Behind the Black Glass

I.

The first time I ever saw the greenhouse, I was fascinated by the way its smoke-stained glass dyed the sunshine grey. The way it illuminated bits of dust reminded me of church, how the stained glass windows tinted the sunlight and made the dust look like souls rising to heaven. At least that was how my pious child’s mind saw it, my hands clasped, my eyes large and earnest, my mind distracted and thinking of anything but prayer. But they say God loves the mind of a child, so I assume He was at least amused by mine.

Years before, there had been a fire in the greenhouse. Someone had thrown a kerosene soaked rag through the ceiling and the whole thing had burned as easily as a medieval witch. When I came across it for the first time, the door had not been opened in so long I had to put my whole weight against it before it slowly yielded, its rust-caked hinges protesting with what sounded like an irritated yawn. Bits of green glass glittered on the floor, and the plants that had survived the fire were large and sprawling, insolently taking up far more space than they needed.

There was one I had never seen before that day, one with a thick thorny stalk that had crawled along the floor and then began clawing up the sides of the greenhouse. It was beautiful in the unnerving way a venomous animal is beautiful, with perfectly round buds that were red and shiny as bits of coral. One day I had picked one, examined it, and then impulsively crushed it between my fingers. Immediately there was a smell of soot and a sharp burning, which intensified as the sap dripped into my palm and down my wrist. I yelped, knelt down, and rubbed my hands feverishly into the dirt, something I’d been taught to do for bee stings. The pain was quickly gone, but I was frightened and stumbled through the forest homewards as fast as I could, the flowers I had picked that day for mother lying wilted in the dirt, forgotten.

After that, I had mostly left the coral-bud plant alone, but I kept going back to the greenhouse, year after year. I heaped the flowers in vases around the house and mother and father never knew where they came from, assuming that the housekeeper had ordered them from the village and that she had a knack for arranging them. Any scrapes or odd rashes I might come down with mother attributed, rightly, to my habit of disappearing into the woods for hours at a time. Otherwise, they were rarely commented upon, or even noticed.

II.

Mother never accompanied me on my explorations anymore, though when I was small, she had come often. We would spend hours hunting for birds nests, animal burrows, honeysuckle, anything that took our fancy. On one of these outings, I had caught a baby rabbit and brought it to show her, ignoring its terrified shaking in my delight that I had found a pet. Mother had let out a little scream and almost hissed, “What are you doing? Its mother won’t want it if it smells of human.” I had dropped it in horror and ran.

When I crept back a few days later to see if mother had been right, I found its body dead in the grass, easy to locate because of the loud hum of a fly swarm directly above it. I gingerly turned it over with my foot and saw maggots burrowing through its fur. I looked at my palms, wondering if it was that smell of dirt and sweat, the human smell, that had killed it. By the end of that day, I had wiped my hands on my skirt so many times the palms were raw. The smell stayed. When I went home that day, I smelled it on mother and father too.

My next birthday, I refused to touch the tiny grey kitten father gave me, though he was puzzled and hurt by this. I would not touch him or mother either, refusing to submit to so much as a good-night hug. I knew my distance hurt them both, but I thought of the rabbit, and I was afraid. When my brothers had come home one day with a little fawn they had found, I screamed at them, telling them to let it go but too terrified to tear it away from them. I had explained through tears that its mother wouldn’t want it if it smelled of human and they had laughed. It was the fawn of a doe they had killed, I found out later.

The allure of the greenhouse was that its plants, I had found, were immune to me and would not immediately wilt if I happened to touch them. I began returning almost every day, gathering enough flowers to rid my hands of any scent but theirs, though still avoiding the coral-budded one. Every now and then one of its buds would plummet to the ground and burst open with a hiss, startling me so badly that I often would avoid the greenhouse for days afterwards.

One day in late summer, I arrived just before sundown and saw that the coral-bud had finally reached the ceiling and started to claw its way out. Bits of glass glittered on the ground, along with a hailstorm of red buds. They had been crushed by the impact and were oozing sap. Struggling in the stinging sap, in a rain of broken glass, lay a rabbit. It was making little grunts and chirps, obviously in distress. It saw me and its struggling intensified.

I looked at it dizzily, and for a second I imagined the coral bud’s branches twining themselves around its legs, pinning it to the ground as thorns ate into its soft skin. I couldn’t leave it there.

I shivered, and the vision vanished as I realized that to free the rabbit, I would have to touch it. Impossible. I felt around for a stick and my fingers fell on a bamboo stake, probably an old vine support, and I began poking at the rabbit’s belly as gently as my shaking hands would allow. It squealed loudly and I realized that the stick was just pushing it deeper into the broken glass and sap.

I looked at my hands and decided, sickened, that I would have to use them. I pulled my shirt off over my head, wrapped it over my hands and, on my knees, crept up to the rabbit. In one breathless moment, I grabbed it. The sap made a sucking sound, then released it.

