Page 54 of This Vicious Hunger
The next night after a hasty dinner with Leo I meet Olea at the garden gate. She is dressed in the dark cloak I saw her in the night she buried Clara’s ring, a memory that still unsettles me. I brush it aside, along with the wobble of nerves, and gesture for her to follow me. We move silently until we are barely a foot apart, neither of us up to talking. The moon is the barest sliver of white in an otherwise completely dark, cloudless sky. I brought a candle, but in hindsight it’s not important. Olea has lived her life in the shadows; she doesn’t need candlelight to follow me now.
“Are you sure you want to do this with me?” Olea’s voice is low and uneven. I think she’s been crying again.
“Yes,” I say.
No.The truth is, this is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever done. My mind has been whirring with it, round and round like a child’s pinwheel. Removing Olea from the garden seemed like the only solution when I broached the idea last night. Olea’s sickness—that final stage of tolerance where the body stops metabolising for good—must be progressing slower than mine, and being away has helped me to reach some sort of equilibrium. I stilldon’t feel wholly well, but I don’t know how much of that is the fact that I can’t make myself stay away. And if Olea hasn’t been outside this place in years, how do we know that distance won’t help?
The other voice in my head, less insistent but just as insidious, is more concerned with Dr. Petaccia. Olea is her ward, her project. From Olea’s perspective, herproperty. How exactly is she going to react when we take that away? I feel as if I’ve made a split-second decision and only now realise the risk I’m taking.
Yet, here I am.
The university has been my dream my whole life—but that was before I met Olea. Whether it is the magic of romance or something less natural, I can’t lose her.
“Come on,” I insist. “Quickly.”
Olea pauses at the threshold to the garden, standing beneath the arched gateway like a shadow. On her face flickers the same indecision that lies within me. Our eyes lock. A rush of warmth fills my chest. My thoughts shift to the book I stole from the library. I have never admitted it to myself, but a romance like theirs—all-consuming, a love between women that is both soft and fierce—is the only other thing I have ever wanted. Aurelio would never have understood. I never thought it was possible. And here it is.
In this second I know we’re making the right choice. Fuck the science.
Olea’s fear melts, and she tumbles the rest of the way through, her legs unsteady like a newborn foal’s. We wait. I look down at the plants beneath Olea’s bare feet. Nothing happens. Nothing shrivels and dies; there is no crash of thunder or dramatic bird diving into her path.
A laugh burbles in my chest. Olea joins me. We walk brisklyand then push into a run, Olea’s cloak flowing behind her like a dark flag. We reach my assigned rooms breathless and giddy.
“I love being here with you,” she says.
We’ve done it. Whatever happens now, Olea is free.
We sit in my study, separated by the distance of my desk. I’ve drawn the shutters closed against the rising sun and the lure of the garden and placed steaming mugs of tea before both of us. In a small vase, Olea has placed an already-wilting leaf from her precious stinging tree. “A little garden comfort,” she says with a smile. I make a mental note not to touch it but can’t bring myself to deny her this.
The air is filled with nervous energy. The skin of Olea’s hands looks different in candlelight, the green patina running through the darkness more evident as she spreads her fingers against the grain of the desk. She’s already thumbed through my most recent notes, corrected several of my taxonomies, and lectured me on the genus of a thorny bramble I’ve sketched from memory as a potential future option for the colloid.
I’m uncomfortable in my heavy clothing. Normally I would have stripped it off by now, rolled my sleeves up, and set to my reading or note taking—or my bed, fingers curled and grasping for release. Tonight I’ve settled inside in all my garden protection bar the mask across my face, though I feel I’m naked without it.
It’s worth it. We’ve spoken more than we ever have before, as if the garden’s privacy was that of another world. There we spoke in riddles, flirty and suggestive. Here it is all laid bare, our lives opening up like one of her night-blooming flowers. She’s told me tales of how Petaccia used to leave her for three or four days at a time fromthe age she could successfully wield a knife to cut her own fruit and cheese, how at first she hated it but grew to hate her guardian’s intrusions more. I tell her of the sepulchre, the Silence of grief.
“I don’t understand it,” Olea says. “All this ritual, these rules. Isn’t it just a prison of another making?”
“Death is a common human experience,” I explain. “People find things less scary if they know how to act, what to feel and when. The death rites help people to process what they feel.”
“Do they?” Olea worries at her lips. “I mean, really, do they? Because all I have ever known is sad people beyond the gate. Sad and lonely and alone. Grief follows them like a cloud, and nothing gets the stain out, not things like cutting their hair or burning their herbs. It’s what brings them to my garden, isn’t it? They’re not okay. And I know grief isn’t just something you feel when somebody dies, but it’s such a universal experience that you would think we would be able to coach each other through it—”
“No, but ritualdoesmake people feel like they are a part of something,” I argue. I think of all the days my father would come home from the sepulchre stinking of smoke and wine and green incense and how it always felt so… so holy. “Like a community.”
“And what about after the ritual is over?” Olea asks. “When the undertaker has gone home and the women return to their families after the days of Silence and the men stomp about in their leather work boots with all that bravado. You tell me either group of them forgets the person they loved? That they don’t wish something different had happened?”
“Yes, but—”
“No,” Olea says. She is fervent now, waving her hands. “It isn’t that simple. You can’t put grief into a box and tie it with a ceremonial bow, the same way you can’t stop feeling happiness or angerwith a blink. It might not be on the surface any more, but it’s still there. Isn’t it better to admit that and let people feel for as long as they need to? When I die I want anybody who mourns me to feel what they feel for as long as they need to feel it.”
“You’re right,” I say eventually. “But I don’t think you have to take away the ritual either. If it brings people comfort, then surely that’s a good thing. When my father died I wanted to mourn him in the way I knew both he and I would appreciate.”
“What about your husband?” Olea asks. She tilts her head curiously.
“What about him?” I don’t want to talk about him. Not here—not with her. It feels wrong, knowing how he would have dismissed this conversation, my choices, my voice. Knowing, too, how disgusted he would have been to see me now, sitting in my rented rooms with a woman I have kissed.
“Did you want to mourn him in the way he made you? You said he wanted you to hold your Silence for thirteen days. Why would anybody do that to somebody they loved?”
I avert my gaze, turning it to the mug of tea cradled in my hands. “It didn’t matter what I wanted.Hewanted—”
