Page 24 of This Vicious Hunger
“Sweetgrass,” Olea admits. “I’m partial to the, well, the sweetness of it.”
My mother used to put sweetgrass in the vodka she brewed—she’d grown up with traditional farming parents and it was pretty common—but she always warned me not to play around with the stalks, as their sweetness was not without risk.It thins the blood, my mother would always say,and then the mind.
Olea’s eyes are wide and dark, and her shoulders droop a little as she chews on the stalk. When she smiles it’s without her teeth and it gives her face a haziness it didn’t have before. I want to ask her more about the plants, or about what she meant when she saidshe had friends “beyond the gate,” but my head is clouded—as if I’m the one chewing on sweetgrass.
“Your hair is very short,” Olea says suddenly.
I run one hand through the rough-shorn curls. It’s growing a little, coiling around my ears and at the nape of my neck. Sometimes I forget what it was like to have hair down below my shoulders, but on nights like this when the breeze plays against my skin I’m more grateful than unhappy.
“My father died.” I curl my toes inside my slippers. I don’t want to talk about my father here, with her. He wouldn’t have understood. “And then my husband.”
“Oh.” Olea pauses, chews the stalk some more, and then lets it drift gently down to the earth. “That’s sad. But what does that have to do with your hair?”
I stare, dumbfounded. Olea’s face is that of a child who has asked the most innocently stupid question, her dark eyes round and her lips slightly parted as she waits for an answer. Only the effect is less childlike than it is eerie, a grown woman playing pretend.Surely, I think,surely you can’t be this removed from the world?
“Have you… have you never grieved?”
Olea wrinkles her nose, as if she’s really thinking hard about this. “Mm, no, I don’t think so. Well, maybe once? I don’t really remember.” Then she tilts her head to the side, playing with the end of her plait absently. “Is this something you do when you grieve? You cut your hair?”
“It’s not just me. It’s something everybody does when they grieve. It’s a sign of honour and of love, from the ancient world when Memephestia shed her earthly form and sheared her threaded golden locks so that the burial fire might send Andynedes’s ashesskyward, back to the gods. Women re-create the sacrifice into the funereal fire.”
“But you said everybody. Do the menfolk too?”
“I… Do you really not know?”
Olea shrugs. “No. The walls are thick and I’m pretty happy here in my little paradise. Like I said, I don’t meet many people and that’s—well, generally that’s okay with me. The hair cutting make a lot more sense now you’ve explained it. It seems obvious now I know that’s something people do. Although I would quite like to hear that story—the one of Memephestia and the burial fire.”
I think of my father, what he would say if I could have told him I would one day meet a girl with absolutely zero concept of grief or the art of mourning. Olea is a blank slate; she has no idea about sepulchres and cradles, about women’s Silence while their men celebrate life over death in the world above. She knows nothing of incense and dried procession flowers, of punishments for breaking the fast or the significance of the shearing of hair. For a long minute I’m entirely speechless.
Olea, meanwhile, has started to drift away. She’s back to collecting her flowers—a big, fat black rose-like plant with a stem studded with hundreds of tiny round white berries in her hands—and seems to have forgotten all about me again.
“Olea,” I call.
She turns, her neck arched gracefully, flowers in both hands and the basket hanging from the crook of her arm. “Yes?”
“You said you liked me—before. Because I speak my mind?”
“Yes.” Olea smiles. “And you’re funny.”
“Well. I…” I wipe my palms against the rough linen of my trousers. It feels wrong, what I’m about to do. Olea isn’t likeanybody I’ve ever met, though, and her knowledge of the garden alone… I think of what I could do with that knowledge, so much of it untapped and trapped in a naive recluse who barely leaves her garden. “I guess you’re funny, and I like you too.” It isn’t a lie, I tell myself. It just isn’t trueyet.
Olea’s smile widens. “Oh good,” she says warmly. I ignore my guilt—and more, the swell of my heart that says there’s more than just the garden to like. “You’re the best friend beyond the gate I’ve had yet. I can’t wait to get to know you better.”
“And maybe you’ll let me come inside and have a look around?” I prompt gently, as if she’s a horse I might spook at any moment. “I’d love to help you with your catalogue.”
“Tomorrow night,” Olea urges. Her dress slips off the tip of one shoulder and my heart lurches. “Come again tomorrow, won’t you?”
Chapter Fourteen
Ivisit the garden the next night, and the one after that. I don’t tell Leo about my discovery of Olea. Nor do I mention the garden again, content to listen to his chatter and daydream about the evening to come.
At first I stay beside the gate for an hour, maybe two. Three on the fourth night. Then I stay until Olea decides it is time for me to leave, when I return to my rooms and lie unsleeping in my bed until nearing dawn. When I do sleep I am chased by winding dreams, of air thick with rain and the taste of fresh soil on my lips, and I wake up with my stomach clenching, ravenous. Whatever these dreams are, they are better than the ones of burning.
Often Olea narrates to me as she picks her flowers; she teaches me how to spotHyoscyamus niger—or black henbane, which I know from stories of old as the original devil’s eye, with its yellow-green leaves, purple veins, and scent so disagreeable that even Olea doesn’t enjoy it—and she explains how she wants to have blooms at all sizes and points in their growing cycle that she can press and dry for her catalogue. Her passion is not just botany, but the plants that others have, often rightfully so, decided are dangerous.
“How did you know that’s what you wanted to do?” I ask one night, as Olea runs her finger along the moon-shadowed red of an opium poppy’s petals thoughtfully. I imagine the touch of her finger across my jaw, and I clench my teeth. “Dangerous plants aren’t exactly easy to come by.”
“I didn’t know,” Olea replied simply. “It just… happened.”
