The Tiger Lilies of Mid-September
- Elisa Wang
- Jun 26, 2024
- 8 min read
By Hypatia Artemisia
I’m sunbathing on a pale blue beach rock, my spirits dampened by the ugly silhouette of that chemical plant on the sky-scape, when I hear you holler from across the water.
You’re brandishing your broom at a throng of boys, making towards them in a dead-leaf colored jumpsuit. It’s quite a sight. At first they laugh, the fat one with freckles imitates your stammer. You scowl and poke his little belly with the broom. Immediately, tears. The delinquents abscond at the heel of their wailing leader, leaving behind a couple of irregularly shaped balls. Eggs, I realize, as you tuck them into your pocket.
At noon, I peek at you snarfing down a ham sandwich as I survey the environment. The cumulus cascading over the horizon shows that there won’t be rain for at least another two days. Despite the influx of tourists in August, the park is surprisingly clean, and along the bayside trail are a spectacular, fiery array of tiger lilies in full bloom. The case is different at sea, where I found, this morning, three mackerels and a salmon floating in the ash-white foam, eyes bulging and mouths agape as if they’d died in great pain. There was another salmon washed ashore, but a black cat got to it before me.
You’ve finished the sandwich and are now setting off at a brisk pace. I follow you. I decide that you are not unhandsome as I blow a bread crumb off your lip. A bit old, I suppose, but younger than you look, and of course, much younger than I.
You stride across the wet sand, your bootprints covering the shallow traces left by their small feet. At the end of the stretch, you roll up your sleeves to climb the cliff, your target: a gulls’ nest. It’s not so high, but I raise the tide about an inch for better padding should you fall. After you leave, I watch over the nest for awhile longer.
I check on it a second time in the evening, and strangely, the gull still hasn’t returned.
You’ve been busy lately, and so have I, and everyday our lunch breaks on the bench burns shorter by a minute.
This afternoon, as you are picking out the cigarette butts and the other nonsense these wretched tourists throw in the bush, I notice a fresh batch of tiger lilies behind a waste bin. They are the most beautiful ones I’ve seen on the island, why, even more beautiful than the ones off the coast of China, with petals the exact hue of dawn. I conjure a breeze, just enough to rustle the high grass where they’re nestled. You hear it, and when you check behind the bin, your eyes widen so much that the wrinkles at their corners almost disappear.
You uproot the flowers to take them home, for a waste bin is no place for such fine ladies. Before going, you glance around suspiciously, but see only children playing and mothers pushing carriages. I’m right here, but of course you don’t know. It’s a fun game, not a fair one.
The next day, I find a different surprise in bushes—a Benjamin.
When I show it to you, you frown and tuck it in your breast pocket. After your evening shift, you hand it to your boss, a sun-burnt man with no hair but a thick blonde mustache, and ask him to put up a notice. He yells at you, spit spewing, says you should’ve reported it earlier.
Later that night, while you finish watering the lilies before bed, he goes down to the club and blows it all in one go.
I discover a secret of yours in the sock drawer.
As I try to move the lilies to a better spot under the sun, I accidentally knock over the drawer, and a booklet tumbles out of it along with a half a dozen hole-riddled socks. Unable to stifle my nosiness, one of my few bad traits, I flip through. There’s a dated photo of a young man and a scrawny boy with a wide grin, holding a huge marlin between them. I cannot distinguish if you are the man or the boy. A medal of honor, forgotten, sandwiched between pages of browned letters, the handwriting too scraggly to decipher. Every three pages or so, the woman in glasses appears, often with a class of children. I recognize her as Mrs. Ting, the Taiwanese immigrant, a schoolteacher at Isle Elementary downtown, and at the end of the booklet, a jade pendant necklace in a pouch. My, the one Mrs. Ting lost last month!
I’ve questioned your long looks whenever she would take her kids to the beach, or whenever she spends the weekend afternoon on our bench, reading, but never realized how deep you were in it. I’m horrified. You must know that she’s a widow! She’s not even very pretty, her spectacles enhance the magnitude of her bulging black eyes, making her appear positively fishlike.
You gasp at the mess I made when you get up. You clean up in a haste, running your thumb along the pendant to check for cracks. With a sigh of relief, you get dressed, pull on a pair of hole-y socks, and head off to work.
Gulls have been falling from the sky. I spot a carcass on a roof, half eaten by mice.
I catch you feeding a black cat, the same one that took the salmon. She licks your finger endearingly after finishing. What an elegant creature, dark and quiet as the night. Though I can’t help but notice a limp in her rear legs.
She’s been coming for the ham every day now. You tickle her chin and name her Benito—disgraceful. Margarita is far more fitting for her playful disposition, and she agrees with me on that.
