Her Hex, Her Heart, Helianthus by Dafydd McKimm
She returns home one night with four sunflowers clutched in her arms like a quartet of freshly baked French baguettes, trailing dirt from their upwrenched roots.
“Look,” she says, “what I found for the garden.”
She tells me she saw them towering over one of the roadside vegetable patches that pepper the countryside around us. “Whoever was growing them was going to use them as fertiliser anyway, so I took some. Aren’t they beautiful?”
When I tell her she shouldn’t have stolen them, she brushes me off, as if I’m an elderly curmudgeon telling her she should mind her language. She goes into the garden–sweet-scented and bursting with the colours of summer–and begins to dig holes in the ground near the lilac bushes with her bare hands. I stand by looking glum, but eventually I help her, her hands on mine as we dig in the dirt, her face beaming as we plunge the thick green stems, rough and furry, into the ready earth. When we’re done, she dances around them like a hedonist, throws her arms around me and kisses my cheek, before leading me, through the sweet-peas and lavender, into the house by my hand.
The next morning, the sun is hotter than it has been all summer. The news reports a heat wave, tells us to drink plenty of water and stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, but she ignores the advice and spends the morning outside admiring the sunflowers, regardless of the fact that her forehead beads with sweat as soon as she steps out of the house. When she returns indoors for a moment to fill the watering can, she is as red as a lobster. “You should stay out of the sun,” I warn her. “You’ll burn to a crisp.” But she insists on going back out to water the sunflowers and, when she finally comes in again, says she’s going back tonight to pick some more. I’m certain she’s delirious from the heat, so I make her some iced tea and place a cold towel on her neck. But come dusk, she is out of the house on her bicycle, a thief in the night, and when she returns, four more flowers take root in the garden.
The next day is hotter still, so hot the tarmac on our drive is sticky when I dash out to fetch in the milk, which has turned sour in the bottles. I spot thrushes and blackbirds unconscious at the bottom of our dried-out hazelnut hedge, and before I can warn her, she is out in the garden again, admiring the sunflowers, pouring water at their bases despite the warnings on the radio of a drought. The little ornamental pond in which we keep goldfish has halved in volume; the fish, barely able to move, rest languidly in the succour of the cool mud at the bottom.
She says tonight, she plans to get even more.
No, I say, it’s too much; it’s getting too hot to think, too hot to breathe. Neither of us says it aloud, but we both know the true source of this heat.
“But they’re so beautiful,” she says. “I want more. I don’t care how hot it gets.”
Her skin has begun to peel, shedding from her shoulders now like strips of tissue paper. She looks as parched as a desert floor, but I don’t have it in me to deny her–her disappointment wounds me far deeper than the searing of this brutal sunlight against my skin.
The next morning there are twelve sunflowers in the garden, now so desiccated that even my memory struggles to convince me that it was ever lush with life. The grass, so thick and verdant in times long past, is now little more than patches of white whiskers; the hedges, once so full of song and birds, are now brittle bleached knots of dry bark and bird bones. The pond is empty and the fish dried husks that stink in the thick air. Hell on earth is postulated on the radio–a scourge that has devastated crops and doomed us all to die of thirst. Only the sunflowers remain verdant, their yellow heads upturned to the heavens as if doting on the strength of a dear child.
She is barely more than bone, now, half-mummified, pouring dust from a watering can. Come inside, I beg her. She refuses, saying only “I want to stay out here with my sunflowers.” Before long, the can drops from her hand and she too falls to dust that dances in the wind around the dropsical stems of her sunflowers, whose heads face aloofly away.
When the sun sets, I venture outside; the dust pools at my feet as I stand before them, stoic and still as standing stones in this new desert world. With quick, violent motions, one by one, I pull them up by the roots, cast them down, dash their heads against the dry ground, leaving deep pockmarks in the earth where they, grasping at the soil with their filaments, were torn away.
The sky darkens as if in mourning, and with a wail of thunder, rain falls, forming rivulets and puddles, capturing the cremated corpses of bird and bushes, the dry brown severed heads of gardenias and irises, and mingling them into a chaotic vortex of detritus. I rush over to what remains of her, pick the teeth from her crumbling head–twelve of them–and place each one in the wounds left by the sunflowers she loved to death.
What will grow from them, I do not know. What curse will they bring on the world, I shudder to think. But I know that I will care for them, whatever may come. I will stay in the garden till I drop of exhaustion or hunger, and see the world collapse about me before I let them suffer even a moment without my attention, my adoration, my love.
