In the Garden
PG. 05/16/2006.

I will set you in my Garden,
And you will be my favorite.

When Emmanuel was a child, he played in his mother's garden. There were nameless gigantic plants and flowering trees with overflowing blossoms and thick, twisted vines, petals in shades of intense violet, purple, blue more blue than the sky or any blue he'd ever dreamed. There were violent oranges and thick, dripping yellows, and green leaves striated with black.

He didn't learn until he was grown that normal gardens don't look like that.

In the center of the garden was a bottomless pond of black water, oily and somewhat thick to the touch. His mother had a tiny golden boat in which she would sit, and row to the center of the pool, to where the crystal lived.

"My boy," she would say to him, when he asked to join her, "the boat is too small. One day I shall give you your own."

She called him Emmanuel after another people's savior, she said. "And so you shall be our savior, reclaiming a place for the lost, the forgotten, the dissolved." She spoke of the ancient land that rejected them long ago, because of their countrymen, and their greed. "We wanted the power that was ours by right, and so they called us evil, and destroyed everything in their efforts to muzzle us."

Every day seemed like a held breath, waiting for his power to arrive, waiting to see what tools he would have to carry out his destiny. In the mornings, she would test him, and in the afternoons he would watch her, in the garden, growing strong from the crystal, touching her plants one by one. He watched them unfurl beneath her fingertips, watched acid-green things sprout from her footsteps.

He was 12 when she finally gave up on waiting. There was no new gilded boat for him, but a wooden raft that barely stayed afloat, over which the black water crept, reaching out for his pale skin. His mother guided his raft out, out, and when they reached the crystal, she pushed.

How strong his mother was.

Emmanuel fell right against the crystal. He didn't feel its spires slicing and scraping against his body, though they did; he didn't feel the skin-warm liquid around his ankles as he slowly slid into the water. All he felt was himself, and the crystal, and this feeling was more feeling than he had known the word could mean. It was the most painful ecstasy imaginable, a torturous burning that made him aware of every single cell in his body, and it had no beginning or ending.

But it did end--when his body slid completely into black, and drifted away from the crystal. Emmanuel opened his eyes to thick soupy darkness. He ignored the pain in the front of his body and struggled to the surface--the surface he could find only by instinct, because light didn't penetrate beneath. When he found light, and air, he looked around for his mother. She was on the shore, smiling, calling to him.

He went to her, and slept.

The next morning she tested him again, with almost the same results. At one point he almost made her believe a lie, but that was all. She left him in disgust, and told him he was not allowed to see the garden that day.

Emmanuel had not known fear until he realized he would never become like his mother.

They tried for months--dosing him with the crystal, other less pleasant things, trying to awaken something. Always there was nothing but that tiny current of persuasion, that slight gift for making another go against their own mind. She gave up on him long after he had given up on himself.

They no longer spoke of his destiny. They no longer spoke of much at all except her. He was 13, and then older, years of mother and son watching each other like old enemies. He learned other things in that empty house, in those living twisted gardens he now only saw at night, in secret. He learned other things with the help of the crystal.

Finally he did it, the thing he had now planned for five years--he took what was his, by lineage if not by birthright, by gift. He'd been advising her for months, encouraging her to seek out others like her. The unspoken was, others who can maybe fix me, others who can maybe replace me. Finally she gave in, and left their secluded enclave, and in the process carelessly left out maps so that he found out where they were.

And where he needed to go.

When she had gone, Emmanuel, her failed messiah, her useless child, drained the pond and carried the crystal off through her gardens. It was hard work, but he had time. He left their home, and never returned, and never saw his mother again.

They say a woman still dwells in those hills, a fairy, a nymph, a creature who does not age or die. A wise man will run away on stumbling upon her cottage, or catching a sight of her unbound hair, or hearing the sound of her weeping. Woe to he who enters her gardens, the gardens that are her only child, and her soul.



Notes: Quote is from Scott Schulz' "Another Day in the Garden."

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