Greggory

They had been her gardens once and perhaps they always would be.

Greggory's first memory was of the garden, down in the field by the meadow. He remembered a symphony of sensations: of lightness and dark, of the stifling still of summer air rustling the brittle stalks of parched meadow grasses and the dull drone of cicadas somewhere in the shade of the willow boughs arching gracefully over the river. He remembered the white hot heat of noonday sun rays shooting through the leaves of the hydrangea bushes, like x-ray beams mapping their thin, fibrous bodies, showing the thick dark orbs of nodes and long, spider-webbing veins as green so dark it was almost black. He remembered running over the tufted clumps of the moldering husks of last year's grass, the dessicated blades pricking the soft soles of his feet as he trod upon them, desecrating their final resting place.

The ground reverberated with each successive thud of Mother's footfalls as she chased him across the meadow, a heavy sound that echoed with each frantic beat of his heart. Then he felt the sweat-soaked cotton of his shirt clinging to his skin as Mother's fingers wrapped like tentacles about his torso, exerting a firm but gentle pressure. He gasped with anticipation and then he was flying upwards, up into the brilliant sapphire spread of the cloudless sky. And the sun was in his eyes and he was blind, blind to all but the dark outline of Mother's figure as she caught him and pressed him to her chest and the radiance of her diamond teeth catching a sun beam as she threw her head back and laughed.

Greggory knew there was something of significance in this memory, some key to understanding the vague sensation of discomfort�"not a true feeling, but the perception of one about to erupt�"that forever plagued him. But, as with a painting one admires and can't articulate the reasons why, he couldn't decipher the riddle of why this memory remained evergreen in the changing landscape of his mind.

It was not until another summer's day, many years later, that he understood.

With the unfailing intuition of youth, Greggory had long ago sensed the tension between his parents that hung as thick as the dust in the air of Father's moldering ancestral mansion. It was not any emotional or physical tell�"no bitter edge to the sparing words they exchanged at the dinner table, no tensing of bodies when one approached the other�"but rather a lack of these things. No feeling person could be so perfectly cool and indifferent towards another, particularly when bound by as intimate a bond as were Mother and Father.

Greggory's whole adolescent existence was a carousel of desires. His childish constitution swelled and deflated as each was gratified or disregarded. He could have understood, forgiven even, rage and tears and, perhaps, spurts of laughter, from his parents. Dispassion was the one thing he could not comprehend.

And the older he got, the more he felt the need to comprehend, to understand these two people from whom he had sprung. It seemed the only way to understand himself. Father was irreproachable, as frugal with words as the money he managed. But Mother�"Mother was different.

In her husband's presence, Mother was a tight-lipped somber woman who moved with kinetic efficiency as she saw to the smooth running of his domestic affairs. In her gardens, Mother bloomed with all the splendor of her flowers.

Greggory's childish fancy seized upon the fairy stories Mother read to him at night to explain this change. Mother, he thought, must be a changeling. One of those clever creatures who patterned their habits and mannerisms on those around them and blended effortlessly into an environment, then laughed and danced when alone, giddy with the thrill of their grand illusion.

It was with this image in mind that Greggory worked up the courage to question Mother about her relationship with Father.

They were strolling through the birch allée. It was late summer and the hydrangeas were in full bloom. The twilight air was cool and heavy, as is the air that sweeps away a rainstorm, pregnant with the impression of energy expended. The weight of it was palpable against the skin. Heavy with implication, like a hand print visible on a windowpane when the light falls just so, which speaks to the force innate to the person who left it behind and the indelible traces of action that linger long after they're gone.

There was something solemn to the quality of the air, as in a tomb or a chapel. As if something beyond was reaching out to touch the downcast face of the penitent.

Greggory took all this in and felt anger growing within him. Patience was the burden of the faithful. But while Greggory had faith in Mother, he felt owed his origin story. God kept men in the dark on many subjects, but not their beginnings. He saw no reason Mother should flout this and keep from him the knowledge that was his birthright.

"Mother?" he asked.