As soon as I felt its soft body yield, I dropped it, almost threw it, towards the door. It made a snuffling sound and stumbled out. My vision blurred, and I fell forward on my hands, into the mass of sap and broken glass. The glass sliced through my shirt into my palms, and I felt burning.

An hour later I arrived home, breathless, my shirt still wrapped around my bleeding hands, and the sap starting to glue its folds to my skin in sticky ridges. Mother was very calm. She cut the shirt off me, then seated herself at my feet and began picking out the glass bits one by one. When she finally finished, she fetched her wound cream and I sat in paralyzed terror as she massaged it into my palms, forcing myself to not pull away from her.

The next morning, she got the story out of me. She had not minded me playing in the woods, but my going to the greenhouse alone frightened her. “It's just not safe,” she said. “Broken glass, probably snakes too, and that greenhouse is old. It was old when I was a girl here. I thought it had been torn down years ago.”

She was adamant that it be torn down now, as soon as possible. I was horrified and pleaded with her. She refused to listen, trying to soothe me and failing.

I sat on my floor that night, staring into my hands.

The next day, I went back to the greenhouse. I had brought a hunting knife: the coral-bud was finally to be picked. I hacked and hacked, and as I did, a sooty smell seeped from its severed limbs. I arrived home with armfuls of it, piled its stems into vases, and dragged them into mother’s room, hoping that if she saw their strangely beautiful coral blots, she would finally understand and spare the greenhouse. The other flowers belonged wherever I chose to put them, but I had always felt that the coral-bud only truly belonged to the greenhouse and could not live elsewhere, despite its insistence on escaping. One of the reasons I had never brought them home before.

I sat at the foot of mother’s bed and waited. When she finally came, she was busily tying her silk robe and at first didn’t notice me as I sat there watching her, my nightgown tucked under my feet, my chin propped up on my knees.

“Why darling!” she exclaimed when she saw me, “What on earth is the matter?” I tried to speak but it suddenly felt like there was a rock in my throat and it blocked any words I tried to squeeze out.

Mother looked around and saw the heaped vases. “How lovely!” she said cautiously, doubtless not thrilled that I had gone back to the greenhouse. There was a vase of them on the floor by her nightstand, and she stroked its leaves gingerly, then climbed in next to me. She reached out a soft hand to my chin, to angle my face towards her for a kiss.

I flinched, and then shrank away.

Mother’s face went white. I don’t think I had ever seen her so hurt, her lip trembling and her eyes wide with disbelief. She must have been at a loss to understand why I was afraid of her, why I could hardly bear to let her even touch me; there were years of built-up, confused pain in her eyes.

I couldn’t look at her. I climbed out of her bed and ran out of the room, stricken. I sat on my floor that night again, staring into my hands, almost convinced that the coral-bud’s sap was dripping slowly from the ceiling and pooling in my cupped palms.

The next day, Mother went to town. I had been in hiding upstairs, pretending that my bandaged hands were still too much of a handicap for me to come to breakfast. It had been brought up to my room, where I stayed until Mother left. Before going out, she crept in to check on me, but I pretended to have fallen asleep again.

As I heard the door shut behind her, I wondered if she had remembered to give her flowers fresh water. Probably not. I opened my door cautiously and tiptoed towards her room, stopping by the kitchen to get a basin of water.

Mother’s room was dark, and at first I could see nothing. But the flowers were definitely still alive; the smell was so overpowering it clotted the air and made it almost too thick to breathe. Tired of waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, I switched on the light.

Every single bud was crushed.

Where they had dribbled, there were burn marks on the floor. The sap had pooled in small clumps, and when I touched them my skin made a hissing sound. I instinctively put my fingers to my mouth; they tasted of charred wood. Whether that was the plant or the floor I had no idea. I only knew that my skin was red and inflamed in a way I was now used to, and that mother, when she arrived home, was wearing dark gloves and carrying some sort of salve.

The day after, the greenhouse was torn down. I watched the men from the woods and after they went away, I ducked through the wooden beams that had been shorn of glass. What was left of the coral-bud had been cut into strips and been piled for burning along with the other plants.

I walked over to its stalks, gathered a fistful of buds and then crushed them in my hands until the pain made me dizzy. I lay down inside the greenhouse, face-up, pretending that sunshine was tunneling in through its smoky panels the same way it always had.

I squinted, starting to reconstruct the greenhouse in my mind. The hole in the ceiling narrowed to a pinhole, like a pupil constricting. I imagined the glass clear and green, then slowly the greenhouse filling with smoke and turning grey. And I went home and watched mother through that slowly darkening glass, watched her smiling face with my sullen eyes, hiding my burned hands that couldn’t heal.