Chapter 1 - The Garden of Despair
Bitter Roots
The first rays of sun snuck into her bedroom, diffracted into rainbows by the large panes of beveled glass. Somebody had left one of the large French doors, the ones that led into the garden, open, and the breeze that blew in brought with it the scent of the night rain.
Cimmy smiled and rushed to her feet, noticed that she’d fallen asleep in the gown she’d been wearing the night before, and was surprised to notice that the delicate silk fabric wasn’t wrinkled. She loved that dress, blushing with the color of ripe apricots, and wore it often; she loved its simple cut, devoid of frills and embellishments, which blossomed amply at the waist to form a full circle, perfect for twirling. One strap had fallen off her shoulder and she instinctively adjusted it, while she tried to remember where she had left her sandals the night before. She couldn’t remember which room it was, nor did she care.
She’d taken them off because she couldn’t run in them, or dance in them the way she wanted to, and in the process rediscovered the feeling of soft grass under her bare feet, and the rush of the water around her ankles during the torrential rain.
She opened the other pane and stood in the doorway, her back against one of the wide wooden jambs, looking out into the garden at the clear puddles that had formed, here and there, in the gravel path, after the rain. The morning sunshine touched them gently, stirring glimmers and sparkles, almost like a dare to bring Cimmy out into the open.
The latter giggled, delighted by this game nature was playing with her, and rushed out, barefoot, into the garden, splashing in puddles and getting drenched from above with the remnants of the night rain that the wind brought down from the tree canopies above.
The garden was very large, but Cimmy knew it well, because she had spent her whole childhood in it. She rushed past the tall sages and bent her head, without even thinking about it, when she walked under the arbor, where the roses were in full bloom. She had the wild canes of the climbing roses tangle in her hair more than once, and by now she could bow her head just enough to avoid them, even with her eyes closed.
She wandered past the tall lilies, which reached above her head, and whose dark, pollen laden stamens stained her fingers when she brushed her hands against them.
Behind them, the umbels of milkweed welcomed hosts of butterflies, which were stirred into flight by the light breeze, only to descend quickly upon the bright orange flowers again, in search of nectar.
The narrow gravel path ended abruptly into the main alley, which was wide, covered in flagstones and lined by linden trees.
Cimmy walked in the shade of the trees, breathing deeply the sultry perfume, her soles tickled by the moss and flowering thyme which was growing between the stones like a soft living carpet and yielded its spicy fragrance under her feet.
She felt the breeze from the pond and picked up the pace, eager to reach her favorite hiding spot before the rain started again, she could tell from the dance of light and shadow on the path that a second installment of the downpour that had fallen overnight was about to start at any moment.
The gazebo was out on a narrow strip advancing into the lake, strip which broke down towards the end, into a path of stepping stones, surrounded by the water, and Cimmy jumped from one stepping stone to the next with the agility of a mountain goat.
She jumped into the gazebo just seconds before the rain started again, with booming, rolling thunder and bolts of lightning, thick as ropes, dancing above the trees; the rain fell hard and fast, drumming on the roof, and crumpling the placid surface of the pond with a myriad of ripples.
The hem of her dress was drenched and heavy, and had turned three shades darker, but Cimmy didn’t care.
She sat down on the round bench that surrounded the post in the middle of the gazebo and gazed into the distance at the heavy clouds which were moving very fast, dropping their watery load over the heads of the cattails, and on the fleshy petals of the water lilies, and sifted it down through the tree canopies until only a sprinkling of water drops reached the ground.
The warm air over the pond turned into mist in the cool rain, and its soft white blanket padded the water plants, and the stepping stones, and Cimmy’s bare feet, while she sat there, watching, mesmerized, the intricate movements that made it feel alive, somehow, while she breathed deeply the scent of the rain, mixed with the overpowering fragrance of wet gardenias and orange blossoms.
Such was the beauty of Cimmy’s garden, and how proud she was of it! It was the most beautiful place on earth, she thought, this walled garden of hers, this heavenly shelter in the middle of existence, this place where everything was flawless.
She stretched out her cupped hands, and they were filled in an instant by the fast falling rain, and she drank from them eagerly, to appease her thirst.
