Oleander

It was Jean Abernathy’s opinion that if one were to look up the word ‘tranquil’ in the dictionary, that Saturday morning in Foxdale would be a perfect match. Birds chirped cheerfully, and a trained ear could probably tell the difference between a broad-tailed and a ruby-throated hummingbird. If there was anywhere a failed ornithologist going through a second divorce and a midlife crisis who wanted to be closer to their science would go, Foxdale would be the place.

It was that point in the day where sunshine was still white and people felt justified in wasting time, knowing the weekend stretched out in front of them, expansive and long, a time to complete everything they’d promised themselves they’d do. Jean looked down on those kinds of people, the ones who slept in shamelessly and crammed all their tasks into the rear end of Sunday, hoping against hope that next weekend, they’d miraculously gain better organisation habits. She overwatered her plants, squinting suspiciously at the still-closed curtains of the house across the road, the one belonging to the mayor and his wife.

In her opinion, the mayor was nothing more than a title to make an old man feel better about himself. She felt justified in this respect - she’d tried going to him to complain about how the branches of her neighbour’s tree hung over the fence, casting shadows on her delicate flowers, or how the school bus came too early on Wednesdays. But he’d waved her off without a second word, which forced Jean to trim her hedge a little too high and shear off the offending branches, much to her neighbour’s chagrin.

Jean was a self-described busybody, always interested in everyone’s business, mostly because she didn’t have enough of her own. She was constantly curious, constantly on the lookout for controversy and scandal, which unfortunately was lacking in such a tiny town.

But still, Jean turned away when she heard the scream.

__

Her grandmother had always told her to turn away. Turn away when the soldiers came, turn away when babies were pulled from their mothers’ arms, turn away when the ones who didn’t, the warriors, were shackled and thrown into wooden wagons, taken away and never seen again.

Her father had been one of them, one of the brave ones who tried to fight. Their handcrafted arrows that had taken down the mightiest of bucks looked rudimentary in comparison to the loud, long rifles that had snatched away her grandfather’s life mere months before. They hadn’t stood a chance. The last thing she remembered of her father was him being kicked into the mud after he’d refused to bow.

__

Ruth Wentworth expected a lot of things to happen that Saturday morning, but finding her husband stiff in their bed was not one of them.

She’d taken extra care setting out his breakfast tray, all china crockery and tiny jars of honey and perfectly buttered toast, all the way to the edges, exactly how Robert liked it. She’d even gone out to pick her prized purple flowers and set them in a vase of salted water, because Jean Abernathy across the street had told her it would make them last longer. (Although knowing Jean, she may well have given Ruth false information just to be spiteful). She’d done everything just right to please him, knowing the conversation ahead would be difficult.

But it seemed like she needn’t have bothered. Ruth pressed her trembling fingers against her husband’s skin, not sure what she was looking for. Warmth? A flutter of a pulse? Eyes flickering open? A snore, even though she hated when he did that?

Her eyes travelled to his face, and a sudden feeling of dread squeezed her heart so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Sallow, greying skin. A still nose and mouth. And when she looked to his eyes, she found what she’d anticipated. They were open, glassy, and perfectly, perfectly lifeless.

Ruth screamed.

__

She’d always been taught to please the men. “The best way to a man’s heart is his stomach,” her grandmother had chuckled as she showed her how to shuck the corn. She’d learned, how to press a man’s feet, how to take care of a household, how to stay quiet as the men discussed how exactly she should spend her life and with whom.

She’d dropped a plate, then, as her uncle decided who her future husband should be. She’d never met the man ten years her senior in her life. Her grandmother had scolded her about the shattered crockery forcing her to spend the night fitting the fragments back together.

She’d kept the sharpest piece.

__

The mayor’s funeral was a social affair, with almost the entirety of the little town attending to sample the canapés. People hemmed and hawed over the tragedy, barely having known Robert Wentworth’s middle name before they read it in his obituary.

The seventy-year-old man lay in an open, steel casket. As Heather Kim approached the corpse, she shuddered. She’d never felt a connection to dead bodies, no matter how personal the connection had been in life. And her relationship with the mayor had never been… close.