Mother, the gait of her long legs clipped to match the stride of his gangly adolescent form beside her, pressed her palm protectively about the crown of his head.

"Yes, pet."

She said it not as a question in response to his, but as a declarative statement. As if his question were a search for affirmation from her: of her presence beside him, of a need to confirm that it was she who bore him.

She was not aware of the slip and Greggory was not aware of its significance, of the existential uncertainty it betrayed.

"What do you feel for Father?"

Her hand jerked away from him. In the violence of the motion, a fine stand of his hair caught on the tines holding the diamond on her finger in its setting. The shock of the pain brought tears, unbidden, to his eyes. It was an act of instinct, as if his genetic association with the name he mentioned burned her.

She did not look at him as she responded, but stared directly ahead of her. Her tone was as rigid as her posture.

"One cannot feel emotion for the sun simply because it rises each day with such tedious regularity. It is only fulfilling the fundamental purpose given it in life."

The nature of his question was such as is beyond a child's comprehension and she had, for a second time, displayed the degree to which she was preoccupied with the secret inner workings of her mind. She had answered as if were a man, not her 13-year-old son, who had asked the question, a man desirous of stoking a passion within her breast that  would wash away the rusty veneer that had turned her into a living statue and held her so long immobile. A passion that would sweep him up in its wake.

But it was the brash, precocious nature of boyhood�"that curiosity that knows no limits and fears no repercussions�"that had led Greggory to pose the question. He understood neither its implications nor the answer she gave.

He was at a crossroads: a boy on the cusp of masculine virility with a mind a few steps ahead in the development of intellectual virility; doubt, borne of the analytic cast of the mind of man, began to eat away at boyish confidence.

Greggory glanced up at his mother for the reassurance he alway received from her and instead received the shock of his young life.

He saw not the fresh, radiant countenance of a fairy queen, but the glossy-eyed death mask of the silent woman who presided over Father's house. The effect was that of a gargoyle ornamenting a shrine: its grotesque visage introduced an element of terror into an environment designed for contemplation of the divine, not the demonic. Its very presence as a vanguard against evil spirits profaned the figure to be reverenced, by suggesting its virtue was itself not weapon enough.

Greggory felt panic rising with hot bile in the back of his throat. He felt the black and white convictions of his childhood falling away.

He had always thought of Mother in terms of her free-spirited outdoor self her closeted indoor self. But the sudden apparition of this horrid visage meant it was not something external to Mother that evoked the change, but something internal. The sensations of that earliest of memories came rushing back to him on the breeze; he heard the tinkling peal of Mother's laughter in the whispering murmur of the air tousling the forest underbrush.

That was it: the laughter, a noise he heard so seldom. And suddenly he knew the terrible secret Mother hid in the deepest recesses of her cloistered soul: Mother was desperately unhappy. And he could not help but wonder at his role in this�"was it for his sake she remained?

The possibilities of such a question were too much for his young mind, as fragile as a chick emerging into the light for the first time. He felt the instincts of manhood: to protect the woman he adored. But how was he to do this if her suffering was rooted in any small measure in his existence? And how could it not be: he was a the living, breathing link to a man he felt sure, no matter what her sentiments, she despised.

He was unmanned then by the child within him fighting for survival. His chest rattled with each breath as he endeavored�"vainly�"to tamp down the sudden surge of anguish, betraying the sob he was trying to suppress.

He buried his chin in his chest to hide the shame of this breakdown from Mother, walking beside him, the rigidity of her stride betraying the effort she was making to suppress her own emotions.

But suddenly she was on her knees beside him, without regard for what the dirty, rough surface of the flagstones would do to the pale green silk of her dress or her paler skin beneath the thin barrier of the material. She was pulling him into the soft, warm comfort of her body, stifling the embarrassing sounds of his whimpers with her breast and cooing comforting platitudes in his ear.

