Red Grow the Roses

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Long-handled, Y-shaped lengths of wood. They pushed her underwater, face down, pinning her limbs to the muddy bed. The water looked yellow as piss from below, and bubbles of air rose like golden balls from her open lips.

She remembers love. It was love that destroyed her and love that kept her alive through death. She’d loved someone, though she can’t remember who – or what. Just the ferocious, all-consuming passion of his embrace; the terror and the ecstasy. Only that it made everyone afraid. That they’d met in darkness, though she cannot recall whether it was once or many times, and that dogs had been howling.

Some things still prick her memory at odd moments, recalling briefly that first raw passion – strange things, like the lift of a white dog’s muzzle, or the feel of leaf mould under her nails, or the smell of wet and sweating horses.

The first, fresh, coppery taste of blood.

They staked her in the swamp because they were afraid of the one she loved. All winter she lay there, while the ice thickened over her head and in the tissues of her body. Nothing lived in that acid water: no fish or insect gnawed at her cold flesh. Nothing moved except the occasional bubble of gas ascending to the surface. Then when the spring thawed her out she rose from the mud, thrust aside the stakes and went home. Looking for love, hot and red.