She’d known him when they were younger, both failed politicians who’d left the big city in search of a smaller town to use to their advantage. Heather had had a plan. Heather always had a plan. She’d climb the ranks slowly, inching upwards on the societal ladder, until she could return to the place she’d always intended to, this time armed with experience. Unfortunately, he’d followed her and beaten her at her own game, something Heather enjoyed pinning on her sex and race but was most likely because of her bad temperament.

She’d plotted these last few years, how to turn the people against their mayor who’d been with them for almost two decades. She’d done her research. She’d dug through his entire life thoroughly, not leaving a single stone unturned.

And now the man had gone and died before she’d had the chance to put her plan into action. Though, it was easier this way. This way, no one had to suffer.

This way, Heather thought, eyeing his wife’s tear-stained face, no one has to know what I do.

__

She kept the shard for a long time.

Months came and went, bringing cold wind and rain. The piece of ceramic grew furred with ice under the floorboards, her one piece of insurance, waiting for the day it would be used.

She needed to get out of here. She knew she had to, not to survive but to live. So she kept her mouth shut, kept her head down, her thoughts consumed by that tiny piece of plate she’d hidden.

The day of her wedding came around. They draped her in silken fabrics that were worth more than three years of education she’d been denied, painted her eyes in kohl and her lips in crimson. She tightened her grip around the shard, biding her time.

Only her aunt seemed suspicious that she was putting up so little of a struggle, knowing all too well the fire that blazed in her heart, but she put on a good act for everyone else, even managing to smile a little.

She clenched the makeshift ceramic knife as she walked towards her husband-to-be, her husband never to be, calculating the most efficient path to push through once she’d done the deed. The old women would be easier to knock over, but the men would be more caught off guard.

She needn’t have bothered. As she raised her arm to strike, a single shot rang out - and then the man she was going to marry lay dead at her feet. Blood spilled over her silk shoes as she gaped in shock.

There was only thought that ran through her head as they caught her by her extravagant threads and threw her in what might have been the same wagon her father had been taken away in. There was so much blood.

__

The greengrocer was next.

His body was found slumped over his breakfast table, one hand still in the honeypot. He’d been relatively young, just forty-five, and the whole village took it as a great shock.

There had been a general consensus not to call the federal police, because as acting mayor Heather Kim put it, “they were outsiders who’d barge in and disrupt everything.” Wentworth’s widow had agreed, which was strange as her late husband had hardly found common ground on anything with Kim.

There were some who might find it suspicious, Annie Hill mused as she tended to her bees, that the mayor’s competitor and wife both convinced the sheriff to keep their affairs private. But those sort of things simply didn’t happen at Foxdale. It was something out of one of her well-thumbed murder mysteries, and although Annie enjoyed daydreaming, her feet were still firmly planted on the ground.

Annie pushed the slightly sweaty veil out of her face, taking off her hat. She’d opted to forgo traditional protective outfits decades ago, when she’d learned to read the behaviour of the insects better than that of her fellow humans. Still, bees were intelligent creatures. Annie was certain they’d sensed the death all around them.

The greengrocer had been a simple man, living alone in his house. The only scandal in his life Annie could recall was when Jean Abernathy had cut his overhanging tree branches off. That, and the fact that Ruth Wentworth spent more time at his cottage than at her own.

It was none of her business, though.

__

A wooden cage.

Rows of wooden cages, actually, each with a single, withered person inside of it. She tried not to vomit. Some of those people might have been her uncles, her cousins, even her father.

They took her wedding clothes, took her pitiful shard of ceramic, took everything from her. She tried to look into the eyes of the man beside her, but he turned away. She could practically taste the bitter tang of defeat on her tongue.

They took her name and gave her a false one in its place. She was given a plate of food that tasted like nothing and smelled worse. She curled up in the corner of her cage, slowly shrinking in on herself, trying to disappear. As they wanted her to. __

Jean attended the greengrocer’s funeral, despite her moral compass telling her not to. It was hardly socially acceptable to skip it, after all, and he had been her neighbour. Still, it was uncomfortable to sit there, surrounded by well-wishers who wished anything but well, listening to them talk about how much the man they haggled with once a week over cauliflower would be missed.

