The Seasons of Her Grief

A sci-fi story of a woman’s grief and a rare flower as a portal to another world

After Gabriella’s husband died, she tended to her garden through those long drawn out days.

She made sure the tomatoes ripened, and the large purple grapes in their vineyard, known as the Bellissima Vineyard, would be ready to be shipped to their neighbor's vinification mill. A place her husband, Francesco Mancini, had started for her and then later sold to a family friend Giovanni De Palo— an older man whose white hair swayed like cotton in the wind.

Gabriella sat in that garden, thinking of Francesco— what she had lost and, unlike these flowers, that which would never regrow again. A man of tenderness and beauty. A man she loved since they were teenagers. She pictured his chestnut eyes with flecks of green dispersed in the cosmos of his irises. If the eyes were gateways to the soul, Gabriella mused, then he had the most beautiful soul the world had ever seen. She thought of his rough hands and tanned skin from working in the fields all day. He was a lean man, tall, and muscular. He had wrinkles that ran along the edges of his forehead and mouth — his rivers of joy and tree rings of smiles. How he would dance with her, by this garden, saying “la mia, Stella.” She had always been his guiding star. Now, though, there was nobody left to guide. And she felt like driftwood drifting among the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Gabriella only cried when it rained. She did not feel like herself anymore — knowing that a family is more than the individual parts, but a garden itself, blooming and growing in unforeseeable ways. She was mother nature. Tired and alone. And when the dark came, she, too, slept on the floor near the bed. She feared losing his smell within the fabrics of the sheets. In a way, he was mummified in various places.

The house that he built had now become a mausoleum to the past.

Was she a ghost now? Gabriella did not know. But she did feel his presence in the garden — a place he worked in so many mornings and afternoons. His beauty and goodness in the maroon lenders. And his aroma in Spring Gentians and Aster Alpinus that swayed with the winds, as if they were — like him — always in mid-dance. And strewn out with the colors of heaven was the Bougainvillea, la rosa, Girasoli sunflowers, and angelic achromatism of peonies.

“A garden is nature’s painting,” he would say to her. And Gabriella would smile and search her knowledge for the next flower to place upon that canvas. It was their favorite thing to do on the weekends.

And now it was all gone. Gabriella kneeled before the garden, her large hat-tipping across her face, trembling both body and soul. Accompanying her was the moving shadow of the sun, racing across the blue Italian sky.

She watched the sunset, mirroring loss in her heart, knowing he was not here to see its surreal beauty with her.

It had been one month since his passing. Gabriella frequented the graveyard only on cloudy days. She filled those heavy hours with gardening and tending to the grapes. They ripened. She picked and sold them. Her life was cyclic, safe, and void of any growth — a process of perpetual mourning mixed with a garden, books, and memories.

On this morning, though, she sat upon the front porch of their house sipping her black coffee, feeling his presence once more. Not realizing what was happening, tears fell down her cheeks, and with rage, she did not think was inside her, she screamed and cursed god as she threw the coffee mug upon the stone steps, shattering it in pieces. The songbirds near the feeder flew away in frantic squawks.

“I’m so sorry, Earth and cup,” she cried out as she bent down to pick up the pieces. “I’m so sorry, birds,” she raised her head to the sky. She cleaned up her mess slowly, not realizing the blood trickling down from a cut on her finger.

After the incident, she walked toward the garden to work and hopefully forget.

She worked mindlessly. And, after a while, she noticed a particular flower among the red roses. It was a Cosmos flower, which was strange because she did not recall ever planting it. It was an energetic violet that pierced the world with its revenant beauty.

“How did you get here?” She asked, rising from her kneeling position and moving over to hover above the flower.

“Oh my…”

She saw a small little galaxy of stars and nebulas moving and floating into an endless void within the flower's pistil. She shook her head and closed her eyes — knowing it was just an illusion, a trickery created by shadows. But when she opened them, the flower had opened up wider, showcasing a glowing orb.

Then it called to her, like a chorus of angels. And she listened and reached out to touch it. Her hand slid into its widening petals. Within a moment, she was shoulder deep. And that’s when she felt her hand touch her shoulder blade.

“That’s…impossible!” she shrieked, pulling her arm out of the flower.

“What are you?” She asked. Eyes glossy and heart thumping in her chest. She was back staring down into the casket of her husband. Back looking into the endless heartache of life. Back staring into the impossible mysteries of being.

