Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“Could you help?” the man asked. He had a low fluty voice; it sounded a little foreign.

Cassidy began to unhook the yellow gauze from the tiny, clawed metal ends of screen. He made a face when she did that, and twisted his entire body quickly. Cassidy saw his back then, saw how the yellow gauze was attached to his shoulder blade. How the other shoulder had a matching scarf, this one draped magnificently over his arm, almost alight. Not moving but capable of movement, she was sure.

She unhooked ten or twenty tiny metal ends of torn screen from the yellow gauze. She thought he might have nerve endings there, and so she was as careful as could be, as if removing slivers from a young child’s tender feet. Not that she knew much about that.

The stranger craned his neck; trust in his pale grey green eyes. Puce, his eyes are puce coloured, Cassidy thought, using a decorating word from one of her magazines. He moaned a little, and turned back around. Perhaps it had hurt him to face her, twisting the yellow gauze that was heavily veined as if by the finest of tendons, the softest of cartilage. More like a bird or a bat than a butterfly.

At last he was free. “Mind if I stay here for a couple of days?” he asked. “I can’t quite leave yet.”

“Shall I bring you food?” Cassidy asked.

“A bit of honey might be nice,” he said. “Otherwise I can graze.”

“Graze?”

“Not like a cow,” he said. “More like a hummingbird or a bee.”

“Oh,” Cassidy said. “I’ll look for honey and if we’re out I’ll buy some.”

He nodded. “Unpasteurized if you can find it.”

And Cassidy went back to the house and read decorating magazines. There was nothing wrong with their house that several thousand dollars wouldn’t fix, but now that they were semi-retired, they needed to hold on to their savings.

“This dresser,” she told Henry when he emerged from his basement, “would look quite nice with a coat of white or palest yellow.”

“Or puce,” Henry said.

“Why puce?”

“It’s a funny word, that’s all,” Henry said. “Like chartreuse. What colour is chartreuse again?”

“A kind of yellow-green,” Cassidy replied to Henry’s back. He was already receding, having poured himself fresh coffee. Soon she’d hear his footsteps on the basement stairs. He was refurbishing old tube radios. The tubes were dangerous to work with, he’d once explained. He mostly did it to occupy his time, and because he enjoyed it. Luckily, because his skill was rare he was occasionally paid nicely. He only worked in the hardware store a couple of afternoons a week now, doing the ordering and such.

“And a vase of fresh flowers,” Cassidy said to no one in particular.

She’d meant to spend the day in the potting shed drawing. She’d recently bought a good sketchbook and watercolours, and real coloured pencils, not the cheap ones children used. She’d had to drive forty minutes each way, because Brookside only had a crafts store. The art supplies store in Stony Creek boasted a little espresso machine. The owner made her a cup before she rang up Cassidy’s things. Cassidy downed the tiny cup, and drove home very fast.

She’d make notes instead of painting right away, just as she did for her decorating projects. She would plan her paintings in advance. A vase of flowers first, she thought, and then a bowl of fruit. And on the third day, a tall thin man with puce-coloured eyes, his yellow wings caught on the torn screen door of her shed. Thinking about him, she felt a little giddy. She was afraid to go down to see whether he was still there, or even to peek at her art supplies, which she’d stashed under the bench after she got home from Stony Creek.

Cassidy called goodnight down the basement stairs to Henry. She went up to bed, holding her glamorous feeling for the stranger close to her heart.

In the morning she hunted through cupboards till she found a dusty unopened jar of honey. She and Henry put sugar in their tea and coffee; she must’ve bought the honey to use in a recipe she’d clipped. She remembered it then: orange honey cake, supposedly a traditional rural cake, although she’d never heard of it till she’d read the article. She’d clearly never attempted it either; the unopened jar of honey was proof.

He was sitting on her stool, bent over her new sketchbook. His antennae bobbed; they were so fine she hadn’t noticed them yesterday. A delicate smile played about his lips, secretive and knowing. It reminded Cassidy of the woman in that famous painting. His twin yellow scarves draped decoratively down his back.

She set the honey down on the poured concrete threshold. Had it taken the whole night for the impossibility of him to sink in? Yesterday she’d instinctively helped him as she might a hurt child. Just because she wasn’t a mother didn’t mean she had no protective feelings.

He licked his lips in concentration, dipping her best brush into an empty tuna can full of water. The sable brush had been the most expensive of her purchases, too fine to ever be used for stenciling borders, or découpage. She’d looked forward to being the first to use it. Cassidy turned and hurried back up the field stone path to her house.

She’d expected her feelings to stay outside with the sky, the garden, the shed, him. But they hadn’t.

His puce eyes. She wanted to look into them.

Henry came into the kitchen and put the kettle on. As so often, he wore his brown corduroys, his safety glasses perched on his dark tousled head.

“I thought you’d be painting in your new shed,” he said.

“The screen in the door is already torn.”

Henry nodded. “I’ve got lots of spare screen. It won’t take me more than a few minutes. I wonder how it happened?”

“Maybe a raccoon or a porcupine,” Cassidy said. “I’ve got some bulbs in there. Even people can eat tulip bulbs, you know.”

“I do know,” Henry said. “My mother’s family in Holland ate them during the war.”

“You never offer to do anything right away.”

“I am now.”

“Now I don’t want you to.”

“Why?”

“You built the shed,” Cassidy said. “It took time away from your radios. You shouldn’t have to fix it yet.”

“You haven’t used it even once and it’s been finished for a week,” Henry said.

“It doesn’t matter. Mosquito season’s almost over since we had those cold nights. You have to work tomorrow. You should go somewhere.”

“Where?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know. Somewhere.”

“To the basement then,” Henry said and headed for the stairs.

Cassidy looked around the kitchen. The new curtains, though pretty, were no huge improvement over the blue blinds that had hung there previously. Not if she took into account how long they’d taken her to make.

She took a piece of paper towel off the roll that always stood beside the sink and sat down at the kitchen table, picked up the red permanent fine tip so fortuitously lying there, and drew a screaming face. It had no antennae so maybe it didn’t belong to the stranger. And she’d never seen him scream; he didn’t seem a screamer, somehow, although she supposed everyone and anyone might turn out to be a screamer if pushed hard enough.

She wondered what the stranger painted in her book, with her Windsor Newtons. In his hands her book would just fill, as if by itself. And no one would wonder why he wasn’t decorating instead. Or gardening or cooking. No one would wonder at all.

He was still there the next morning, and the morning after that. Cassidy knew because she checked before she left for her bookkeeping job. He never noticed her standing at the shed door even if she coughed, or wore her heavy plastic gardening clogs and thumped a little on her way.