She looked at the arrangement of flowers on his casket, the same genus as the ones in her garden. The purple-red ones he’d nearly killed with the negligence of his tree branches. It was enormously petty, she knew, but all she could think of was the way he’d gone berserk over a few trimmed branches and pulled out several of her flower beds in retaliation. How the mayor had done nothing.

Jean hardly considered herself a pleasant person, but in this case, the greengrocer deserved it.

__

They hadn’t had water in two days.

She didn’t know if they’d simply forgotten, or if they were doing this on purpose. Torture, she thought, as she sucked in whatever moisture she could from her mouth.

The wooden cages were deteriorating, not in structural integrity but in basic hygiene. Cracks appeared in the far corner of the box and weeds poked their heads in, bursting into bloom in the sweltering heat. She’d stopped sweating about four hours ago.

She pressed her cheek hard against the back wall of her cell as she’d done a thousand and one times before, managing to get a tiny glimpse into the cage of the man beside her. He was on all fours, retching, with nothing coming out. Her gut twisted.

Desperately, he ripped up a small mauve flowering weed from a crack and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing urgently, sucking all the wetness out of it. Dimly, she wondered why it hadn’t struck her to do that earlier. She nearly turned away to try it herself when it happened.

He sat up on his haunches, triumphant, the slightly chewed leaf still hanging out of his mouth. Then he swayed, eyes going distant, and abruptly collapsed on the ground, twitching slightly before falling still. She stared at him, then the plant beside her.

She had a plan.

__

Ruth Wentworth did not attend the greengrocer’s funeral.

It should have been normal, one townsperson attending the memorial of another. Paying one’s respects and all that. But her own husband had just recently died, and though Ruth held no real fondness for the man, she still believed it was asking for trouble to spit on the grave of the dead.

But now he was dead, too. And whose grave would be spat on if she visited neither of them?

Ruth mostly kept to herself now, moping around her house, arranging and rearranging jars of honey with handmade labels in her pantry, relying on well-wishers to bring her necessities. She really wasn’t in the mood to traipse along the streets in respectable black, a thousand sorry for your losses being thrown at her from all directions.

Ruth despised these people, the lot of them, with their stuffy mannerisms and their stickler morals and their too-big noses. She’d spent the last twenty years quietly loathing them, turning herself inside out to make sure no one knew the extent of bitterness that existed within her. She’d done her duty, played the docile politician’s wife, made tea and hosted dinners while her insides continued to fill up with a burning hatred.

Then there was him. The grocer who’d winked at her as he’d weighed her bananas, making her blush awfully. The man who’d made her feel alive again, not just like an accessory. And now he was gone too.

Maybe those condescending remarks about her grief would have meaning, after all.

__

They became her new ceramic shard. Her life insurance, her one-way ticket out of this hellhole.

She learned her lesson this time. Don’t wait too long. The next time the guards came, to drag away the body, she struck.

They did this often. Tantalise her with food and water she’d never be given, just to see her reaction. One guard came and unlocked the cell, dangling a half-eaten chicken bone between his fingers near her face, rabid onion-smelling laughter making her mouth water against her will.

The crushed petals lay between her fingers, staining them purple-pink. She drooled as expected, reaching out and touching the food with her contaminated digit. The meat was slightly too pink as the guard guffawed and chomped down on the leg.

She prayed it was enough.

It took longer this time, so long that she was sure it hadn’t worked. But his muscles stiffened, eyes going unfocused, limbs twitching slowly. A look of the utmost bewilderment crossed his face as he collapsed to the floor.

She was gone before he fell still.

__

Heather Kim squatted by the side of the pavement, carefully scrutinising a single footprint in the dirt.

It was probably nothing. The sheriff had ruled the third death in two weeks a suicide, a young man found in the bathroom, head in the toilet bowl. He’d only been twenty-two, the great-nephew of Jean Abernathy. Heather shook her head. Shame.

But it all seemed too perfect to be true, didn’t it? One death was an accident, two a coincidence. But three?

Foxdale wasn’t a hostile town. Heather hadn’t thought it had the capacity to be one. Townsfolk left doors unlocked during long, dark nights, extending hospitality to weary travellers and neighbours with missing keys (far more of the latter than the former). It was one of the few aspects of the town Heather enjoyed, before the murders began.

