweat rose in me, I bowed again and kissed the ground and poured it forth. From my brow, from my back. From my arms and legs and chest.
I gave and the earth swallowed away her parched living. She became black and fine and soft. Loamy and rich and ripe.
I gave and she was satisfied.
I gave and did not run dry.