Orange-blossom-ashes

by A. R. Menne

It was that time of Spring when hares go mad with sexing and violet-stemmed trees explode in a confusion of pink petals, petticoats, ruffles of pistils and downy yellow nectarine powder. It was the time of year when Sariane picked cabbage from her garden, brewed orange blossom water in a top pot, and plucked fresh eggs from the loins of her prize hen every odd-numbered day.

She preferred to eat the eggs hard boiled, along with the cabbage, and this was her routine Spring breakfast. (In winter it was buttered pancakes and lemon water.)

She was only vaguely aware that her great (many times great, actually) grandfather was a touring conquistador, lapping up the dust kicked skyward by the venerable heels of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, after whom many hotels and cities have subsequently been named. As fate would have it, no cities or hotels were named after Alonzo de Cabriotee, but he was nonetheless one of the few globetrotters to lay eyes on at least one of the seven cities of Cibola (though history writes a different story). He was legendary in his own right: with sun-baked leather hocks flapping against his Spanish ham, skin browned and gold as the treasure they were chasing, hair ratted into a hundred wooly ropes, carrying puppets made of driftwood and copper coins for eyes in a sack across his back, unicorn powder, ground, in a small felt pouch that dangled against his groin, a collection of metallic vials, as of yet empty, that rang against one another in staccato beats to match the withering march through desert vales and across the thorn-peppered foothills of the Rockies. In the wake of his journey he'd left behind three different Indian brides (with not a little brain-wracked guilt for his indiscretions), all plump and virginal on the wedding bed, who offered spread dowries of tanned and taut amours, dripping with all the transient treasures side-bar to the main event: bringing home overflowing bundles of gold and pitchers full of immortalizing water: hence the hollow, metallic vials that bruised a yellow spot against his leg.

What Sariane didn't realize was that the most antiquated family heirloom, one of said vials, very well-worn and sandpapered down by the hundred Cabriotee family hands that had fingered it through the past four and some centuries, had been filled with a hopeful candidate for the immortalizing potion: some brook water on the outskirts of a Wichita Indian village in Kansas, dazzling clear, its collection inspired by what Alonzo supposed to be the preternatural specter of an invitingly naked nymph drawn all over with coral-colored tattoo on the facing bank, but which was, in reality, a dim-witted manifestation of a rather violent fever he'd contracted the previous week.

In any case, this febrile vision beckoned him to collect the water, which he did, and which dangled against his yellow bruise all the way back to Mexico City the following year.

Sariane, dressed in powder blue, blue-black hair tied up in tight coils, a bastard child of one of Alonzo de Cabriotee's secret and most ardent loves to whom the magical vial was gifted on the brink of an agonized separation, sat at her breakfast table, a perfectly boiled egg in a little silver Eierbecher in front of her, flaccid cabbage on a plate just north of her right elbow, orange blossom water in a salt shaker, the family heirlooms gracing glassed cabinets around the room, gray puffball clouds rolling by out the window. She peeled off the leather egg skin carefully, then bit into it gracefully. All was grace and tact with Sariane. She'd lost track of the genetic memories, diluted by time and history and the wash of so many other colorful gene pools. Alonzo's burs and bruises and many wives were nothing but a dull thorn in her brain's many folds, and since the passing of thirteen she hadn't given a second thought to the deteriorating relic.

However, on this particular spring morning, as the hares were copulating in the garden and trees were seducing the warm south wind with their gentle, passive sex, a jet plane broke the air overhead, causing a sonic disturbance that vibrated certain walls in the house and sent a particular glass case in the dining room tumbling over with extraordinary violence. Along with a pair of Victorian baby slippers and an engraved tobacco pipe, Alonzo de Cabriotee's vial crashed across the table, tumbling, rolling, finally breaking up into a thousand powdery pieces just inches under Sariane's nose. She gripped the table to steady herself and sneezed out her nose. The boiled egg, knocked over by the engraved pipe, went rolling along its oblong axis across the table till it smashed into slippery white and gold egg petals on the stone flag below. Sariane's heart skipped approximately three and a half beats before she resumed breathing properly, and only then did she notice rising up out of the pile of broken dust and metallic ashes of the vial, like the remains of a long-extinct Paleozoic phoenix, a creature with two wings, paper-thin, the color of obsidian rock. Her mouth sagged for a moment, as she slowly recollected the significance of the wrecked article before her, regaining control of her arrhythmia while extracting a dust particle from her eye. At that moment the prehistoric insect, fluttering its black and opal wings, caught hold of the spring breeze and flew into Sariane's left ear.

What followed could only have been the result of magic, or reticent genes breaking through their thick shell of slumber, or perhaps the last remnants of Alonzo de Cabriotee's feverish dreams, which, coupled with the mingling dew of March hares that fluttered in on a breeze, got caught in Sariane's black curls and in the folds of her long powder skirts.

She leapt up from the table, a hand clutching the left side of her head at the point of entry; the buzzing insect, like a pebble rattling inside a hollow jar, could not be got out, but made a roar and clatter of oceanic proportions. In despair, she grabbed the engraved pipe off the breakfast table and, white-knuckled, jammed the pipe's silver stem into her ear, at which point the insect stopped and dropped like a quarter through the bowels of a slot machine, past the gullet, and into her stomach. She burped a silver bubble and then nearly fainted with tremors-delight, antique butt of a pipe still jammed in one ear, hair imperceptibly damp from the exertion, a steel button popped off one pressed cuff.

That afternoon she made love to the gardener, her kneecaps buried in soil, breasts perfumed by gardenias, wreathed in apple blossoms, knocking last year's dried-up apples off the boughs, which fell in varied shades of rhythm to form soft dimples in the ground, a semicircle around the lovers. She ate canned jelly and moon-shaped crumpets, marionberries and chocolate sticks; she sent telegraphs to cannibals in New Guinea, ordered a case of silkworms from China, and when the sun set, lamp-buttocks fireflies nested in the coils of her hair.

From that day forward, the black-winged phoenix rattled in her belly, a pebble, a coin, an artifact: and she performed parlor tricks for startled guests, perfected the art of belly dancing, and never ate another boiled egg again.

The Author

A. R. Menne is an artist based out of Seattle, Washington. Drinks too much coffee, tends a small rodent circus, spends days and nights in pursuit of filling her (metaphorical) Wunderkammer with digital paintings, scribblings, drawings, synthesized magic, constructed mythologies; additionally could be labeled: a myopic bibliophile, a closet linguaphile currently struggling with rudimentary German, possessor of a pink coif, recent aficionado of anything drenched in wasabi. Her work can be viewed at zendinou.com.