Lapis roses, Sin roses/2

After that, the rose merchant came calling once every five days, and I was able to comb Quarz’s hair again.

Only the lapis-rose hedge in the Rosarium remained empty. To the east, the purple double roses were beginning to open; to the west, the crimson sword-point roses had already fallen.

Each day, after combing Quarz’s hair, I went out into the Rosarium and trimmed every jutting branch, every stray leaf, every malformed bud into order. When the pruning was finished, I cut a few of the season’s roses as well, taking care never to pick too many.

Snip.

Snip.

Snip.

In the green stillness, the sound of the shears bloomed and vanished.

I sold the roses I cut to a florist who made his rounds.

“You ought to let people into this Rosarium,” he invariably complained. “Turn it into a tea garden and you’d have no shortage of visitors. Plenty of them would leave you a handsome gratuity besides.”

And I invariably told him I had no intention of doing any such thing.

I could not bear the thought of anyone else treading upon the soil I watered with my own hands and enriched with nutrients.

“Is that so?”

The florist never pressed me further. He would raise his flat cap, revealing white hair so carefully kept that he hardly seemed to need the hat at all, and then move on to the next garden.

After the florist had gone, I sharpened my shears for the following day.

I sharpened them meticulously.

Then I put them away in their silver case and placed it upon the low tea table beside my chair.

The remaining roses I arranged in a vase. I brewed tea, poured it into both my own cup and Quarz’s, and drank.

And I gazed at Quarz without ever tiring of her.

Amid rose-colored waves of orderly lace and unruly gathers, Quarz sat perfectly upright, her head inclined slightly to one side. She held her fingers up against the slanting afternoon sun and, with eyes of blue glass, watched something I could not see.

Her lips were parted a fraction, as though she wished to speak.

But Quarz, who lacked nothing and desired nothing, had no need for speech.

Even so, those lips remained poised upon the verge of opening.

I liked to imagine that they waited for the day when Quarz would whisper the final words and pass judgment upon the world.

What words would they be?

I contemplated them in rapture.

Eventually the tea grew cold.

The sun went down.

And I began to tremble before the dark.

The world, already dark enough, was sealed within night, and all the unclean things crept closer while those things that were necessary slept.

Hounded by the presence of things that surely ought to be unnecessary to me, I gathered Quarz against my breast and slipped into bed.

The faint fragrance of lapis roses, absorbed into Quarz, never quite left the sheets.

It kept the superfluous things at bay.

Surely it was Quarz’s radiance that protected me—the radiance of one for whom the gathering dusk seemed not to exist at all.