The Chalice

When she offers you the chalice, the liquid within tastes like nothing you can recall tasting before—a heady blend of hothouse flowers, their sweetness tainted by the humid decay of their growth, and thunderstorm petrichor, all shot through with a thick and hungry musk.

You swirl it on your tongue, trying to understand the scents seeping up into your mind; your eyes close for a moment, and when they open she has left your side, gone over to busy herself at the stove, suspiciously nonchalant. She doesn’t look at you, but she doesn’t need to.

You swallow.

The rest of the liquid doesn’t last long; you gulp it down, eager to get through this, whatever torment or test or spell she has devised to subject you to this time. Whatever price you must pay before she finally gives you what you really want instead of that sly smile and another long wait.

As the liquid settles in the pit of your stomach, its taste lingers in your senses; settling in for the long haul. You can almost remember where you’ve tasted it before, that long-ago summer full of stolen days and nights full of sweaty longing; the summer you spent with _, when their parents weren’t keeping you apart. It must have been in, what, ‘36? Before everything started to go wrong, back when the world seemed so bright.

(Part of you, a part that is not lost in the memory of what you and _ did together, begins to question; the ticking timer at the end of a dream, the broken acceptance that gives way to lucidity. But it is so slow on the uptake.)

Do you remember all those weeks of careful maneuvering, arranging things just so? Sharing secret smiles with _ as you each played your parts, all in service of this one final day: the last day you would be able to spend together (though you didn’t realize how badly it would end), the first day you and _ would be free to sate your shared desires.

It was all worth it when you felt their lips on yours, when their scent filled your lungs; when you opened yourself for them, and they opened for you, and you comingled the secret sparks you had each kept hidden for so long, those impossible seeds. How could you ever have forgotten the hothouse heat, the humid earth and glorious flowers overwhelmed by the scent of your love?

(How indeed, your true voice asks in a tone that sends cracks shooting through the memory.)

With that smell filling your mind, you can almost forget what came after; how the flower you planted in _’s core withered and died, even as the one they left in you ran riot, thick vines spreading out from your core, soaking up the light and heat in your spark as it choked the life out of you; the months of hospitals and medicine, the ultimate answer they found to free you from your floral invader—

And, as the memory shades into nightmare, your body convulses and you come back to yourself—no longer on your chair but hunched on the floor, heaving, your body desperately trying to purge itself of every last trace of the poisoned chalice; she holds your hair out of the way, whispering gentle reassurances, her hands soft and eyes devoid of any trace of judgement. She never tells you how your failure affected her; there are so many things she will never find words to tell you, no matter how desperately you might want to know.

What matters another?