She then jumped out in the rain, from stepping stone to stepping stone, shivering and giggling, and ran through the fruit orchard, stirring the wet dirt between the trees and filling the lap of her dress with peaches, whose ripe skins were almost the same color as her wet dress was now, as the rain kept falling, thick and heavy, from above.
She couldn’t even remember how many times she had made her way through the peach orchard, hundreds, thousands maybe, to find the dirt path that weaved through the wildflower meadow and led back to the house.
During sun baked summer afternoons, the meadow was covered in the bright eyes of chamomile and chicory, but not now, when the flowers had shut themselves tight to keep out of the downpour that was pounding their sappy stems and releasing their fragrance.
The young girl was about to reach the flagstone path when the rain let up and the sun started shining immediately, making every drop of water sparkle. Tiny birds, thrilled by the plentiful water, gathered in flocks to bathe in the puddles, boding good weather.
Cimmy wasn’t in a rush to get to the house, but her feet carried her back to the garden in front of her bedroom, just by the power of habit.
She reached the little herb wheel, with tall anise growing around the fountain at its center, and there she stopped and sat down on one of the old garden benches, basking in the sunshine, to allow her gown to dry and to munch on a peach, in the peace of this plant realm of scent and wonder, surrounded by bees and butterflies, and the smell of the heated herbs.
Clouds passed overhead, playing with the sunlight, on, off, and on again, enticing the birds to sing louder, until their collective chirping drowned all the other sounds.
A baby rabbit, a cottontail, jumped at Cimmy’s feet and startled her, and then turned abruptly, to distract potential predators, and vanished behind a shrub.
Cimmy got up to take a look at one of the garden patches, which had not been planted yet, and spent a few minutes in front of it, trying to determine whether she should grow chives or dill, and she couldn’t help notice that the thyme seeds that she had carried on the soles of her feet had already started to sprout in her footsteps, making the whole decision process obsolete.
She sighed, resigned, when she saw it happen, and allowed the garden to decide for itself, hoping that there wasn’t too much sunshine in that particular spot.
She picked a few handfuls of purple pods from the pole beans, which were laden with flowers and fruit, all donning the same noble color, and smiled instantly at the sight of the huge squash flowers, whose cheery orange matched the brightness of the summer morning.
She looked at the pepper patch and regretted not planting the more colorful varieties, the purple, yellow, orange and red ones, and her thoughts seeded the fertile dirt, which bore fruit immediately, to accommodate them.
Satisfied, Cimmy turned around on her heels and was about to return to the house, when a familiar voice shrieked through her beautiful landscape, ripping huge tears in its fabric and making her choke with dust.
“Cimarron!! Curse the evil moment that spit you into this world to burden my life! Wake up, you useless cockroach! Are you waiting for the sun to raise you? There’ll be no food tonight, so you know, we only feed those who work to earn their keep!”
The door slammed behind her, reverberating in Cimmy’s head like the sound of a trap closing. She sat up carefully, wincing because of her bruised ribs, and coughed up the dust that was filling her nose and her mouth. They haven’t seen water in months, and on the barren patches of thirsty dust, creased by deep cracks, crooked and swollen around the edges like scars, nothing grew anymore, not even weeds. Only the scraggly tops of bitter roots, whose sharp and ravenous filaments grasped onto the dirt so desperately that people worked their hands raw straining to pull them.
She’d been born to this place, Cimmy was, to this garden of despair, bitter and filled with harshness, this place where she was lucky to be fed and begrudged for being born, the place that hope forgot.
Nobody understood, and Cimmy least of all, where that heavenly garden of her dreams came from, for surely there was no way she could have seen anything of the sort, or even heard stories about it.
Nobody in the community had ventured past the tall walls of their garden, if one could call it that, in generations.
When she was very young, Cimmy had tried to describe the pond, and the peach orchard, to siblings and friends, and got a vicious beating for her trouble, so she learned to keep her imaginary garden to herself.
