Chapter Text
For the length of one lifetime, Pearl and Rose lived together in earshot of the sea. They built a home on a sand-covered cliff stained violet by wild lupine, waist-high.
The house was built with love. The pair had access to an overflowing spring of it between them. Pearl pulled streams from Rose with a look. Her mundane boldness set the stars in place. Their foundation cured. Rose’s collected in the heel of each hand whenever she knelt to knead at Pearl’s shoulders. Walls erected themselves in their voices.
They started a family together. This family of theirs was always growing bigger and always growing smaller. Everyone was welcome, so everyone eventually grew up. They grew until the home in earshot of the sea could no longer hold them and went the way of hermit crabs to find another.
Pearl and Rose did not have to worry about this. The home in earshot of the sea was their home. They’d already shed former shells. When Pearl and Rose were young, they lived beneath the ocean in a place appropriately called SeaWorld. In SeaWorld, there was no social mobility, because the designers of SeaWorld engineered it that way. People like Pearl and Rose were born into whatever they did. Rose was a reef designer, and was responsible for all the life in the world. She was uniquely trained and qualified via a series of multiple-choice tests. Pearl’s job was to stand in one place. She held a clicker in one hand, which she clicked whenever a visitor entered SeaWorld. SeaWorld was a closed society, so no one ever visited. From her perspective, Pearl literally had the most boring job in the world.
This situation was obviously stupid and untenable in the long run. Rose started talking to Pearl whenever she came down to check pH levels. They checked one another’s pH, in a manner of speaking. They talked about building a home in earshot of the sea. They quit SeaWorld and went on land. They spoke to other people of all sorts, and discovered that just about everybody’s assigned jobs were just as poorly planned as Pearl and Rose’s. They and their allies formed a cooperative economic coalition in order to leverage collective power against the losers in charge. They were targeted by the government. They went into hiding and started a family. Eventually, they had a son with Rose’s human lover, from whom they kept the secret of SeaWorld.
That story has been told before, so let’s move on. You get the idea.
For the length of one lifetime, Pearl and Rose lived together in a home in earshot of the sea. At the end of this lifetime, Rose left Pearl behind in the fall.
Pearl buried her in a flowerbed, per Rose’s wishes. She retreated into their home and shut the doors and windows to all seasound. Winter came, and knocked, and went. The garden fell asleep.
She opened her doors in the spring. Attempted to open. First the knob itself fought her, so Pearl planted her foot on the welcome runner, shoved one shoulder against the door, and twisted it up with her whole body. The runner ran away from her, bunching like ribbon candy against Pearl’s dusty shoe rack. (Rose had rarely worn shoes.)
Pearl fell to the floor, bruising her nose. The thing remained shut. All the windows of the house were closed, too. Pearl pulled up a blind and saw nothing. Pearl cursed the doors and windows. She tried again. Her bare feet squeaked without the runner. So did the wood when she managed to budge it. The knob creaked nine degrees, spinning shank and latch, and Pearl saw a seam of darkness appear along the edge of the door. She released her doorknob, leaving fingerprints on the rose. She shoved.
It groaned at her. It opened. Pearl saw sunlight and thorn at her window back to the outer world. Rose’s garden had grown wild without anyone to tend it. While Pearl had been fast asleep in her grief, it had overtaken their home.
The garden had always been Rose’s. Rose had always been Pearl’s. This probably made the garden Pearl’s responsibility, now, but Pearl didn’t want anything to do with it. She had only just started thinking again, and Rose’s grave lay in the garden. Pearl was not ready to enter. She only wanted to leave the house.
The door didn’t open any further, whether Pearl asked nicely or not, and weeds had grown too thickly over the windows to escape another way. Pearl resorted to a blade and forced her way out the front.
Pearl walked to town for the first time since Rose left her. The lupine had sown itself another rung while she was sleeping. The tree with two trunks had taken lightning; one side of it was a wound. A horse fly bit her leg. Pearl had been frozen in time long enough to have forgotten the real world, and all of it irritated her now. Her eyes were oversensitive to the sunlight, rendering columns of pollen blind spots. Her feet were unfamiliar with the uneven earth, the little stones that settled in her shoe.
One journey there and back and Pearl was really quite sick of it all. She entertained the thought of another nap. Visitors always came by in the spring and summer, and this year there was no Rose. It wouldn’t do for Pearl to oversleep.
Pearl didn’t need to eat, but her son did, and he would be visiting not long from now. She decided to clean up, cook, and present her best self to her family.
The garden was as high as the house. Pearl cleared back her narrow path and kept both eyes on the door. There Pearl’s pruning shears freed it from the ropes of thorn that had sprung up in Pearl’s absence.
She went inside. She shut the door.
Pearl slept an ordinary sleep that night, for her, meaning she didn’t sleep at all. She had a couch the color of red sand. It had once been the perfect size for Pearl and Rose together. Pearl took it with a cup of tea, small. She looked out the window. The window was still covered in garden. She could not tell what time it was by looking. She looked at their things. Pearl hadn’t touched them since Rose left. The bookcase was out of order. She could clean that tomorrow, when she cleaned the house.
Because she was now awake, Pearl heard something. Not the sound of the sea; that was muffled by the plants. A scrap-tap-tap on the window.
She was still angry at the universe for interrupting her thoughts earlier. The fly-bite on her leg was a hard, itchy welt. The sound on the window was her enemy.
Pearl forced the window out in much the same way she had the door, hacking open a viewport with a kitchen knife. The tapping stopped.
It was night-time now. The lupine-field had gone red. There were stars in the sky.
“Be quiet!” She shouted out the window. Cool evening air responded. Pearl shivered and shut it. She could still see the lupines.
The tapping resumed.
Pearl threw open the portal again and confronted her enemy. “I said, be quiet!” she screamed to the natural world.
The tapper tapped. Pearl heard a voice. It said her name.
It was Rose’s voice.
”Pearl,” said Rose’s voice. It was a whisper. It was the voice Rose used in the universe they shared between the two of them, in bed before day and just after dreams. “Let me in.”