Page 37 of This Vicious Hunger

There is a flash of metal as the stranger removes something from inside their robe, whatever it is large enough to catch the last rays of the setting sun, and then the stranger rolls their shoulders, climbs to their feet, and begins to dig in earnest.

I don’t know what to make of this. I’m still torn, hovering with indecision, when the intruder in the garden stops and drops something in the hole they have made.

I can’t see what it was, only that it was small—no larger than a silver coin.

They cover the hole quickly with the shovel and then with their hands, laying the shovel down and bending low over the weeds once more.

A sneaking, trembling feeling starts deep inside me.

Not quite a suspicion, but closer by the second.

I hold my breath, waiting, waiting, until the figure in the garden reaches up to brush their forehead.

The deed done—whatever the deed may have been—they have grown careless, and the hood slips back.

Dark curling hair slides across their forehead.

An inky-clad hand reaches up to pull the hood back.

Not gloved, I realise, but stained.

Olea.

It feels like deceit. The sun has nearly set, but I know I’m not mistaken. I would recognise her hair, the frame of her beautiful narrow face, anywhere. She was a stranger in shades of pink and gold, but now, in the early moonlight on this clear, cloudless evening, she is Olea again.

Olea, digging in the garden. More: Olea digging in the garden by the light of the setting sun, so out of character for her when the sun seems to cause her such displeasure, on an evening when she has explicitly asked for me to stay away.

My heart thuds and the stale bread and cheese threaten to make another appearance.

I’m hot and dizzy, gripping at the frame of the window for support.

She doesn’t glance up here again, nor does she resume her usual garden duties.

She looks lost, bewildered, but also strangely satisfied—her body language, the gentle slope of her shoulders and casual dangling arms, that of relief.

Am I chasing rabbits? Is this a foolish scene to try to pick apart and understand?

I’ve learned before that more harm than good can come of such questions when answers are too far away.

I could go insane trying to understand this girl.

Maybe I should return to my bed and gaze instead at the ceiling and its cracks, imagine the crawl of Mandragora officinarum roots.

It will do me as much good as standing here.

Yet I can’t tear myself away from the window. Olea stands, frozen. I half imagine I can see the rapid rise and fall and rise and fall of her chest. She looks as if she could be laughing, or crying, and a violent little niggle at the back of my mind whispers: What if she is laughing at you?

What was she digging for? What was she burying?

I grasp at straws, my sluggish mind churning and turning over possibility after possibility.

She wasn’t planting seeds, nor would such behaviour align with the checking of her soil or the gentle snipping of blooms for her catalogue. But why would she keep secrets from me?

I wilfully ignore the secrets that have always been between us, her silence around Petaccia’s mentorship and her request that I keep my admittance to the garden a secret. And Clara, too.

Clara.

Is it a coincidence that Olea has asked me to stay away tonight—so soon after I raised my questions about Leonardo’s wife and the garden?

Olea was cagey in her response. She lied to me.

I recall, too, the way she grew nervous when I asked, the fiddling of her fingers, the gold ring spinning and spinning.

And even then I had wanted her to touch me.

The ring—it is about the size of the object she buried.

Why would she bury it? Is there more to her friendship with Clara than she admitted, some closeness she is too ashamed to reveal?

I squirm in place, embarrassed by the heat that still coils between my thighs, unsated and out of control.

Did she bury the ring for me, as a gesture of moving on, or did she bury it because of what I asked?

Because of my friendship with Leo? I pull at my hair, scratching my scalp mercilessly, as though I might pull the answers from my skull with the right amount of force.

I am so deep in my thoughts that I almost miss what happens next. It is nothing, a nothing thing, an event that happens a hundred times a day—and yet, in this garden it does not. Only I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed before.

Olea lowers the hood of her cloak fully.

She has resumed her usual casual air, though perhaps only I can tell how forced it is.

She has hidden the shovel amongst the weeds and begins snipping small green flowers, her nose turned away from the boggarts’ rotten scent and buried in her shoulder as she snips bloom after bloom.

I’m almost certain that she doesn’t need these flowers for her catalogue, but she works with a fervour that borders on religious.

Whether it is because of her distraction or simply that she doesn’t expect it I don’t know, but when the little sparrow swoops into the garden Olea doesn’t see it.

I don’t either, not until it’s too late, but even as I watch what unfolds I marvel at the tiny bird, realising with curiosity and faint, unfurling horror, that I have never seen a bird in the garden before.

No, not a bird, not a bee, not a fly—not during the day, and definitely not at night.

I’m sure they must exist, for the garden ecosystem to function, but I have never seen one. Why?

This bird flies straight for the boggart’s posy and its unleashed rotting-flesh scent—or swoops directly for Olea, perhaps, a nonsensical attack.

I don’t hear anything from my vantage, but I see Olea flinch and pull back from the bird as it dives.

She covers her exposed face with her hands as she throws herself out of its way, knees skidding in the dirt. The bird continues its flight.

A frantic flap of her hand. The bird connects with the exposed inky flesh of her palm.

The bird drops like a stone.

My breath catches. At first I think that the bird is only stunned, that it will shake itself in a second and fly away.

That is before I see the way Olea stares at her hands, both outstretched before her.

The rising moon casts silver across her features and I recognise the expression: resignation, tinged with the faintest disgust.

The horror unfurling inside me is no longer slow and dawning.

The feeling slams into me, leaving me sick and shaking, realisation not far behind.

All this time… all this time I have believed Olea when she said the garden trusted me.

I have believed her when she said that the plants were toxic to everybody but her—and now me.

I was wrong. The bird isn’t stunned. It doesn’t get up and fly off.

Olea walks to where it fell, calmly, calmer than I have seen her all evening, and gathers the poor, tiny thing in her hands.

I can see the way she cradles it, curiosity merged with her resignation.

She lifts first its wings one by one, and then its head.

The bird wriggles once, one last fighting flare of its heart, and then goes still.

Something liquid, dark in the moonlight, drips down Olea’s arm.

She lifts the bird to her ear and listens, then whispers something to its lifeless form.

Piece by piece, the puzzle slots together.

When Olea said that the plants were not toxic to her because they trusted her, that was only a story she told to draw me in, to lull me with the harmless side of her and her miraculous Eden.

The notes in Petaccia’s book were more to the point.

Tolerance , I think. It’s all about exposure.

I can see it now, plain as the inky stain on Olea’s fingers, plain as my body’s rejection of—followed by complete intoxication with—her.

Her and the garden both. When we’re apart I crave them, and if we’re apart long enough I am sick and shaky as an addict without opium; when we are together my body is filled with overwhelming sensation.

Yes, the bird might have been sick, dying already, but… the coincidence is telling. Death by a single touch. Look at what her kisses have done to me, even after months of low-level exposure to both her and the plants.

When Olea said that the garden was dangerous, I should have listened.

I should have listened to my body, the feverishness and sleepless nights, the sweet-bitter scent of the garden, so similar to Petaccia’s wretched eyeball tree; I should have heard Leo’s warnings and taken Olea’s caginess about Petaccia’s experiments to heart.

Bile burns my throat as I slowly, carefully, close the shutters and back away from the window.

I back away until I reach my bedroom once more, fingers at my lips, teeth grinding as understanding finally hits me in wave after wave after wave.

I picture without trying the burning shock of Olea’s kisses, the heartsick need to be near her.

No, it is not only the plants that grow close to the wall that can maim or poison in one toxic touch, nor those on the other side of the trees; it is not just the garden that can kill.

It is Olea too.