The shopkeepers complain of poor business, as the number of tourists are dwindling fast. They know as well as I do that the island is being poisoned. I can even feel my power waning.
An American in a vanilla suit flicks his cigar right into a patch of Anne’s lace on his way to the airport. You go to pick it up, and confront him about the no littering policy, but your stammer has gotten worse recently and your English has never been outstanding. He doesn’t seem to understand, appearing offended. Frustrated, you wave the cigar in his face and berate him in your native tongue.
He pushes you.
You stumble back and fall, a crowd gathers. Then Margarita, coming for her serving of ham, slinks out from behind a bush. I wink at her, motioning towards the perpetrator. Like the majestic beast she is, Margarita lifts her tail over the American’s shoe and disappears back into the bush like a passing shadow, leaving him cursing. The crowd dissipates in bemused laughter, and I catch a rare grin on your face, as wide as that of the boy in the photograph.
The other cats have begun to avoid Margarita, who hisses at anything that comes close. Her limp has worsened, and she walks, tail twitching, as if she had nettles for fur, so that every movement causes immense pain. In the midnight, she mews pitifully outside your porch, licking her invisible wounds.
Mrs. Ting is not doing much better. She’s teaching arithmetic when she suddenly drops the chalk, and when she resumes the operation, her handwriting is sloppy, her plus signs crooked. The good kids look at one another with concern, the rowdy ones laugh.
On Friday, she collapses in class and is taken to the hospital. The women whisper on their weekend strolls of her sickness, of how she hasn’t been the same since her husband left. You overhear them and you don’t get a wink of sleep that night.
You decide to visit her the next day. Your boss extends your shift for another hour because some degenerates vandalized the park sign. At home, you snip most of tiger lilies and bound them with a length of fishing line to form a makeshift bouquet. Your craftsmanship is questionable, but I’ll admit there’s something very beautiful to the roughness of it.
It’s raining for the first time in weeks, silver needles pierce through the black cloth sky. Just before opening the umbrella, you burst back through the door, rush to your room, and yank open the sock drawer. You dig the pendant out and hold it to your chest, then drop it into your pocket. You leave the socks on the floor as you head off into the storm.
When you arrive at the hospital, trousers wet, panting like a dog, the checkin lady with the dead eye informs you that she’d just left.
You go home, go to bed in your soaked clothes. You even neglect to water the remaining lilies, though this late in the year, it is not you keeping them alive anyways, but me.
Just before daybreak, Margarita has a bad fit of convulsions, crawls into the ocean, and downs. The other cats follow.
I go to check on Mrs. Ting at lunchtime, and I find her slumped over the dining table, her face planted in a bowl of fish stew. Her hair is pulled back into a neat bun, her blouse buttoned to the very top, her skirt tailored and her shoes polished. But there is no blood running through her still rosy cheeks, no breath out her rouge-painted lips.
Heaven and earth forgive me now, as I spread myself through the tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet. I restart her little heart and lodge my consciousness into her skull, then I open my eyes for the first time, see them stare back at me in the mirror, wide and helpless as a dead fish’s. I dry my face with a napkin, and head for the bay, where I know you will be waiting.
You’re sitting idly on the bench, wondering why Benito hasn’t come yet. When you get up, you find the note under your lunchbox, telling you to meet me on the hill.
You find me for the first time on the hill overlooking the sea, I motion for you to come. You stare back, bewildered. Your stammer has gotten so bad you can barely speak, and so I say nothing, and kiss you. And as I do, I feel myself losing hold of the body. I say that I’m tired, and without another word, I let her rest on the soft grass under the blue sky. You watch her for awhile, and I see how real your love is, however twisted and damned it is. You lay down and doze off, smiling
I wonder if I could love you had I a heart. In the absence of one, could I love you with the trees, and the ocean, and the birdsong? I suppose I’ll make do with a cloud cover over the hill to shield you from the low sun; a cool, comforting breeze through your hair when you wake up, and she doesn’t.
It’s been a week, and they’re evacuating the island. It was the energy plant, poisoning the water, poisoning the people.
On a Sunday morning, with the sunlight shooting through the palms, you sweep the bayside road for the last time, then take your suitcase off the bench, and head down to the valley where Mrs. Ting lies.
You lay down the pendant in an already-withering pile of roses and Anne’s lace, from the kids, before the headstone. I’m fading, and so I put the last of myself into the soil, until I bloom; pushing out from the hard, cracked earth, crimson spots spreading along my orange petals, and I beg for you to look back, just once.
And when you do, you’ll furrow your brow, then smile, unsurely but happily, at the tiger lilies of mid-September.
i would like to drown in your words thank you very much