Darkheart

The Present: Bed & Breakfast

Heather bent down and, with her right hand, gently smoothed the earth over the arm, watching the fingers of its fat little hand disappear beneath the black material. A real calm settled over her, a sense of satisfaction as she looked over the flowerbed in the deep, cold dawn. Pale gray light was just beginning to limn the roofs and treetops of the households around her.

She spent nearly an hour every morning, before the sun came up, outdoors in her yard. Even as autumn was pushing into winter, there was much to be done. There was always much to be done in a garden. Pruning and weeding and composting and raking: it mattered. If she wanted a wonderland of florals come spring and summer, she'd need to put in work all year round. She knew from practice--had learned from unending trial and error and research--what worked and what didn't. It'd taken Heather years to finally get things right enough that the Garden Ladies Club had accepted her into their ranks and placed her home on the Home and Garden Tour the community held each June. That month was always bittersweet, when the spring jonquils and tulips were beginning to fade, their passing just in time to catch the mockery of the early roses and daylilies. Heather had poured a fortune into paving stones and lighting, landscaping and even a heated koi pond with a charming waterfall that they had to cover each winter. Her husband hadn't appreciated all of it at first, but he'd stopped complaining about her spending once the neighbors had begun to express their admiration.

David was all about appearances. It was why he'd married her, wasn't it? Hadn't he told her as much, more than once? Of course, Heather had no one to blame but herself for their relationship's lack of affection; she'd capitulated to his proposal knowing exactly what he thought of her. And could she really say she'd been in it for love, either? It'd been five years, and she honestly didn't know, anymore.

Her husband's overbearing focus on pretense had encouraged Heather to do most of her gardening in secret, long before anyone else was out getting their hands dirty. The gardening itself wasn't a problem. Plenty of people got outside and planted and divided and trimmed and filled bags with leaves and exterminated pests. It was more that most of them didn't work with the earth quite the way Heather did. In fact, she was anxious to let even David know the extent of her obsession, which had begun to take up much more of her than he was aware.

The woman placed her hands on her knees, shivered a little. She sat on her heels in front of her favorite flowerbed--the one where the poppies and wildflowers grew. The other beds were special as well, but there was something about her oriental poppies, their velvety crimson petals with their jet cores, their dark hearts, and the fact that they thrived in the summer rather than the spring or fall meant more than she could quite define. Yes, this flowerbed was the one she cared for the most, which was why her time spent on it became more and more precarious.

Reaching into a canvas bag at her side, Heather withdrew another babydoll, the glass of its opening eyes glinting sharply when they caught the glow of the nearby lantern. With her right hand, she picked up the large pair of pruning shears she used for her early morning gardening and, not pausing to examine the particulars of this naked doll, proceeded to sever its arms, legs, and head from its cotton-stuffed torso. This would have to be the last one, for now. She'd already buried the remains of four other babydolls in this bed over the last week, and as large as the rectangle of earth was, she was beginning to run out of room. The poor poppies might become frustrated, might decide not to show themselves, if she took up too much of their space. It was time to move on to the other flowerbeds. The others deserved as much love as this one did, after all.

The first hole she dug unearthed the foot of a previously-interred doll, so she carefully reburied it and moved her spade a bit higher. This hole needed to be large enough to fit the head, which was about four inches in diameter. Heather preferred them small. She didn't like the life-sized babydolls; they were greedy with required space. Whenever Heather scoured thrift shops and yard sales (which was often), she forwent anything she couldn't easily dismember and cover.