 

The routine of their lives�"his and Mother's�"did not change after that evening, but there was an unspoken vow that now existed between them. It was as if they were two shipwrecked souls adrift on a vast, desolate expanse, for whom the impossibility of salvation was liberating. Without hope, they could approach their doom calmly and with dignity. Their personal privations heightened the awareness of the other's suffering and a tender bond sprung up from it.

Mother took up the practice of the laying of hands with evangelical devoutness, as if the brush of her fingers on Greggory's hair could grant some indulgence, not for his offenses but hers.

And Greggory�"he became like an explorer obsessed with the unearthing of a fabled treasure. His motives were dual: to understand Mother, and thus the part of him left empty and aching by this vacillating existence of theirs, and to learn what made Mother happy that he might become the chief source of her joy. For the light, languid sound of Mother's laughter�"like the sound of water bubbling over the stone-strewn beds of a shallow river�"was the real treasure the boy craved.

But, try as he might, he could find nothing of the consistency of spirit that seemed to be a theme for life in so many others. There was some contradiction in her nature, beyond Father, which Greggory could not trace, though he was acutely aware of it, as one is of a shadow cast upon the wall that seems incongruous with the shapes of the objects in a room. He was equally terrified of both.

Mother was eternal and constant in her habits and emotions, like the boulders that littered the estate's north lawn. If you knew where to look, you could see the striations carved by the pressure exerted by retreating glaciers, wounds that had stood exposed for millennium. Yet�"or was it because of this?�"she didn't live from day to day. Not as others did. She was indifferent to changing fashions. Diamonds and rich silks that gave a sense of youth and vivacity to other woman contrasted poorly with her unique brand of austere beauty. On her figure, which was neat, clean and simple�"a thing of beauty because its form mirrored its function�"jewelry became grotesque. It was too obviously wealth and status objectified.

Unlike the other wives of her station, she sat stiff and reserved at dinner parties as the living statues of stylized people around her became animated by idle gossip and scandalous bits of hearsay. Her home bore no trace of her personality. She appeared simply in settings that seemed constructed as a backdrop to her passive loveliness. But then she'd vanish and the room looked just as natural bereft of her presence, as if she'd never been there at all.

 

But everything changed the day Father discovered the terrible Truth. Its discovery was a matter of happenstance. At a routine trip to the optometrist, Father, who thought his failing eyesight was nothing more than the byproduct of a lifetime spent meticulously scrutinizing neatly outlaid columns of financial figures, had been informed that there were copper deposits in his eyes: a sign of Wilson's disease. This by itself was not that terrible; it was treatable. But it was a heritable genetic disease, which meant Greggory had to be tested too. The results were devastating, but not in the way anyone expected: Father was not actually Greggory's father.

It was dinnertime; Father was late. Mother sat across from Greggory, waiting, at one end of the long mahogany table in the dining room. She was silent, apparently mesmerized by the curlicue patterns made by the steam rising from the soup tureen.

Father appeared as if out of thin air and threw a neatly folded piece of paper before her.

Mother, whose delicate features were a study in pastels, had blanched as she picked it up and read what it contained. And the rage in Father's eyes had gleamed with a particularly fierce fury on account of the golden rings of copper round his corneas.

But this was as far as their emotions carried.

"Does he know, your lover, about your b*****d son?" Father had asked, his voice dry and even-keeled.

"How could he? Do you think I'd have agreed so readily to a genetic test had I known?"

"Surely you must have suspected. It defies reason to not even have suspected his paternity."

"It was only the once. Just before we were married."

"Well, let's hope you made a lasting impression, because you no longer have a home here."

"Very well. We'll leave tonight. If that suits you."

Mother's voice betrayed no emotion as she acquiesced to this upheaval of her life, but Greggory, sitting, forgotten, across the table from his parents, felt a jolt of pleasure pass through his body, like the swift shock of an electric current.

"No. You'll leave tonight. Alone." Father replied.

Mother rose from her chair in a manner that was so slow and precise it was almost mechanical. It was a warning sign, for that kind of control of movement was only exercised conscientiously, when one was aware of the violence of instinct. It spoke of power and fury, made all the more alarming for needing to be restrained. She locked gaze with her husband.

