#gardeninanhourglass

[thefinishpiece]

Garden In An Hourglass

Mina forgets why she came here.

Something about flowers in rain. Gardens a circus of mist. Clouds hanging on every leaf of every plant. All edges terraced in heavenly gust.

How long had I been gone?

These petals are shades unfamiliar. These green-blades cut in different directions. The maze has shifted somewhere else, its corridors now alternate, its architecture obliterate.

Mina missteps once or twice.

It still smells the same.

Perfumes of nature sprinkling in the air, honed to velvet-scent by the sky’s endless tears. Aroma of raw soil, damp and twisting, blending its earthly flavor with cool-crystal vines of fauna and flora, braided in boundless growth. Fumes of nature, expressed.

So many years since she has seen this place.

Approaching her—a skeleton drenched in veil, blackened to obscure wrath, the whites of bone amplified in the stormy scene. It looks at her, both of its eyes a drained sink, and it stands solid in the grove, replacing gargoyles for this scenery myth.

“You must be who I think you are.” It echoes.

Mina nods, nostrils cleansed.

Everything is hazy and toned. An ephemeral wistfulness surrounds her, with a glaze of nostalgia, the bright smoke of this place cornering her view. She always adored days when it rained.

She make excuses. “I am so awful at keeping track of time. How long have I been gone?”

A reluctant question, certainly—for to be certain of anything relating to Time is to forgo the conclusions of it. Time, the ceaseless glue of space, ripping through dimensions like light through glass. Filtering and untouchable.

It cannot answer. But this does not concern the ghost.

“You always did lose it all the time.” It echoes.

It grins, a pernicious crescent, while she watches every plate of its marrow-shell grind and gyrate on its face, from cranial-cap to cheek-plates to bending-chin. All this clockwork of its frame necessary to perform one single action—something so arbitrary when concealed by flesh.

Mina almost wants to smile herself and see if she can notice the parts in her face moving too, or if her brain only accepts the sequence as a solitary motion. The wonders of face.

Out of a stony path, they emerge to obsidian gates, dazzling in their sharpness, pointed and polished. Roots reviling, afraid to grasp the lifeless metal, avoiding its attractive poles for lesser stones and bricks, defeated by a net of spears.

But the skeleton touches it without recourse, crackling, halting only to brush residue from the shoulder of its ebony-dress. It is dressed for some occasion, but she never bothers to learn the names of such temporal fancies. One occasion for another—they are all strands of grass in a field of roving hours.

Inside, a breath of hotness—of humid contrast between earth’s spit and artifice’s sinew. Air, swollen in plastic pride, hovering behind walls from the pit it was borne, to linger in suffuse misery. A trap.

“Do you happen to know the time?” Mina asks, softly.

Her voice is still liquid from the outside waves. As soon as she says these sounds, she regrets it. Certainty is a vanishing art.

“I have not met it personally, but I hear good things.” It jokes—ha, the skeleton tells jokes!

Mina looks around at glass walls, suffocating in growth. Too many plants; too many plans. No horizon. Back to the garden, they rewind themselves.

“How long has it been?” someone shouts.

There he is, the Gardener. Dressed in dark dream. A fancy suit that appears like frozen lava. No hair, but a nice ash head. Like a pollup of crusty snow.

Tonally, his skin is quite grim. Like a raven plucked of its feathers. So pale, unhuman—a cadaver pulled from space, bleached by the shrillest fear.

The Gardener is a poor gust of gloom. He has time in a basket and all the space to spare. He asks Mina how long it has been since when they never met. She dares not tell him her name, but he figures it out anyway. Eating hours and drinking histories.

“We have been waiting,” the Gardener groans.

Mina shrugs. “Yes, we have.”

They float down a river of sand. Around and around. Come and go. Flurry and dissipate. They only go so far, until their container sends them back to recite and repeat the same motions over and over again.

Though the Gardener and his skeletal companion are unaffected by this place, Mina feels every loop and round.

She grows thirsty. Like a seedling sprouting early, desperate to taste the rain. And though they are in a garden, time’s lashes affect her body more like a desert. Dry seconds.

“Is it time for tea?” she asks, politely.

“It is always time for tea!” the Gardener screams.

They stop their ride. Then they take their positions at the tea-table, a thing overwrought in silver strings attached to a diamond-dazed puck. Porcelain and pleasantries await them. Conversations about the lengths of letters.

The tea is hot—it’s always hot. Mina stares at some blossoms behind her. They are perpetually beautiful. But the Gardener demands her attention; he is a fiery, unforgiving conversant.

“If time is a circle, then what is a square?”

The Gardener is gleeful as he poses his question—he desires to have her answer wrongly. But she does not have time for his ghoulish games.

Without looking at him directly, Mina casually declares, “Circle takes the square.”

He is dumbfounded. Not that anything they have ever discussed has been anything else than nonsense—this whole garden is a monument to nonsense! Fair points decay like unpollinated wombs.

The Gardener turns to his skeletal servant, bewildered. But the Skeleton is picking maggots out of its holes, not actually listening. Yet, it is obedient, and still responds in reverberate tone, “How long is a circle?”

The Gardener shrieks and points at Mina. “Ha! Can you count? Do you know how long a circle is?”

Why is he always trying to prove her wrong? Why can’t they just talk about flowers or something?

While rubbing sweat on her neck, she sweats. “Is the temperature in here bothering anyone else?”

What was once tepid is now arid. Mina almost coughs from the heat. Seconds burned to hours. Burned to days. Burning for years. Epochs.

An endless fire of eternal scorching. Castigating flames casting her in hardened plaster, body melting within like a stew of organs and soul. Hardening—time sharpening the time sharpening the time sharpens the time. Agony.

Dead alive. Forcibly awake.

How long has it been—how long was I gone?

“Such a pain—I am a black-hole burnt piece of toast.” Mina says.

Surprised she suddenly speaks, the Gardener gasps. “It has been a long time...”

“When was the last time someone spoke?”the Skeleton shatters. “When was the last time we had been here...?”

After an intermediate silence, Mina laughs.

The Gardener stares at her, nearly drooling for her to offer just a scrap of something happening. But it isn’t much.

“Nothing too funny, just—” she yawns, dumbly. “I forgot why I came here.”