The Olive Tree
Amelie Edmondson
Olive was my name.
Now I have no name. My paintings are still on my desk, one half-finished and lightly taped to the table. I didn’t like to tape it too much as mother said it would peel the varnish off the dresser. No one has moved my cup of paint water; dust is settling on top of it. Dust is settling on me.
Mother sits in the kitchen. The wine is on the table, but it hasn’t been touched. Was she even planning on drinking it? Her eyes are dark, and I don’t remember them any other way. It must be hard to see my face every day, propped up like a porcelain doll. She looks up, her eyes clouded with tears. She looks at me as if I’m still here. But she cannot bear to look at what she knows was her fault.
I look out to the garden, my tree wilting, almost gone. I hoped that I would be well enough to continue to take care of it one day, but here I am, here but also not.
I turn from the window, the floorboards no longer creaking at my footsteps. I am surprised I don’t slip through the floorboards, as from novels I believed that someone in my condition would. I haven’t gone near the room at the end of the hall since I returned, since I couldn’t bear to look at what rested on the bed. I grasp my fingers in my palm and tiptoe in, though I don’t know why. It’s not like anyone could hear me before this, let alone now. I have to stop.
This is the first time I’ve properly seen myself.
My eyes stare back at me, as if made of glass with not a soul behind them. My hair sticks up like a wire brush, clearly mother has not bothered to brush it. I sit up stiff against the wall, a ghost of a fidget remaining on my fingers. Stitches stick out from my eyelid like barbed wire, the bruising and swelling only just beginning to go down. I don’t think I’ve left the bed that still smells of chloroform and carbolic since it happened, and I’m collecting dust like my abandoned cup of paint water.
They said I was dangerous. I didn’t think so. I was scared. But if I was a danger, I cannot be anymore. My body cannot leave the bed anymore, cured of its dependence on the front of my brain.
So now I wonder, not quite a person and not quite a spirit, wondering why I could not have just withered, like my precious olive tree.