"You can't take my son away from me."

The metering of Mother's voice betrayed the same control as her motion of rising.

Father turned away, to the wet bar in the corner. He coolly took the ice from the bucket and transferred it to a glass. There was a staccato tinkling rhythm as each piece fell.

"Oh, yes I can. I've paid for his upbringing. I own him. And he'll pay me back by doing his duty to the family."

"I've thought you many repugnant things, but never a liar."

Father snorted and whirled around.

"You think this is the first time such things have been done? Leave quietly and the boy will have material comfort. Take him with you and I"ll destroy the pair of you."

"And expose yourself to the ridicule of being made a cuckold? Of having no heir? No, you value your station far too much for that. If you're going to threaten me, at least make it convincing."

Mother laughed then. It was not the exultant sound of joy being exploited to its fullest, but a low, grating sound, utterly without mirth. It was the sound a soul makes when it realizes itself freed from the weighty burden of consequences.

Her next words were hard and taunting.

"Do you remember how it was? How popular you were with me on your arm? We made a deal, you and I, though we never spoke of it. You bought yourself a pretty ornament to flaunt your station. And I bought freedom, of a sort. It was a bad deal, but I bore the consequences, as I made the choice freely. But I will not sell my son into the same slavery."

As she spoke, her gaze remained fixed on her husband. Her body was very still, held conscientiously so, so that all her energy might be concentrated in the luminosity that had suddenly flickered into life in her eyes.

But one arm rose slowly as she spoke, beckoning her son. Her upturned palm hung suspended in the air and remained, perfectly immobile, until Greggory hopped from his chair, crossed round the head of the table, past where Father stood passively sipping his drink and closed his fingers around hers.

This clasp was like a living link between them. As she turned and walked from the room, she did not acknowledge her son or comment on what had just passed. She simply led her son, like a shepherd leading a lamb, down the hall and up the stairs. The tension between their arms never changed; the relationship between their bodies remained the same: never slackening, never tightening.

When they stood outside the door to Greggory's bedroom, Mother released his hand and Greggory suddenly knew how a baby bird feels when pushed out of the nest for the first time.

He heard the rustling whisper of her silk skirt as she bent down beside him in the twilight dim of the hall.

"Tomorrow, my darling."

It was a promise and a deliverance and a pardon all rolled into one.

Then she kissed his forehead, rose and melted into the dark recesses of the house.

 

But though tomorrow came, Mother did not. Greggory awoke and was immediately startled, though he could not at first place why. Then as he braced his torso on his upper arms to come to a sitting position, the sun slanting through the window caught in his eye; he winced. And then he knew: it was late in the morning; Mother should have come for him long ago.

He leapt from his bed and raced to the door of his room, only to find the handle stubbornly refusing to give way. His cries reverberated in his high-ceilinged room, but did they carry outside the door? No one came for a long while, not until he'd exhausted his lungs and sat, slumped against the wall.

He heard the lock turnover and jumped up. But it was not Mother standing like a portrait in the door frame; it was Father.

He looked at the son who was not his and said, in the same even tone with which he'd confronted his unfaithful wife:

"She is gone. You lost both a father and mother yesterday. As an orphan, you'll live on the charity I give you. See that you earn it."

Then he turned and walked away. He did not bother to lock the door; it was unnecessary. Greggory had been driven back, like a leaf caught on a gust of wind, against the wall. He would have fallen further had it not happened to be there.

Could Mother really have abandoned him? The thought was impossible. He felt the energy of their clasped hands within him still. No. If she was gone without him, there was another reason.

He found himself wondering about his real father, about what there might have been between him and Mother that led them to the act that gave him life. Mother was not a woman to let passion overtake her. Or had she been before Father? Is that what was indicated by those rare moments of joyous indulgence, where, in the light and freshness of the garden, she threw her head back and laughed? Was there another self buried within her, one which was the exclusive property of his real father?