Because they were murders, weren’t they? That’s what she was doing here, after all, muddying the new pantsuit she’d bought after Wentworth’s death. She squinted harder at the pugmark, before sighing and giving up. What did she know? It was someone’s shoe - likely one that had been doing nothing more suspicious than crossing the street.

Heather stood up and brushed dirt off her knees, looking around for any spectators to her juvenile detecting. Luckily, there were none. She clapped the dust from her hands and spun around, marching purposefully back home. She had campaigning to do.

__

She ran out of there as fast as her atrophied legs could take her.

They’d be notified of her absence by now, she knew. Although there was no one behind her, she heard the alarm bells tolling, alerting every guard in that rotten building that there was a prisoner on the loose.

It was drier than her homeland. More barren, too. The unfamiliar stench of it poisoned her lungs. Still, she ran, breath leaving her, chapped feet landing hard on the unforgiving stones.

Someone shouted behind her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the familiar crack of the rifle to end her life as it had ended so many others before her. But nothing happened. Slowly, she turned around.

A guard was standing there, gun loosely held to his chest, uniform jacket too big on his frame. She studied him. He couldn’t have been more than a boy, still barely growing fuzz on his terrified face. It was then that realisation crashed into her - she’d killed a man.

She held her hand up towards him, showing him the sweaty crushed petals still there. She dipped her finger in the liquid and drew a line across her throat. He seemed to understand, nodding and slowly backing away.

He was giving her permission, she realised in shock. Permission to flee.

So flee she did.

__

Jean Abernathy stood in her great-nephew’s house, surveying the mess of the young man’s home.

Socks lay discarded on the floor, dirty dishes piled in the sink, and garbage bags lined the wall against the door. There were prized objects too - ornaments and expensive devices and reasonably nice clothes in the cupboard. Letters from friends lay on his desk, notebooks and pencils and a scribbled sketch or two. His wallet looked full, his fridge stocked.

It hardly looked like the home of someone who wasn’t planning on living anymore. Jean picked up his phone, which buzzed with hundreds of messages. She quickly put it down again.

He’d been so young, taking a break from his studies to spend some time with her in Foxdale. He’d had aspirations, dreams. He’d wanted to be a designer. An architect. Was it an artist? She forgot now. She wished she hadn’t.

__

She used the false name.

She’d picked up the language, assimilated into the culture, donned their clothing. She smiled when asked questions, concealed her accent, didn’t draw attention to herself.

She moved constantly, never allowing herself to make lasting connections, always looking at these people who’d killed her own and harbouring loathing in her heart. She knew the individuals themselves were not at fault. But they were the same ones who’d cheer when more of her people were captured and eradicated and killed.

Eventually she settled down, in a town small enough that they hadn’t even met another like her. Except for one of them; one who was so familiar that they both stopped and stared into each other’s eyes like they had decades before on that dry, barren plain. And she knew he was giving her permission again.

So she bided her time, just like all the other times before. She was patient.

The purple-red flowers blossomed everywhere.

__

She decanted the thick, golden honey into the glass jars.

Each one was decorated with a sweet paper doily with a bee drawn on it in black and yellow ink, flying clumsily through a field of aubergine blooms.

She reflected on what the sheriff had told her. You’ve gone too far. She had, she knew it. The young man - he was the same age her saviour was when he let her go. He was blameless.

She was at fault.

She was a believer in retribution. What goes around comes around. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe in a divine god that would do it for her, seeing as any higher power there might have been had abandoned her decades ago. She’d taken matters into her own hands.

She gazed out of the window, to where her bees buzzed along peacefully, settling on the flowers in her yard. The honey was laced with it, built with it, the same nectar that had stained her fingers so many years earlier. The same colour that touched them now.

Annie Hill - no, that wasn’t her name. She’d left her old name behind in that dim wooden cage, fleeing from her people, shedding her identity. She’d wronged many, been wronged by more. But now, it had come to an end.

What goes around, comes around. She dipped her fingers into the honey.

She licked the syrup off her gnarled hands.

And as she collapsed to the floor, the oleander continued to bloom outside.