Dining on Rose Petals: A Primer for Late Stage Sleeping Beauties

Issue four: flash fiction by Marisa Celeste Montany

John William Waterhouse, Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May, 1908

Keep the fork in the left hand, the knife in the right—this is most important when dining on rose petals. Likely, you find yourself in a magnificent chamber. Possibly, at the top of a briar-bound tower. The table is rich. You see no windows, no doors. You are alone. You do not remember coming here, and—you realize with a start—you cannot get out of your chair.

But all around you: Roses. Cut, they melt the walls with color; petaled, they pool on the floor like wax. The table too drips with their languor, smothering sweetly the silver ladies who watch from acid-etched eyes, forever frozen, chasing themselves round vases and bowls. Each and every one positively dissolving in rose. And yet—how strange. You smell only bloody meat, something powdery, cloying like surgeon’s gloves…

The roses. They must be eaten in the proper order. A first course, really. A prelude. To make yourself ready. Take care not to swallow the bones.

Yellow is first. Sunshine breaks beneath the blade of your knife, creeping and crescent before being swallowed in darkness. Remember. Remember what Yellow feels like. Pink then, pale, like freshwater pearls around your neck. These will work to a gritty smoothness, polishing down your sharper teeth. Green is next. Green will sting like nettle, like want. And ever after, as in some dark and bottomless mirror, you will see in others only that which you cannot see in yourself. Red is last, and Red will bleed.

Good, good. You have done well. Lick the blood from your plate and stack the bones neatly, like a house of cold matchsticks, a vestal’s temple, a warrior’s barrow. And now, your reward.

At your right elbow and your left, golden platters piled high with fruit appear. All red enough to make the most lascivious goblin blush. You must eat a mouthful of each. Apples and pomegranates, red pears and gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, rosehips and cherries, and more dangerous fare besides: baneberry, lily of the valley, bittersweet nightshade. Spindleberry.

You remember spindles. Are you beginning to spin? The poisons can do that, but darling, darling, isn’t spinning what got you here in the first place? Yes, you remember. This is what comes after: You are purged, you are numbed, you are paralyzed like prey, but you must keep eating. You have made your briar bed; now you must lie in it. Open your lips round and wide and push that sickness down.

Surely you understand now. When you dine at the table of another’s desire, victory lies in subservience. For this you were made ready! Congratulate yourself on your self-mastery. Are you not happy with what it has bought you? The roses, the gold, the silver ladies forever grasping after their own silken backs? The fruit that never runs out, that grows rarer and redder the longer you sit? You have become the pistil in the whorl. Eating, and eating, and never growing full.

You may stay here forever with your well-won riches, that is your due. You will have many friends, though you will never see them, ensconced and netted as they are in towers of their own. All sitting, eating, lips burling and cracking as they whisper more.

But—well perhaps I should not say. Perhaps what has been forgotten is best left forgot. And yet… do you remember Yellow? That cresting glow, delicately deboned, eaten in slow darkening strips from the tines of your fork? What if I told you it was not dead? Indeed, that it cannot die? Do you feel it? There, curled up inside you like the fern that looks for spring. Sleeping.

The knife. It is still in your right hand, yes? Look down. Do you see them? The vines springing up around you, through you? You thought they were roses but look! Their arms hold no blooms. No green beats beneath their skins. The only roses here are disembodied, dismembered. Lifting your eyes from the table, tasting that hot, congealed scent as it sticks in the back of your throat with each shortening breath, you begin to understand. The vines are something else.

Cut them. Tear them out. The walls will scream, but they cannot hurt you. Uproot the brambles that choke you. Unspool the thorns bit deep into your heart, your mind. Unpick the vines that bind your legs. Take back the sails of your lungs.

The tower is shaking now. Do you remember your bones? Stacked so reverently on your bloodstained plate? Good. Climb into your little bone house.

Inside, there is a door framed in yellow light, in moving air. A fourfold horizon, curled up in this deepest of places. Waiting. Clean your knife, put it away, but keep it forever, and keep it sharp. As you make for the door, a veil, earthy and ethereal, washes over you from the place beyond. The scent of roses.

Go. You will find the door unlocked. Chase the wind to the far corners of the world. Wash your skin in the light of stars and sun. Savor the cool, tender petals of the wild and rooted rose. But before all, belong to yourself.

Wake.

Marisa Celeste Montany was born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaii, splitting time between Ka‘ū and Kona. After roving far and wide as a ballet dancer, barista, waitress, English major, history major, bookseller, ballet teacher, library assistant, and occasional goat-wrangler, she is currently settled in Maryland with her husband, exploring her newest incarnation as a writer. She is an alumna of Middle Tennessee State University, and her short stories have been published or are forthcoming in Fairy Tale Magazine, Corvid Queen, and Crow and Cross Keys. You can visit her at marisamontany.com. She loves horizons.