She slept on the dirt floor, right next to the door, a place that was drafty during chilly nights and where the door hit her in the back every time somebody went in and out of the room they all shared. It was hours before the sunrise, but everyone else was already up, trying to get to whatever roots they could find before the others came and picked them clean. Cimmy got up too, dusted herself off and went outside.
She was still trying to get the powdery dirt out of her mouth, but behind the crunchy, mineral bitterness that settled in the back of her throat every time she swallowed, she could still taste the peach she had enjoyed earlier in her dream.
Survival
It was still cold outside before dawn, but Cimmy knew that in a few brief hours, the barren patch she was digging with her hands was going to become hotter than an oven. The sun was unforgiving at noon, in this place that had no means to offer shade other than their little shelter, which, of course, was completely off limits during the day.
“Ah, the princess decided to join us! How can we be of service, your Majesty? Let us pick your food for you!”
“Don’t waste your breath, Bertha, there’s not enough there to make it worth your while.” Josepha swirled a finger next to her temple to signify that Cimmy was not right in the head.
“Well, maybe she can eat from that garden in her dreams. Why don’t we let her?” the latter didn’t relent. “You don’t come anywhere near my row if you know what’s good for you! If you want to get any roots, you better wake up on time,” Josepha continued.
“Did you see that look she gave you?” Bertha snapped, as if bitten by a gadfly. “Get out of my sight, jinx, you destroy everything you touch! Good for nothing louse!” the latter didn’t relent.
Cimmy looked around, wondering where she could go hide in this cracked open field where you could see for miles. She also wondered what was there left to be destroyed, for, as far as she could tell, the job had already been finished. There was nothing left, nothing worth having, nothing worth fighting for, and in a brief second the desolation of it all was so all-encompassing that her entire soul coalesced around a single thought: she didn’t want to live like this anymore. Whatever it entailed, however hard it was and no matter how long it took, there was no point in living, other than emerging from this hell.
She didn’t know how, of course, and the concept itself was absurd. One couldn’t just escape one’s own existence, could one? As far as everybody was concerned, this garden was the world, no way in, no way out, no way up.
“Ugh, girl!” Naima mumbled under her breath, bitterly, overcome by pity. “Look around yourself, and look it good, ‘cause this, what you see, this is all you’re ever gonna get. Just drop that pie in the sky fairy land that you’re wasting your time with. You’re only going to make things worse for yourself.” She looked Cimmy straight in the eye to make sure her words had sunk in, and was angered by what she saw in them. “How dare she,” Naima thought, “the little snot! I waste my time to give her good advice instead of letting her die in the gutter and this is the thanks I get. Serves me right for playing Samaritan to an idiot!”
Caught in the open fire between the three, Cimmy instinctively retreated in her mind, where remnants of her night time garden managed to hold on to their shape. She closed her eyes and called to God in her anguish. One could always call upon God, couldn’t one? That was the one hope in this life. She’d heard stories.
“That’s right, you go right ahead and pray, ‘cause God has nothing better to do than listen to the likes of you! Let me tell you something about God, little girl! He hates your kind, the wasteful, the idle, the selfish and the pigheaded, who think they can get by in this world by burdening other people’s lives! I hope He hears you, I really do. Maybe you finally get what you deserve for your wickedness!”
“You tell her, Bertha!” Josepha encouraged, angered by a particularly uncooperative root that had scraped her palm. “Like life is not hard enough already. I have to sit here and look at this nasty sloth! Get out of my sight, curse, before I get my hands on you!”
Cimmy had experienced the work of Josepha’s hands before, and knew that the latter was thorough and methodical in her administration of punishment, so she got up and left, trying to figure out where she could keep herself out of sight until things blew over.
“You’re letting her leave?” Naima burst with anger. “Who’s going to feed her, you?”
“She can starve for all I care!” Josepha retorted. “Oh, you heard me right, girl!” she yelled behind Cimmy, who had turned her head upon hearing the conversation. “No food for you tonight!”
'Well, at least there is consistency,' Cimmy thought, since the promise of starvation had been bestowed upon her earlier that day, and she knew from experience that this promise was always kept.
She found a crack in the dirt that was deep enough to give her some cover, although getting deeper in the parched earth carried with it the risk of being baked alive, and settled in it, trying to make herself as small as she could.
