There is a dead woman in the garden, and she will be there until morning. The lines are down, road washed out. She came through the back gate, no one knows why, and then she dropped dead. No one knows why.
I can see her through the window, propped up against the peonies. Her legs are spread in a wide ‘V’, one of her stockings has pulled itself down and gathers in folds around her ankle. Her coat and her skirt and her hair are grey.
Mother had wanted to bring her inside, lay her out in the empty room. “Her eyes are still open,” she said. But no one wanted to go outside in the rain to drag in the dead, wet woman, to place their fingers on her jellied eyes.
I do not tell anyone this, but I have seen her before.
There is a dead woman in the garden, and she will be there until morning. The lines are down, road washed out. She came through the back gate, no one knows why, and then she dropped dead. No one knows why.
I can see her through the window, propped up against the peonies. Her legs are spread in a wide ‘V’, one of her stockings has pulled itself down and gathers in folds around her ankle. Her coat and her skirt and her hair are grey.
Mother had wanted to bring her inside, lay her out in the empty room. “Her eyes are still open,” she said. But no one wanted to go outside in the rain to drag in the dead, wet woman, to place their fingers on her jellied eyes.
I do not tell anyone this, but I have seen her before.
***
A month earlier, I got my first period. (My first era, my first reign). It lasted three days: the first brown and mottled, the third a washed-out salmon, and between these two, a day of ripe, throbbing red.
I had no warning, just a sudden alien swirl in the grey toilet water, a flurry of questions. What was this minute, dark-blood nebula? Where in my body had it lay coiled, peeling slowly into downward descent, worming into open air?
Was my body making preparations already?
I had to acquire sanitary materials from another girl, one much more on the brink of womanhood than I. My natural gaze fell directly at her breasts. And they were breasts. Rounded, tugging down at their own fullness; mine were still little titties.
Sanitary materials, she called them. (I imagine gloves up to the elbows, face mask, goggles, a little trowel). I shied away from the one requiring insertion, choosing instead the sticky-backed strip of cotton wrapped in turquoise.
“Would you like to walk home with me?” the girl asked, while I peeled, pressed and squatted in the stall.
We did not talk along the way. I was anxious to get home and pull down my pants. At the corner where our roads diverged there was a small square house shrouded in rose bushes. The blooms were splayed open and disintegrating, dripping petals all over the sidewalk. I could see movement between the branches; a woman bent over, her scissored hand moving in bird-beak thrusts, snipping the roses. She looked me right in the Eye. I felt a warm trickle between my legs and walked on.
***
My parents have now forgotten about her, the dead woman in the garden, even though she has entered the house, disembodied, drifting through the unopened windows. My mother is cooking dinner, my father hovering over her, talking about chances of wind and rain. They could find someone if they really wanted to, someone to “take care of it,” but dead people are easy to ignore.
All the rooms are empty but the one where I am, looking out the window at the people below who hunch and scurry as if afraid something above them is teetering, about to crash down, something worse than water. This window looks out the front of the house; the garden is out back.
I imagine us all naked: the people on the street below, me with my newly red thighs, mother and father in the kitchen, flitting around each other like fish, the woman in the garden with her hard nipple eyes.
***
After I saw her that first day while walking home, the old woman began to appear everywhere, in other bodies, unexpectedly. I saw her at school, hiding behind the teacher, clasping bony-veined hands over her mouth, laughing and laughing.
“Honesty, bravery – these were the men who formed our country,” said the teacher, and the woman laughed and laughed.
“Taxation without representation.”
Oh god, how she laughed.
I was afraid, at first, that others would see her and link her to me. But no one saw, no one suspected.
“We are not sure, of course, if he really did cut down the cherry tree.”
I began to laugh, too.
I saw her in places where no one could possibly fit; behind my desk, under my bed, inside my empty shoe, in its wide-open mouth. I was afraid of her, but drawn nonetheless, sensing the inevitability of our bond.
But I was surprised when she showed up in the garden, dead. I was surprised that mother could see her. She screamed. I was surprised when the woman did not laugh, did not vanish.
Something about her, I had seen as beyond. I thought she could live forever.
***
The house is dark now, silent and still. It is the time of year when days are compact, trapped between ever-stretching nights. The sun is brief, terse, no time to chat, he must be going. But the moon lingers, spreads out her translucent body, settles in.
They keep me awake, the moon and woman in the garden, the woman who will be gone by sunrise, carted off to be named and placed in a decorative box, buried, perhaps mourned, but forgotten. I wonder if I will stop seeing her.
I wake up, having no memory of sleep, and leave my room. There was never a conscious decision to go down, no weighing of options, no pondering of ghostly consequences. She has found me; it is only fair.
I shake in my thin nightgown and bare feet, I turn the knob, I slip outside. The rain had stopped, and the leaves in the garden are weighed down with water, glistening. From where I stand I can see the dead woman’s feet, her wet black shoes and sopped stockings. I walk closer, around the bushes, her body coming into view from the feet up. Knobby knees, out-turned; arms and torso sheathed in grey wool. The skin on her face and neck has gone slack, pulling back on her bones. Her eyes are still open, looking past me, above my head.
It’s the eyes.
But I can close them, pass my fingers gently over, bestow the look of sleep, banish the look of the dead. I bend down, smell her mothy dampness, already feeling her hardened eyes under my fingers, though my hands have not moved. I bend closer, breathing her in, still not touching, face to face. The moon has lowered, bending too, she is curious; our skins shine transparent. I bend closer.
The dead woman sits up, cold lips to my ear. “Do you want to know the secret?” she says. And her mouth blooms into the blood-soft petals of a rose.
Abigail Rine is a working writer living in Newberg, OR. My fiction work has previously appeared in Talking River Review. I have also published non-fiction and criticism in Forum for Modern Language Studies and several edited book collections.