The flower’s petals opened, closed, and opened again like a butterfly flapping its wings. Gabriella didn't know if she was going crazy or this was actually happening. Regardless, the flower made her feel safe as if it understood her. And so she walked back towards it, lost in its beauty and deep violet mystery. This time she reached not with her arm but her whole body. And what she felt was a soft vibration of mist, and then she was through, into a world beyond this one — into a place of old beginnings, and new deaths now awakened.

What Gabriella noticed first was that everything was coated in a violet hue — the sky, the grass, the bumblebees that danced among her garden. The world warbled with a type of electric hum, making her teeth vibrate and bones hurt. It was a royal wavering, coated with lavender aromas and magenta smiles. Her head felt light and mind dizzy as she seemed to oscillate with the powerful buzzing.

It was her world, yet it wasn’t. And then she saw him. Her husband. Like some prophet, arisen from the dead, with his full dark beard up to his defined cheekbones, beard full, and his hazel and now slightly purplish eyes reach for her heart and pull her inwards — as if standing on a mountainside and staring into deep into a chasm. She cannot walk at first. Her heart is stone, stuck in the place between sorrow and desire. But then her toes wiggle in the dirt. Her fingers and hands move as she stirred one foot at a time. Left foot in front of her, followed by the left. Her body an automaton. Her soul a burning sun.

He moved to her, a broad grin on his face, and she to him, with the most joyous tears in her eyes. But before they can embrace, a woman’s voice calls from behind him. He turns to follow that voice, and her heart stops like a herd of buffalo nearing death’s cliff.

Has he found another woman? She wondered. But the voice, she thought, sounded so familiar. Anger and fear amalgamated into a single cohesion feeling. Has he always been alive? Did he leave her long ago? But she saw his body in the casket…didn’t she?

Its lilac voice cried out to him again, and that’s when she saw the woman. That was when it all made sense, and the dawning of truth eclipses her mind. That was when she saw herself embracing her husband — a dead man alive again and her twin of another ornate realm.

She looked down at her hands as they reached out into the plum world. It seemed natural, but her wonder was shattered by a single moment. Gabriella noticed the shimmer running between both realms, like crumbled plastic wrap blowing in the wind between these acrylic worlds. The purple cosmos flower was some doorway to a world so close, yet so far away. Everything goes purpled as Gabriella collapsed upon the grass of her and not-her lawn. She was seen and not seen all at once.

When Gabriella awoke, the first thing she noticed was that night had appeared. The second thing was a familiar sound of laugher in the distance. Lifting herself slowly from the grass she begins to move toward the sound at the window of their and not-their home.

Peering within, her heartbeat ceased. For in that bed, their bed is Francesca. But he was not alone. For next to him, covered in a sheet, was her. They were talking and giggling, their naked bodies covered in a sheet. This isn’t the past nor the future. This is now. A different now. And before she can accept that insane truth, the days begin to sweep by. Seconds become years.

“Please, no, don’t go by so quickly,” she argued to the flower. But either it doesn’t hear her or listened because she watched the dusks and dawns sweet across the horizon like fine sand — entangled as one.

Autumn crept around the corner, coating them in supple love. They labeled wine bottles with the art she created and poetry he wrote. They laughed and giggled. She watched her and him, sad happiness swelling inside her. All that mattered, she thought to herself, was that he was alive.

The days galloped across the meadows of time. Seconds became sunsets and sunrises. Minutes became years. And with a heavy heart, this parallel life unfolded before her — everything coated in the twilight of purple mystique.

Winter blew in, bringing with it two kids.

Spring bloomed, and the kids have graduated, while she and Franceso have finally retired.

Summer brought new light, and with it, her illness. Not Francesco, like in her world, but this time it was her who stuck on the wheel of destiny.

Forever nightfall had come at last. And there she watched Francesco, kneeling before her grave, weeping. His eyes no longer have that once shine, his face mirrored with loss. She understands this loss. His sorrow and pain. Unlike her, he doesn’t wait until rain to cry.

She understood that in every world and place, death is inevitable. She extended her arm to comfort him, but at that moment, the world flickered, like a bulb going bad in a lampshade, and the purple sky decayed, crashing with thunderous might. Before she could mutter a single work, darkness flung her into mental oblivion.

When Gabriella opened her eyes, she was back in her garden. Like puzzle pieces, the world she knew, the world where she did not get to live a life with him, assembled before her. The cosmos flower was still there, but its radiance was dull and lifeless. What magic it had bestowed unto her was now gone. It was just a flower once more.

But in her heart, she still carried the lessons of that purple world. The seasons of grief had come and passed and left healing seeds to blossom once more, in the garden of her heart.

© Bradley J Nordell 2020

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