Greggory felt a sharp stab of jealousy. He'd never had to face the prospect of competing with another man for his mother's affection before. He felt a desire to go out and wander the gardens, to find some lingering remnant of her there. But Jack Frost's overtures of greeting were in the nip of the air; the touch of his outstretched hand passed on a frigidity that shriveled the foliage. There was in all things the stiffness of age that presages death. It was an allegory Greggory found too painful to contemplate. He remained in his room, slumped on the floor, and cried himself to sleep.

The next thing he knew, the prodding of Father's well-polished brogue was rousing him from a fitful slumber filled not with dreams but the vague ominous outlines of shadow creatures who might be the subject of dreams if the mind didn't shudder away from the terror their very impression cast.

He dragged the boy downstairs and presented him to a dusty husk of a man, a skeleton poorly wrapped round with flesh, who was to be his tutor. Father explained he was to be obeyed in all things�"a proxy to himself�"then vanished to the city on Business.

 

Greggory had not realized how lonely his childhood was until there were no longer the moments in Mother's gardens to anticipate. His tutor was no companion; he spoke only to set Greggory his task for the day, then retreated to a sun-dappled wingback chair and promptly fell asleep. The only other person in the house was a middle-aged tank of a woman, a redoubtable force of Irish Catholicism, who, having learned of the scandal which had driven out Greggory's mother through the normal methods employed by greedy-eared domestics, now spit at the boy whenever she saw him.

As for Father, he was like a carrion bird sitting in the lone dead tree above the scorched plain of the desert. Waiting, quite flagrant in its intentions, as some poor creature heaved its last miserable breaths on the ground below. His visits to the house were rare and infrequent, but Greggory awoke each morning with a gnawing sense of dread that he would go down the stairs and find Father before the mirror in the vestibule.

He was a spectre ever over his shoulder. And so, at the age of 14, Greggory came to understand what it was like to be entombed alive.  When he glanced in the mirror, he saw in his features the reproduction of Mother's glossy eyed death mask. The first time he saw the living corpse staring back at him, he wept. Not for himself, but for Mother: he finally had the understanding he had so desired. His wails were for forgiveness, for whatever resentment he had harbored, deep down in the shadowy wells of his soul, in the unplumbed depths he feared to explore. He cried out as a penitent to God for the maternal tenderness that was compassion in its purest form: that gentle brush of lips against the forehead that absolves all sins. Instead he received the cool, indifferent brush of a draft moving through the house instead.

He tore himself away from the mirror and raced into the gardens; he had not set foot in them since the evening before Mother left. The first touch of new life was perceptible, not in any greening up of the skeletal remnants of last year's shrubs, but in a certain quality they had taken on, which spoke of growth to come. As the overture of a symphony presages themes to be explored and phrases to be developed in a search for greater meaning.

And in that moment Greggory saw the gardens for what they were: an allegory of Mother. So much loveliness and refinement in the neatly delineated lines of planted beds, in the terraced rock walls that rose in gradated steps to match the slope of the hill, in the radiating spokes of brick walls marking off boundaries between enclosed gardens, each a room painted in the vibrant pinks of cosmos or violets of irises. But just beneath the surface, there lurked the terrible malevolence of nature, with its indiscriminate lust to level all, to assert its dominion. It took a singular will to fight against such a concentrated force of despotism.

As Gregory grew older, and the gardens aged with him, he came to understand how much stronger was Mother than she appeared. In a mere five years, the gardens were a wilderness. Weeds began to push apart the paving stones; the brick walls crumbled with the pressure exerted by snaking tendrils of vines; rust ate through the graceful wrought iron lacework upon the garden gates.

It saddened Greggory to walk the paths he had once wandered with Mother. The rustling of the undergrowth seemed to whisper tauntingly. Where once two pairs of feet had trod,  only one passed now. He knew that whatever weakness had existed in Mother was magnified in him: she had possessed, at least, the power to fight here. She could not fight Father, but Father was a petty and transient tyrant. The entropy of nature was a much more fearsome enemy, one who always got the last laugh. For in the end he triumphed over time and absorbed the being of his enemies: greater fuel to fight off the attempts of the next fool who came along. Yet, Mother had triumphed here, if briefly, and found some peace. Greggory could not do the same.

