Lose The Roses

New Orleans, 1925

Gazing out her bedroom window while wishing on the brightest star in the night sky, Stella tracks her mother’s stealthy traverse into Mrs. Hawthorne’s immaculate rose garden. Rows upon rows of roses, all colors and sizes sway in the evening breeze, a sultry dance. Their perfume fills the night air, peppery and sweet. The lustrous blade of mama’s pruning shears shines under a full moon, glinting. Why Mama steals Mrs. Hawthorne’s roses, she doesn’t understand.

Surely, we can buy our own.

Mama’s funny that way.

***

Hotel Dieux, 1950

Stella stares at the old photo, sepia-toned and curled with age in her hands. There she stood, ten-year old Stella in a fancy dress, not quite smiling. The memory makes her palms smart.

And Aunt Sola, a shimmering presence of white light, hovers over the basket of fresh-cut flowers Mama snipped from Mrs. Hawthorne’s yard the night before.

She’s only just noticed it now. Aunt Sola was there… maybe a ghost, some kind of presence.. warning her.

She falls back to that day… the day of the roses… and their cruel thorns.

She was instructed to wear her finest Sunday dress for the photo shoot. Mr. Bayres was hired to take her picture.

She remembers the hint of a breeze as she gripped the large bouquet of flowers, wincing as thorns pierced her tender palms. Mama shushed her when she cried out.

“Hush child, what’s a little blood? A small price to pay for such beauty. Smile for Mr. Bayres.”

Blotting her tears, she posed, ignoring her screaming hands. A different voice whispered, almost chanting, as she struggled to be still for cranky Mr. Bayres. He didn’t care much for children. Kept tempting her with a plump apple if she stayed still.

But the voice was there… insistent.

Lose the roses, Stella. Your mother needs help..., it urged from another realm. LEAVE, it implored her.

If only she knew then, what she knows now. She thought the voice to be her imaginary friend, Penelope. Penelope only appeared after too many hours left alone, locked in the cellar.

But Aunt Sola was there that morning… with a warning. She sees her in the hazy image, a glistening light next to her small self, floating over the roses.

***

When Stella was seven, Aunt Sola moved in for a short time. Things were normal then, blessedly normal. Her aunt wore shimmery dresses, the color of fluffy clouds. She smiled generously, unlike Mama and filled the house with bouquets of wildflowers and mouth-watering meals. Before Aunt Sola’s arrival little Stella scampered through the pantry in search anything to eat, like a hungry mouse. During her aunt’s stay, she’d fall asleep with a full belly and a sense that all was right with the world, until…

One night she woke to raised voices – not the usual chaotic episodes of Mama screaming and swearing about imagined things. This was more sinister, a violent hush. Mama accusing Sola of turning Stella against her.

She knew better than to interrupt the sisters, eventually falling into troubled sleep. The next morning Aunt Sola was gone.

Stella’s mother, Luna May existed in a world of shadows. Some nights she’d tuck Stella into bed, telling story after story of her childhood, while they munched chocolate chip cookies, filling the bed with itchy crumbs. These stories usually ended happily, but sometimes not. Stella closed her ears to fend off the nightmares when her mama told tales of evil things. Her voice changing, deepening into a rasp, as if possessed by a malevolent thing.

The following days would be rough… little food and hours spent in the cellar.

Stella didn’t always intuit the bad days, but sometimes she knew. The evening after the photo shoot posing next to Mrs. Hawthorne’s pilfered roses, she and Mama dined on succulent roast pheasant and garlicky potatoes. Three nights later, she was locked in the cellar, cold and starving as Mama ranted from above.

Penelope kept her calm, talking quietly. Only now does she think Penny and Aunt Sola might have been the same.

Nosy Mrs. Hawthorne overheard her mother’s tantrum and called the authorities.

She wept when they took her mother away… institutionalized. Doctors diagnosed schizophrenia. When no one could find her Aunt Sola, Stella was put in foster care. A kind family raised her alongside multiple siblings and a herd of miniature donkeys.

Years later, her aunt’s body was found buried in the garden of Stella’s childhood home, dug up by the new tenants’ hunting dog. Her mother’s pruning shears lay next to Sola’s decaying form, crusted and rusted with blood.

Stella wonders if her mother wasn’t just mentally ill, but a raging psychopath. Does that sort of thing run in families?

Scrunching the old photo in her palm, she tosses it to the hospital room floor. She stares into the blue-green eyes of her beloved newborn twin daughters, Rosie and Iris, nestled to her chest. She can’t imagine a love so deep.

Tiny hairs on the back of her neck rise to attention as a chilly breeze sweeps in… from nowhere. The room darkens as sunlight succumbs to shadow.

Tearing her eyes from her darlings, she’s alarmed to find the old photo on the nightstand, un-wrinkled and fresh as the day it was taken.

A deep voice rasps in her ear, Lose the roses, Stella. Cut those roses.