By Any Other Name
Kilmeny MacMichael
Irina’s roses should cascade over her garden wall.
Only, while she was out, someone came and tore the flowers to pieces.
When Irina reached to rescue what remained, a hidden thorn pierced her finger. Still, she gathered a bouquet from the savaged vines, took them inside.
Her mother claimed to know nothing about their destructive visitors. Just as she knew nothing when Johannes brought news of their father’s arrest.
Irina isn’t reading the textbook alongside her afternoon cup of tea. Her finger throbs.
Irina said everything they wanted her to say, following her father’s arrest. She signed the statements. Surely, she would receive her pharmacy degree.
Where did her half-brother’s anger get him?
The vase on the table was from Johannes.
Irina and Johannes were sometimes mistaken for twins. Blessed with regular features, strong bones. Irina’s mother joked the two might be models for soviet architecture’s next monstrosity, the stainless-steel planes of their faces cutting through the eagle wind of the future.
There was a photograph of them fighting, on a dock at a lake. Five years old. Gripping each other’s arms and legs, grimacing, each refusing to let the other be first into the cool.
She tried to warn Johannes he couldn’t go on dabbling in dissolution, playing piano at those bars, with those people, relying on their father’s protection.
Irina’s finger throbbed with each heartbeat. Roses were tricky things. She would have to watch against the spread of bacteria and rot throughout her body.
Johannes swore they wouldn’t get him and spoke of Paris. He asked her to come with him. Irina laughed.
A few days later, Johannes brought her this beautiful vase. He didn’t say anything about it being the last time she would see him.
Irina worries at her wounded finger.
Perhaps Johannes was sitting at a table on the Champs-Élysées, asking for café crème. Perhaps, he, too, was dead, like their father, or imprisoned, found guilty of some new old crime, intemperance, mockery, youth.
Irina didn’t know.
The glaze on the lip of the vase is slightly rough against her throbbing finger. They even attacked roses now.
It may be they still trust her enough. She won’t tell them silence is not agreement, and that her acquiescence could be shattered like rose petals stomped into the dirt.
She won’t ask what they’ve done to her brother, or why they make this war, but she vows by these red roses she too can grow thorns.
She’ll graduate. As a pharmacist, new to the trade, she’ll be eager. She’ll smile and she will prepare their medicine.
Irina takes a sip of tea, wraps a handkerchief around her hurt.
She will pierce them, in sharp and festering ways.
She will go back out to the garden. There will be something to replant. There will be blossoms again. And more thorns.
Irina doesn’t remember the day at the lake she fought with her brother, but knows now, she will not be the one to let go.
Top Ten Sounds by which to Feed Roses
- Wind
- Your favourite radio drama episode for the twentieth time
- Rain
- Quien Sera/Sway
- A new podcast for the first time
- Pictures at an Exhibition
- A folk singer singing under a bridge
- Justin Hurwitz’s First Man score
- A neighbour learning the guitar
- Starling
Kilmeny MacMichael
Often looking to real and unreal stories of the past for present strength, Kilmeny MacMichael writes from a small town in western Canada’s Okanagan Valley. She has over thirty works published, including with Allegory, Short Édition and Worlds of Possibility. You may find more through kfmacmichael.ca.