His only solace was the meadow by the river, where his first memory seemed as perennial as the overgrown expanse of the meadow plants, where goosegrass, Queen Anne's lace and milkweed mingled with juniper and hydrangea bushes.

It seemed appropriate that, here, his consciousness began. Here, where the war between nature and order seemed rooted, here where the lovely virginity of untamed nature coexisted with the staid regularity of evenly spaced border bushes. It was here Greggory had known peace, even if he hadn't known at the time what the feeling was. And here he increasingly sought a return to that juvenile state of bliss, for Mother's absence did not grow easier.

Sometime, as he lay in the meadow grass, thinking that once this ground had held the impression of her, a new mother dandling her baby upon her knees, he imagined he heard signs of movement in the field. And he looked up and saw her, standing there above him.

"I understand now." he murmured in greeting.

And she bowed her head with the solemnity and grace of the priestess of some primal religion and absolved him. 

But, when he opened his eyes, there was only the solid wall of the meadow grasses like the curtain wall of a fortress all around him. And he thought: a fortress can offer shelter, or be a prison.

 

The hydrangeas that stood like a breakwater between the river and the meadow seemed an extension of the water: they were one solid mass of blue, variegated by shades of light and dark, like the soul who had ordered their planting. Their big, round heads of blooms bobbed in amenable time with the sweep of the wind. Greggory wondered whether Mother had thought of this when she ordered their planting. Or whether on the summer afternoons of his infancy when she'd brought him here�"companion and yet not�"if her thoughts had drifted in a similar vein. It amused him to think of this, to wonder whether his mind, rooted so much in her, bore any similarity to hers.

In the spring of the year he turned 19, some six years after Mother's departure, one of the bushes suddenly bloomed a vibrant pink. It spoiled the effect of the flower heads, rolling like small choppy waves in the wind. The pink flowers were like the ugly red tide he'd once seen at a beach Mother had taken him to when he was little. They were a blight upon his sanctuary. They made him shake with a rage that overtook him suddenly. It was the first real emotion he'd experienced since he'd exhausting himself in weeping over Mother's sudden departure. His rational instincts told him he should pursue the emotion, probe it to find its roots and pluck it, weed-like, from the garden of his psyche before it had time to spread. But his subconscious warned him that there was, perhaps, something in there that might impugn Mother's character, might unroot her memory at the same time.

He waded cross the meadow to examine the bush and found the blooms of the adjacent shrubs bore the first stages of the same taint; the delicate frilly edges of the flowers bore a faint pinkish tinge, like the first signs of a disease threatening to erupt.

Greggory had learned enough from Mother to know that it was something in the soil that gave hydrangeas their color. They were a reflection of whatever surrounded them. Was that what Mother, who affected so well the elegant society lady, had admired in the plant?

If that were true, it meant there was something in the soil, some poison profaning this place of sanctity, this place where Mother had been happy. Some poison in the soil, which was the foundation of the earth, eating away at the place where Greggory's innocence was rooted. Some poison, some acid slowly eating away at the foundation of his being. It could not stand. The plants would have to be dug up, the soil replaced.

Six years on, it was not difficult to get round Father's hawkishness. Though he remained cloistered in the ancestral mausoleum of a family that was not his own, Father had entrusted Greggory with some perfunctory role in the business at his eighteenth birthday. He had only to wait until Father left the town to attend to some important meeting or other to call up a landscape architect and give him Father's business account.

When the workmen arrived, Greggory insisted in taking part in the excavation. He knew it was necessary, but he felt that each spade of sod unearthed tore not into loam and roots, but at his soul.  The heavy-booted workmen lumbering over the ground Mother had once glided over so elegantly was almost more than he could bear. He knew he was aggravating the foreman by standing beside him, sweating over the details of what was a fairly simple task, but it was the only way Greggory could retain any sense of mastery over the gardens, and over himself. This had been, until now, the private domain of him and Mother. Their own Eden, equally perilous as the original.

