Garden Flowering, Bamboo Dying

They stand on stones sunk in dead grass, green moss curling over grey rocks, softly filling in harsh cracks.

“Please.” She gestures to the glass sliding door where their reflection stares back at them. He looks at himself, black hair and high cheekbones, six-foot and still in the prime of his life. Always in the prime of his life.

“No, dear.” He turns to look at her, white streaks in her hair and lines of laughter around her eyes. She is past her prime, well into sixty. She will never be young again.

Her eyes harden. They are the only thing familiar to him now. Black and sharp, he is thankful they have not dulled against ever-flowing time. He doesn’t think about what he would do if they smoothed into compliance.

“We’ve been out here for so long,” she says. He knows what she is trying to tell him. Her knees, after a life of blunt force and jumps, are not what they used to be. No part of her is. “Come on.”

He looks at her, standing in this garden they have grown together. There are apple trees with green leaves that shine with life, violet flowers and endless life. Their friends tell them their garden is beautiful, so lovely, you must have put so much time into it!

They did. They put time into everything they did. It is a garden to be proud of, a garden built to be admired. There are violently shaded violet tulips from the east, bamboos in their last legs of life decorated with faint pinks and purples to mark their death. Scarlet Morning Glories from the north, staining the ground with faint red, curve around the sturdy bases of dancing Willow trees.

He takes her hand, feels the blood thrumming through paper-thin skin and smiles. “Alright.”

This garden is an accumulation of their life; the bamboos from when they got lost in a dying bamboo maze, the ground covered in wilting petals and he had to burn their way out. The tulips from when they first met, a child of the Earth and a small human.

She walks first, as she always does, now that just a fall could break her brittle bones. He walks behind her, eyes trained on her. How cruelly time takes from us he thinks bitterly. The stones meld together, four into two, two into one, one into a solid path of grey. It takes them to the sliding doors, where their reflections stare back at them. Their garden fills up the rest of the cold glass, red and purple and green.

She slides it open, steps into his house. He follows, as he always will. As she walks to sit, tired, he turns to look at their garden again.

He remembers when it was freshly upturned dirt and the smell of rainwater still lingering in the air. He remembers her, young and beaming, no lines on her face and no white in her hair. He remembers catching her around her waist, swinging her in the air as she yelled about him getting dirt on her clothes.

Why am I still here? He wonders, some days, why he still lingers in this abandoned city, in this god-forsaken mansion. The rest of his family has moved south, where magic is still abundant and humans have barely sunk their concrete and plastic into an already suffocating Earth.

But then he turns and looks at her, who lives with love and thinks, because she has made a home out of a dream and let me inside.

Besides, this garden feeds his life source well enough. It is full of magic, a small oasis thriving on their momentary happiness within a desert of death.

He thinks of kissing her, the sugar-sweet taste of caramel candy and her waist in his hands. Remembers dirt smearing across her arms and caught under his nails, her smile stretching wide across her face as she shrieked with laughter. Remembers thinking at that moment, I could love you. Remembers golden laughter and warmth down to his toes. I could love you. I do love you.

He looks at her again. Her eyes are sharp, but the rest of her face has softened with time. His will never, has never, can never.

She smiles faintly at him and beckons him to her side. He goes, pulled on a puppet string. She sits against couch a mage from Morocco made, her feet against a wooden floor sustained by a dead nymph’s blessing. The walls that encase them thrum with the magic of a hundred generations, a magic that runs through him.

This house is his. And I loved it, He thinks to himself fiercely. It holds within it his childhood. But I can love it no longer. It will stand for the rest of eternity with him and him alone.

But this garden, vibrant in this moment and maybe for the next ten, will die with her, and he will stay to live with it–with her, as long as time will grant them.

Because I love her and will love her until I burn.

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Death comes to find him on a bland Tuesday, when the breeze blows hard enough to ruffle flower petals but soft enough so that they don’t tear off. He is downstairs, doing his best to flip an omelet without tearing the egg when he hears Death’s call.

“Nathan.”

She calls him from upstairs, where she sits in a chair, looking at their garden from the window. There is a small leather-bound book in her hands, and he realizes it is one of his. When he reaches her, she meets his eyes with hard ones.

“I want to die.”

And what is he meant to say to that? He knows he is lucky she has waited for so long to tell him.

He knows that she means her words.

Her pride is too great for her to fall into decay. She was once of the best fighters in the world, twenty-something and all lean muscle and harsh edges. She was once black hair and black eyes, fast and cruel and viciously competitive.

Time has taken it all from her. Nathaniel looks at her, white and greying hair, laugh lines and sagging skin. She once could race him up the stairs and win. Now, she clutches the railing as he watches her apprehensively.

“Must you?”

And he knows he is selfish, in this wish he has. He knows that she hates living like this, thwarting death but always exhausted. Dying pathetically, she had once called it.

“I will not wait to die.”

He tries his best to memorize the picture before him. The walls are a soft grey, the window casts a yellow glow into the room. Dust floats in the sickly-sweet musty air, dancing and whispering as she sits still, her posture straight and her chin tilted up.

Her face is proud, her eyes are harsh as they meet his.

“When I die,” she starts. He opens his mouth to interrupt but she speaks over him. “When I die. I want you to bring me to the garden. I want you to bury me there, among our dying bamboos and cry for me.”

She takes a breath that rattles in her chest and he knows that death must be wrapped around her throat now. “Then I want you to go south, and find your brother. I want you to go and find your life again. I want you to leave this garden and me – this death-haunted garden and a dying, dead woman – and I want you to move on.”

She gifts him with one last smile, but as her eyes soften, he knows Death has won.

“Move on, because I have, and because this garden is dying, and I won’t let you die with it.”