She closed her eyes, trying to escape the desolate landscape, but found it hard to concentrate over the pangs of hunger. She thought that if there was a God, how could He abandon her so, she hadn’t done anything wrong to deserve such hatred, her mind refused to understand it.
Maybe the others were right, maybe she did bring this upon herself, maybe if she did give up that stupid, worthless dream of hers life would be easier to bear, maybe God would forgive her and have mercy upon her. Maybe people wouldn’t hate her so much, and maybe she’d survive.
She opened her eyes and was blasted instantly by the cruel light of the sun at noon, and it dawned on her that making do with what was and giving up and just surviving life was the real punishment. It was the very essence of damnation. No eternal fires, no pitchforks or demons to torment people. They tormented each other in this man made hell of hatred, anger and despair. If there was anything she really wanted to ask God in prayer, was not the strength to bear her circumstances, but the ability to change them for the better.
Meanwhile, her stomach was still growling, because she hadn’t eaten in days. This wasn’t her first trip to the vast empty mansion of hunger, and she assessed that if she didn’t get something to eat soon, she was going to fall into the next tier of weakness, the kind that would not allow her enough strength to dig for food and would all but guarantee that things would not end well. The last time she was in this situation she had lain outside in the sun for days, and it was only a merciful providence, in the guise of her friend Rahima, who restored her back to health. Her friend had gone without to share what little she had with Cimmy, and got herself in trouble for her efforts, a thought that still tormented Cimmy to this day. How could she be any good if even those who tried to help her got hurt, especially those whom she loved? She decided that Bertha and Josepha must be right, that she was tainted, somehow, by a cursed fate, and she vouched that this time she will let herself go before she allowed anybody else to be harmed in the process, and least of all her best friend.
She shut her eyes tighter and waited to pass out, and with what little strength she had left, she still managed to get irritated by the fact that something was poking her in the back. Talk about adding insult to injury, right?
She turned around to dislodge the irksome bane, because if she were to go, she wanted to have a minimal level of comfort on her last journey, and she was shocked to discover that the source of her annoyance was a healthy clump of roots, a lot fleshier than the ones she was used to finding, because they reached much deeper into the dirt, which allowed them to find more of the precious water.
Cimmy ate until she was full, and it bears mentioning how one’s death wish tends to dissipate once one is no longer in despair.
Still chewing on the fleshy tubers, she thought about what Bertha and Josepha would say, probably something in the neighborhood of how selfish and ungrateful she was to have found good food and not once think to share it with the community, the lot of them who had been working so hard and had earned the right to the better harvest.
She was pleased to acknowledge that no pangs of guilt were tormenting her conscience.
If she’d already paid her dues ten times over by being called lazy, selfish and pigheaded, she might as well enjoy the spoils.
She then remembered her friend Rahima, grabbed a large bunch of fleshy roots and hid them in her shirt, to share with her after nightfall, when nobody was watching.
The heat was starting to relent, and she considered that it might not be so bad if she spent the night there, maybe the earth trapped enough warmth during the day to tide her over until morning, but then she remembered Rahima and realized people will search for her until they found her, and in the process they will discover her little treasure and take it away from her, so she begrudgingly dragged her feet back to the camp.
She passed by Bertha’s group, followed by triumphant looks of satisfaction that God had finally doled out justice, snuck the roots to Rahima, beseeching her and making her swear by all that she held dear that she won’t tell anybody where she got them, and tried to creep as inconspicuously as possible into the house to retire for the night.
No such luck, the teases and barbs only eased up after a couple of hours, when their initiators got tired and emotionally spent, but when the room finally went quiet, Cimmy took a few moments to go over the events of the day.
She was still radiating the simple, very basic sense of well-being one gets when one goes to sleep with a full belly, something she had never experienced before, and wondered at the curious turn of events that had made this miracle possible.
In the process, she remembered the request she’d sent upstairs when she was pondering whether to live or die, and the significance of the fleshy root discovery came in full focus.