It took longer than expected to pull the tainted bush free of the ground. There was something tangled in the roots that would not give way; it was as if the soil was fighting off intruders. With a tremendous grunt, the men finally yanked the plant free from the ground. A shower of dirt and broken root fragments cascaded through the air. The fine, dry grains of the dirt moved as if with sentience into the eyes, ears and nostrils of the workmen, sending them doubling over into coughing fits. Even as he choked on the cloying mist of dirt turning to mud on the wetness of his tongue, Greggory felt some thrill of pleasure to see the gardens fight back so. It gave him hope that all might one day be well.

"Hey boss," one of the workman called, having recovered his breath.

He plucked a small white rod, about three inches long from the roots of the displaced hydrangea bush.

"There's your problem." the foreman said, turning to address Greggory, "Some animal's died. Seen it a thousand times. The decomposing body releases phosphorus and nitrogen, makes the soil acidic. Good news is it's an easy fix, once we get rid of the corpse."

Greggory nodded and grabbed a spade. Kneeling over the looming black pit they'd created, he felt an odd mix of power and powerlessness. It was a grave they'd opened, the grave of some hapless creature. He felt the fragility of his being�"this great disruption, this great shattering of the patchwork veil of peace he'd cobbled together�"caused by some dumb animal who'd had the bad luck to give up the ghost at this particular spot. But, now, he was also god-like: the life force of the creature had gone; it had no say nor care for its remains; Greggory did, and there was no will that could fight against him as he callously picked up its bones and cast them into the river.

The foreman heard a clatter and a heavy thump and whirled around. Greggory had fallen, head first, into the pit in a dead faint. There was a tremendous racket as he called out for help and a great cloud of dust rose from the parched summer earth as the workmen came running over. They carried Greggory's insensible form to the shade of a tree and laid him out. One man went running to the house to fetch water.

"Must be heatstroke." the foreman said as he stood over him.

He shook his head disapprovingly as he looked at the rail-thin form of the boy and thought, unkindly, of the softness of the upper class.

"Boss!" one of the workmen called out from the pit.

Something in his tone made the foreman run over.

The face of the workman kneeling in the dirt was pale, a feat given the intensity of the noonday sun.

The foreman looked down into the ground and nearly fainted himself.

There, gaping up at them, its pallor a garish contrast against the rich brown-black of the fresh loam that still bore the moistness of the earth from which it had been wrested, was a skeleton, not animal but human. Its only shroud was the grimy, tattered remnants of a pale green silk dress.

Reviews

[Crowley]

I have to say, the writing and the flow of this piece is very good. The characterization and dialogue are amazing as you ferret out the emotion using action and thought in a very professional manner. It seems a little long for one chapter, but that is the only thing critical that I can say. As Emma below noted, I was pulled in in the first few sentences and ravaged the rest as quickly as I could. It is a Novel I would continue to read because the writing is superb, the characterization awesome, and the dialogue very believable. Loved it!!!

[emmajoy]

I was already lured but then was captured by,

" He gasped with anticipation and then he was flying upwards, up into the brilliant sapphire spread of the cloudless sky. And the sun was in his eyes and he was blind, blind to all but the dark outline of Mother's figure as she caught him and pressed him to her chest and the radiance of her diamond teeth catching a sun beam as she threw her head back and laughed.' And of course, there's more fine writing and mysterious, an unwrapping, ' Greggory felt panic rising with hot bile in the back of his throat. He felt the black and white convictions of his childhood falling away. He had always thought of Mother in terms of her free-spirited outdoor self her closeted indoor self. But the sudden apparition .. '

This writing is extraordinary, grabs thought and keeps it here, wanting and longing to know more.. Not sure whether or not it comes under the guise of mystery or what, but do know that the writing of it is first class, phrasing and descriptions so vast, i certainly felt drawn to and want more and more.. I'll read to the end, please let me know when chapters are posted, if you have time.