Mary Frances stood in front of a small table, bare feet with her soles deeply rooted into the carpet. Born in 1973 some liked to call her an historic, even to her face, like she was a dinosaur, yet she felt she was only middle age.
Evil people, she thought. Them be gone!
She became more and more lilac as tears smeared the eyeshadow all over her face. Finally she came to her senses - well almost at least - and took out a porcelain figurine from a secret compartment under the table. Carefully she placed the figurine on the table and started to move her hands in circles around it, sometimes quickly touching parts of the figurine.
The man secretly watching her from his hiding place in a bush across the yard had no problem watching here every movement through the open window. He had never seen the figurine before, yet he had been in the house many times. He thought it resembled a person, perhaps a man, but what man would have so twisted features?
She started to mumble.The words were almost recognizable, yet he could not grab them and extract something meaningful. It was like trying to remember what the summer you never saw was like, just from watching the wretched remains of frost killed flowers late in the autumn.
What
secret rites was she performing?
He was shrouded in backlight as the late evening sun worked its way through the canopy and his beard glowed.
He stroked that beard carefully and thoughtfully as he watched her move her body, but not the feet, like to music played on her internal organs, on strings only she could hear. He watched her bare toes grabbing deeply into the carpet and the muscles in her neck getting tense, then relaxed.
She had not been honest with him and he was furious, but then again he had not been completely honest with her either. He had gone by many names and
Paul Black was just the latest of them, but it was by that the name she knew him. He portrayed himself as something more than he was, but what could a man of his profession do? Honesty was a luxury reserved for church goers, do-gooders and the like. He couldn't afford it.
Even his friends, with their moral standards such as they were, had warned him not to get involved with her. They thought he was a fool for wanting to marry her. She was known to be worshiping the fertile soil, the sun and strange plants with pointy foliage. The roots on these plants were called rhizomes and were highly addictive, causing euphoria and lack of judgment in the poor souls addicted to them.
What those plants actually were called, he couldn't recall at the moment, but as he moved his hand toward the beard again, it came to him:
Irises, they were called irises!!!
With this little strange story and my very last pictures for the year, I want to wish you all a really great new iris season!