It took all of her willpower to keep herself from laughing out loud and give herself away, but it did dawn on her that maybe God didn’t hate her all that much after all.
Encouraged by such timely support, she gave thanks and rushed back to her dream garden, eager to show it off, although upon further consideration she had to assume He’d probably seen it already.
Greed
With each passing day, Cimmy got stronger. Her face regained its youthful fullness and the color in her cheeks returned, a detail which didn’t escape Bertha’s keen eye. Since food was so hard to come by and all the sources of it were already spoken for, there could be no other explanation: Cimmy was stealing it from somebody.
'Just my luck!' Cimmy thought. 'It’s either give it away or have it taken away. No option three here.' At least she had had enough food to restore her health for the time being, and to give herself some back-up for what was sure to become a turn for the worse in her life. Bertha and Josepha’s involvement absolutely guaranteed it.
She wondered what she was going to do for food from now on, as she dug diligently at the end of her parched row, where the roots had been gone for a long time now, when her hands ran into a sizable clump. She managed to scarf down a couple of tubers before Bertha came and took it, cursing under her breath, confounded by the snot’s unbelievable luck.
“Maybe we should send her out into the fields, like pigs after truffles,” Josepha suggested, half joking.
“Why? Isn’t our fortune bad enough? Do you want to get involved with whatever evil she’s using to get the better of us? Don’t you fear God’s wrath anymore, Josepha?”
“You should be talking about God’s wrath!” Josepha mumbled under her breath, still resentful over the fact that Bertha had simply taken the fleshy clump of tubers from right under her nose, no explanation and no excuses either, the entitled cow!
Maybe if she did get that clump, Josepha wouldn’t have to worry about her diminishing harvest right now, but she prayed that God, in His benevolent wisdom, found it fit to diminish Bertha’s stash too, just to prove that there was divine justice in the world.
Walking through the field on her way home, pleased with herself for being so quick on her feet and eating those tubers, Cimmy still felt kind of bad that she didn’t manage to hide any for Rahima; because she was deep in thought and not paying attention, she didn’t notice the clump that was sticking out of the dirt until she stumbled on it. The falter increased her proximity to the ground and placed the fleshy tubers right under her nose. It was a large clump, too, which probably explained why it wasn’t all buried anymore.
'One option three, coming right up,' Cimmy thought, encouraged. She ate until she was full, filled her shirt with tubers for Rahima, and headed home.
Given the snot’s unexplainable luck, Bertha and Josepha spent some time in council and came to the conclusion that Cimarron back owed a fair amount of tubers to her folks for having put her up so far, for feed and upkeep and whatnot, and they brought this detail to her attention, certain it would elicit protests.
It didn’t.
“If I told you once, I told you a million times, but nobody’s listening to me. She’s not right in the head!” Bertha clarified the situation.
The Flower Field
When she had time, Cimmy sat down with Rahima and they went over the events of the day, their joys and upsets and what the future might bring.
“Why do you think we’re here, Cimmy?” Rahima asked.
“What do you mean? We were born here.”
“Yes, but why? Why here, where everything has to be so hard? Do you think there is some other place, maybe, where life is easier? There’s got to be an easier way to get through this valley of tears!” Rahima frowned, dejected.
“Why, you mean like the outside?” Cimmy replied.
“You never thought about it?” Rahima asked sheepishly, because she wasn’t all that convinced there wasn’t something sinful about her inquiry.
“No,” Cimmy pondered. “I mean, why do you think it’s different on the other side of the wall? For all we can tell, it’s probably the same. The sky doesn’t end at the wall, nor does it change in any way. I bet you the outside is just the same.”
“Good grief, Cimmy! Can’t you at least let a girl dream?” Rahima brought the absolute argument to dissolve her friend’s skeptical outlook on life. How could Cimmy, of all people, discourage her friend from searching for a better way, and who was to know that her friend couldn’t see that way, that she didn’t have all its details in her head, just like Cimmy had her garden.
“Maybe you’re right. What do you think it is like?"
“What if there’s water outside these walls? What if there are beautiful flowers growing out there? What if we’ve trapped ourselves behind these walls for reasons that have long ceased to matter and now we’re just going through the motions without thinking?”
