“I’ll find her and bring her home, I promise”

That is the last thing he said to me. I hate promises of course, because people seem to think they will make something happen.

Promises break.

Glass breaks.

Flower stalks break when their blooms are too heavy.

People are like that sometimes. They concentrate on what other people will see instead of what they are, and they break.

I’m not like that. I am like those little purple spring flowers. All greenery with the tiniest blossom. Blue mustard, they’re called. I’m also like them because no one wants them or is even interested in them, but they still come up. Blue mustard doesn’t care. 

I care.

She was the only person who ever bothered to braid my hair. She sang to me, songs he wouldn’t have thought appropriate for a child so young. She never worried much if things were appropriate for me. She told me anything that she wanted to and I forgot everything except that she wanted to have red hair instead of brown, and I looked like the last man she believed in.

She didn’t believe in him. She laughed at him when he told her she was beautiful and she cooked his meals and mended his torn shirts and cleaned his house. But she never believed in him. She said she didn’t believe in anyone, except the child with the eyes of stone.

He believed in her. I used to watch him watching her. She was worth watching. I don’t know if she was really beautiful, because I always loved her. She only wore yellow silk dresses, and they were always dirty because she wore them to do everything, but I thought she looked like the sunshine. She wore her hair differently every day and she spent hours staring at herself in the looking-glass. She danced for me but not for him.

It took me five years to realize I was the child with the eyes of stone. Before that, I thought she meant the stone figurine in her room. I still don’t know why she called my eyes stone. They are hazel and set deep under heavy brows. I don’t spend much time in front of the looking-glass. I didn’t like it when she did.

She twisted our lives around her own. She taught us that no day was complete if you did not stand on the roof and look at the stars. She showed me the shapes of clouds and beauty in jetstreams. She taught him how to dance while I sat in the corner, and they danced every evening for a month. She read out loud to us evenings by the fire, but only Dr. Suess and sometimes Shakespeare. She said we could learn all we needed to know from these two, and the Bible. But she wouldn’t read the Bible to us. She said there were some journeys that a soul had to take alone. She wouldn’t let either of us into the kitchen when she was baking, so we would sit in the doorway and watch her cover her yellow silk in flour and eggs. Her hands were clumsy, but her feet never stepped wrong. I was seven before I understood why. She was right-handed, but she used her left for everything. Her right hand had been burned and she didn’t like to see it. She made her right sleeves so long they fell over her hand, but her left sleeves never came to her elbow. 

She taught us to depend on her for everything; food and clothes and affection and recreation. And then she left. One morning she broke her looking-glass with a piece of firewood and kissed my face and left. He was away and she did not leave him a letter. She left him everything else. She walked out of the house without a thing but her little red purse. She did not tell me where she was going, or even that she was going. I watched her for as long as I could see her. She walked away, down the road towards town.

He came back and waited for a week, but she didn’t come back. I knew she wouldn’t. She was a broken flower stalk. She bloomed too much. She didn’t believe in anything except the child with the eyes of stone, and I don’t know why she believed in me.

I don’t cry for her. He cried, and then he grew angry and said she had no right to leave in that way. He promised me and he left. And I don’t care. He won’t bring her back. He promised.

Promises break.

Glass breaks.

Flower stalks break when their blooms are too heavy.