vetiver (shirley 2020 | rose/shirley)

[fiachairecht]

vetiver. shirley (2020), rose/shirley. rose thinks about going mad, for shirley (shirley is thinking about drowning). 1.2k words, rated m. for marginalia in femslashex 2021.

Spring arrives from the ground with an understated violence, new life trampling over the remnants of snow and last autumn's leaves on its way to the surface, and the creaking of the porch swing begins to keep Rose up at night.

She can't see it from her bedroom; shouldn't, really, be able to hear it — but she does, and when even the baby is asleep Rose slips from bed and makes her silent way to the front of the house where the windows open onto the pinprick gleam of Shirley's cigarette trying very hard not to keep the darkness at bay.

She never sees Shirley's face. She doesn't have to. Knowing she's there — knowing why she's there — is enough.

Rose never turns on the lights. She could, she knows, she could cast her shadow out into the black and let it ride the flickering lamplight on a useless chase into the trees. Then Shirley would see them both, would say Rose, would maybe say, Paula, and then she would—

Then Rose's imagination runs out. She isn't the writer.

But there are other things she can gauge, things like the tilt of Shirley's head by the position of her light, things like the number of anxious words thrumming through her body by the speed of its movement as she sways back and forth.

It's a vanity, to think Shirley's looking in at her, invisible in the house even when the curtains are pulled back, but there she is: framed, with the light in front of her asking for something she wants to give.

Not asking, perhaps. Wondering. But her husband's never done either, so when it comes to it — why shouldn't they be the same? Why shouldn't she?

Shirley disappears into the night: even when the moonlight silvers the grass, the trees, the chains of the porch swing, it never touches the woman herself. And in her own night, when the cigarette gleam hovers just in front of her and Rose imagines she can see the sweep of Shirley's pale eyelashes over her cheeks, Rose runs her hands over her chest.

I have you now, she thinks, if you'll have me.

Her fingertips catch on her nipples, hard and pebbled in the spring chill. She licks her lips, pulls her nightgown up — a little more every night she's sure Shirley knows she's there.

She can't tell her anything else. Isn't sure why she's showing her this, except that Shirley's already seen more of her than even Fred, and it seems like this is something she needs to give her, even if Shirley never acknowledges that she has it now: Rose, hand between her legs, biting her lip against silly questions and sillier sounds.  

Know, she thinks, fingers pressed against herself, skin flushed pink with the thrill of being watched.

You have to know.

Shirley never mentions it. Perhaps that's all the proof Rose needs that she really does know. Rose is being kind, not bringing it up, but she can't imagine Shirley thinks of her own silence as kindness. And so, therefore, it must be intentional, because Shirley isn't, shouldn't be, kind.

Madness has given her all she needs, it seems, and so—

"Perhaps I should like to go mad as well," Rose says, to the sizzling pan of vegetables on the stove and not really at all to Shirley in her bedroom. "Perhaps she is only trying to help me."

Perhaps, she doesn't say, I will go mad even better than Paula did.

Shirley had tried, in the woods, when they were face to face and breath to breath and fingertip to fingertip and still not as close as Rose thought they ought to be. Rose still isn't sure whose fault it is that that didn't change anything enough.

The vegetables don't answer, but they do burn.

 

**

 

Fred is out. Stanley is out. The baby is asleep — the baby is inside, if not asleep. Rose kneels up on the porch swing and wraps her hands around the chains, presses the too-thin skin of her palms into the cold metal links one by one.

Outside, the rain spills down in a torrent, driving under the soil with a mindless determination. Unlike Shirley's hands, it will never re-emerge with treasures. On the porch, outside, but not, all the rain does is roar in Rose's ears, whispers magnified until she cannot tell where one word stops and another begins.

Is this where Shirley gets her ideas? 

Rose slides her hands up the chains, stretching towards the rough edges where they're bolted into the beams above. It's colder, the closer she gets to the sky, but easier, too — the chains are slick with the rain that's blown into the covered porch on the afternoon storm. And it's easier than she'd thought, too, to pull herself up to standing: she's grown stronger, in the Jackson-Hyman house, under Shirley's hands.

She can't push off from the floor, suspended as she is, but the swing rocks with her movement anyway, fast enough that the wind starts to bite at her cheeks, sharp as she'd ever imagined Shirley's teeth might be.

She shuts her eyes. Leans back until her head tips past the edge of the roof until the rain strikes her forehead and her legs tremble against the swing's back with the strain of staying upright.

The swing picks up speed, pushes her back under the eaves — closer to Shirley. Swings back. The creaking fills Rose's ears, subsides: She couldn't stop the swing if she wanted to.

She wishes she had a cigarette. She opens her mouth. The rain drips in, bright and cold and full of life.

"There are easier ways to drown."

Shirley's voice, from the doorway — the door whose opening had been swallowed by the wind, if it had needed to open at all.

Rose swallows, instinctive; coughs, even though the mouthful of rain had been small. The remnants dribble down her chin, and she shudders at the touch.

Shirley laughs, the vibrant, disjointed witch's cackle that Rose cannot imagine coming from her own throat, even with her eyes closed.

"I'm not trying to drown." Her tongue feels clumsy with cold and disuse.

The floorboards creak, snap back into place like a gunshot. Behind her eyelids, Rose can still see Shirley clearly: bare feet, glasses, dressing gown, her hair wild and untameable, even by the storm.

"But you tried to jump."

The chain twitches under Rose's palm as Shirley's hand lands somewhere below hers. Doesn't tense enough to pull the swing to a stop. The wind had been stronger, on the cliffs, but now it just creeps under her skirt. Presses against the seams of her stockings like Shirley's hands aren't.

Will be.

"Imagining isn't trying."

"Isn't it?" Shirley's voice is so quiet, Rose wonders how she can hear it. "Shouldn't it be?"

Or are you too afraid?

Are you mad enough?

The swing jerks forwards. Rose's fingers lock around the chain as her knees give out, and when she opens her eyes all she can see are Shirley's, magnified behind glass and as hungry as Rose has ever seen them.

Her hands slip down the chains, and this time, she feels the skin tear. Shirley's hands are at her hips, urging, pulling her back down.

"I imagined this, too," she says, and Shirley's teeth meeting her lips is all the answer she gets.