Cimmy wanted to ask her friend how come she never told her that she could see the flowers too. Nobody in their world could know what a flower even was, or what it looked like, unless they saw it in their mind. Of course, when one had to spend all of one’s life essence scouring the dirt for bitter roots, one didn’t have much time or disposition for esoteric discussions.
“What kind of flowers, Rahima?” Cimmy asked, almost in a whisper.
“Purple flowers, Cimmy. There are all these purple flowers everywhere! They are tall, and their stems are spiky, and they look very harsh, but then, when they bloom, they are beautiful, like fuzzy pincushions swaying in the wind. An entire field of them. You can’t see the end of it!”
Cimmy also wanted to ask her friend how did she know what purple looked like. There was no such color in their world, where everything was painted tan and brown, and where even white was a precious commodity, given the fact that, with the scarcity of water, things were difficult to clean.
“And you are saying this is what you believe the world is like outside the walls?”
“I don’t believe,” Rahima whispered so softly, that her comment was thought more than spoken. “I know.”
“But think about it, Rahima! If those flowers are indeed there, what is to stop the wind from bringing their seeds over here? There is no barrier in the sky. Surely they’d be blown over the walls, eventually!”
“Maybe they don’t take root for lack of water,” Rahima followed the logical argument.
“But what if we could find some and plant them on purpose and give them water? Then there would be no doubt that the purple flowers existed.”
“How?” Rahima asked. “We don’t even know what their seeds look like?”
Cimmy also wanted to ask her friend how come she knew what a seed was for, since the bitter roots in their garden didn’t bear fruit, they propagated by spreading underground and sprouting their rugged foliage here and there, but she figured that their conversation would become absurd at this point, so she dropped the matter altogether and took the details on faith.
Between root harvesting and searching for something as inconspicuous as a tiny plant seed, Cimmy and Rahima’s lives were too busy to allow them to notice the subtle changes in the weather, the sudden gusts of wind that came out of nowhere, the rare clouds that passed across the sky occasionally, the unusually warm desert nights.
The tubers seemed to be more abundant, and that’s all the community cared about. The girls wore themselves out searching the land in every direction for even the memory of a seed, but, whether they didn’t know what to look for or there wasn’t anything to be found, their search came out empty.
Even Rahima gave up on the possibility, thinking that maybe the seeds were too heavy to be carried by the wind, but they still spent as much time as they could engage in hypothetical discussions about what the outer world might look like.
That’s why when the first rain fell, it took everybody by surprise, and because nobody had seen rain before, they immediately declared it evil. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that duplicitous snake, Cimarron, was involved in what could only be the work of the devil. How else would she bring food out of bare dirt other than by summoning the powers of darkness to her side? Now something as unholy as water falling from the sky had occurred, and the end of their world couldn’t be far behind.
“I told you nothing good would come of this, nobody is that lucky, not without evil on their side,” Josepha jumped at the chance to portend doom and looked forward to damnation, so that she could show Bertha who was truly right. “Now you’ll see punishment come down upon us from above, as it is well deserved; it will kill all of our tubers, you just wait and see. We’re all going to die because we gave in to that spawn of darkness. You listen to me, girl!” she grabbed Cimmy, who had the misfortune to pass her by precisely at that time. One might bring up the laws of synchronicity and offer this instance as the perfect example, but that one would not be Bertha, who stood firm in her belief that all unexplainable events and coincidences were generated by the dark works of the likes of Cimmy. Rain included. “You lift this curse off our heads right now, you hear? Don’t you think for a second I’d spare a moment of doubt about wasting your degenerate hide? What have you done to us? Answer me!”
Cimmy returned her gaze with a stare that was so sincerely idiotic it made Bertha gasp, taken aback, and let go of her with a big sigh.
“Still useless, I see!”
Bertha said, frustrated that she didn’t get the answer to her problem. Cimmy was happy to clear the field before another hand grabbed her, but she couldn’t help notice the absence of the word cockroach.
She wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing. In all fairness, being a cockroach was worse than being useless, although being a useless cockroach did bring out the worst of both worlds.