It was a bright and sunny day. Last night, it had been dark and stormy.
She was walking down the street. A flower was growing through the cracks in
the sidewalk: yarrow. Yarrow;
scientific name: Achillea millefolium.
Historical medicinal uses: antispasmodic, tonic,
haemostatic, alterative, diuretic, diaphoretic. Other uses: to divine the Chinese I Ching. Yarrow's most commonly associated gender:
female.
N.B. the
most commonly associated gender for any flower is female.
She bent
down, picked the stem of yarrow, and stuck it into the half-open front pocket
of her backpack.
The bus stop loomed in front of
her. A new shelter had been put up,
looking like a fortress enclosing the small bench. She eyed it suspiciously.
It had the skinny bus stop pole utterly petrified.
She sidestepped the
shelter, which hissed at her as she went past, and leaned against the pole
without taking off her backpack. The
shelter continued to hiss at her, and she was sure it would spit, but it had no
mouth. And, obviously, nothing without
a mouth could spit. Pointedly, she
hocked back a gob of saliva and spat it out onto the pavement halfway between
herself and the bus shelter. The lone
old man sitting within it ignored her completely.
When
the bus arrived, she stepped on board quickly, and slipped a two-dollar coin
into the fare slot. $2.00, flashed the
little green indicator, $2.00. She
looked blankly at it and then cursed silently - she'd put in almost twice as
much as she’d needed to.
‘Oh, look at that,’ she
thought. ‘A mistake. Another mistake. How odd. How strange. How not unusual at all - that would make it
usual, wouldn't it?
‘Double negative,’ she sighed, ‘everything's just one long stream of
double negatives, these days. The bad
things no longer travel alone; they must come in pairs…
‘I saw a man the other day, at the grocery store. The cashier was putting a carton of eggs
into the brown paper bag for him when her fingers slipped and it fell to the
ground. Crouching down very slowly, the
man picked it up and looked inside; two eggs had cracked and were bleeding
thin, yellow strings of yolk into the clear pools of albumen that had already
accumulated. He raised one hand to hit
her and she shrank away from him instantly, looking terrified. The blow never fell. I think he must have realized the entire
store was looking at him.’
She walked down the aisle, bracing herself as the bus
swung out into the street and started rolling along towards downtown. The seat just after the side door was
vacant, and she tossed her backpack onto the seat, following it with her
body. She settled into the blue plastic
seat, patched with duct tape and decorated with a smattering of graffiti.
After a
couple of minutes, she shifted her backpack to the aisle seat and scrunched
herself against the window, then fished a paperback novel out of the recesses
of her bag and flipped through various dog-eared pages to find her place. She wet her fingertip, turned the page – and
it fell out, slightly more yellowed on the side where it had been bound. With a sigh of frustration, she bent down
and looked under the seat for the page.
It was lying just behind her feet, and she snagged it easily, but as she
was lifting her head back up something caught her eye. It was on the wall of the bus, a few
centimeters from the floor:
A black
circle, perfectly drawn. She admired
the accuracy - presumably, it had been drawn freehand. She raised her eyebrows at the circle and
gave it a companionable smile.
Black, she reflected, still
peering at the circle, is considered the colour of death. I’ve never thought that, myself… I read a story, when I was very little,
about an aging Chinese emperor who decreed that whosoever could grow the most
beautiful flower from the seed he gave them would become his heir. Everyone in the empire came to try their
luck, and among them there was a peasant boy who had no worldly goods but
possessed a true green thumb. However,
no matter how hard he tried, he could not coax even a tiny sprout out of the
emperor’s seed. He tried finer and
finer soils, and at last he used a soil so rich and pure that it was jet black
– but still, the seed would not grow.
On the day that the emperor gathered his subjects to judge their
flowers, the peasant boy approached him last of all, with his pot full of
precious soil, and confessed that he had not been able to grow even the
smallest seedling. Then the emperor
embraced him and explained that he had found what he was looking for – an
honest heir. For you see, all of the
seeds had been cooked and couldn’t have grown at all.
The part of this story that stuck
with me was the black, black soil. To
the kid, that soil was the most valuable thing in the world. It could help him create life. And ever since reading the story, I’ve
considered black a positive colour.
The bus lurched to a stop, and she hit her head on the
wall. Rubbing her skull, she sat up and
looked to see who was getting on, both hoping and fearing that someone she knew
would board the bus. This time it was a
young man with feathery strawberry hair whom she’d never seen before, carrying
a canvas bag slung over one shoulder.
He walked towards the back of the bus, and as he walked he glanced to
either side, considering each seat as he walked past it. She stared at him openly and with interest.
As he passed her seat, he whispered, "What are you
searching for?" Then he stopped
and took the seat across from her, sitting down and looking straight ahead.
She gaped at him in surprise, but
quickly recovered herself. "What
do you think I'm searching for?" she replied, also looking straight ahead.
"I think you're going to slay
the dragon," he said.
"I've already done that,"
she informed him, feeling like it was the right thing to say.
"Have you stolen his treasure
hoard?" His voice was quiet and
excited, but he still looked straight ahead, giving no evidence that they were
having a conversation. She wanted to
look to see if his lips were moving, but decided to keep her eyes focused
directly in front of her, as he was doing.
"I have not," she said,
decisively. "There are more
important things than treasure."
"Have you rescued the rainbow,
though?" Now the young man seemed
quite concerned.
"I'm - I’m working on it,"
she assured him. He fell silent. After a few minutes, she dared to look round
at him, but he was slumped against the window, apparently asleep. The sunlight and shadows from outside raced
across his features. He suddenly
reminded her overwhelmingly of someone else.
‘You inspire me,’ she thought, ‘did you know that?’ She addressed her thoughts to the young man,
although she was holding someone else in her mind. ‘You inspire me to every form of art; you're my muse.
‘You're not perfect.
You're arrogant; that's why I've never told you that you're my graceful
unwitting muse. You're vain; that's why
I've never told you that you're beautiful.
You’re insecure; that's why I've never told you you're ugly. You're mean to people every day, so I never tell
you that you are, in fact, one of the most caring people I know - but you’re
amazingly kind to people every day, so I hold myself back from telling you how
cruel you can be.
‘I’ll never tell you these
things... I reckon that if people were
to tell each other everything that they truly thought about them, then the
world would be a better place, but I know that I wouldn’t do it myself. Can it ever be fair to ask others to do what
we won’t, ourselves? A lot of things
are like that.
‘I don’t ask
people to do things for me.
‘I'll
never ask my muse to model for me. I
rarely talk to my muse. My muse stays
behind glass, walking and talking noiselessly, but I hear every word.’
She settled herself further into her seat, abandoning
the novel in favor of gazing out the window.
When she looked around, the young man was gone – she hadn’t seen him
getting off, which struck her as odd.
The bus reached downtown a few stops later, and when she leaned down to
grab her backpack, she noticed that the black circle was gone as well. But the bus jarred to a halt before she
could search for it, and with a final puzzled glance at her seat, she stepped
down onto the sidewalk and started walking down the street.