“You’re improving,” Doctor Callaway says, and I would roll my eyes if I wasn’t busy adjusting a trellis. The vine is fragile and smug. I like it. “Your affect is calmer. Less provocative. Your sleep has stabilised.”
“If you say one more positive thing about me, I’ll blush.” I push my hair off my forehead with the back of my wrist and leave a smear of soil there on purpose. “Any chance of moving past the kiddie gloves? You know, to real tools. Things with teeth.”
“We’ll discuss it,” she says.
I look up at her through my lashes. “Discussing isn’t the same as doing.”
“I know,” she says, and for a second I like her. She lies less than before. Less than others. Maybe that’s why she’s always so tired around the eyes.
There are tools, of course. They’re here because they ‘trust’ me. I can see them under the tarp: rake, spade, hedge trimmer with a long jaw, the orange hulk of the wood chipper crouched like an animal that’s learned to pretend it sleeps. We used it last time. It roared and I felt its voice in my bones. Doctor Callaway watched me feed it branches until it sang right. She didn’t flinch then, either. Points for consistency.
Orderly One is on gate duty, bored enough to yawn without covering his mouth. Orderly Two is the new one – squarer, red hands, a buzzcut that suggests he bullied smaller boys at school and talks about it like it was summer sport. He’s close enough to smell like cut grass and stale coffee, and when he hands me the gloves, his fingers travel half an inch too far along my wrist.
I let it slide. Once.
“Thanks,” I say. I don’t put the gloves on.
We trim. We weed. We relocate three slugs from the strawberries to the compost with a ceremony I entirely invent to annoy Doctor Callaway. The sun lifts its face and decides to trybeing brave. A bee elects the rosemary. I do not think about the island, about men fraying into violence, about a pair of hands I liked because they never shook.
“Hydrangea?” I ask.
Doctor Callaway glances up. “What about them?”
“They’ll go pink if you keep feeding them that,” I say, nodding at the fertilizer bag. “If you want blue flowers, you need aluminium. Acidic soil.”
She makes a note. She makes so many notes. I imagine them as feathers stitched to my back. I imagine them as knives. It helps me smile at her when she is being particularly clinical.
New boy sidles closer as I demonstrate how to loosen the soil around the roots without breaking the tender thread at the base. His shadow falls over my hands. He breathes through his mouth.
“You’re a natural,” he says. Too familiar. His tone saysgood girl.His hand sayspossessive.It lands on my shoulder for exactly one second. Warm. Heavy. Wrong by design.
I hold very still. The earth makes the tiniest sound as it settles into the space that motion would have created.
“That’s strike one,” I say lightly, without looking up. “The first touch was a warning. But there won’t be a strike two.”
Doctor Callaway’s head tilts. Her pen pauses in that way of hers that suggests an impulse to intervene strangled by an addiction to data. She says nothing. We are performing a test in which she measures how far she can push me into civil society without losing a limb, and I measure how long she can pretend she isn’t inching me toward a cliff to see if I’ll jump. I am winning. She thinks she is, too. It keeps things polite.
New boy laughs. He doesn’t hear the tone. Men like him never do.
“You’re funny,” he says.
“I’m inconvenient,” I correct.
We ferry broken branches to the chipper. I run my hand along the orange casing like it’s a dog I’ve taught clever tricks. Its black mouth yawns; the teeth are quiet for now. The tarp folds back like skin. I feed it twigs and feel the tremor travel up my wrists the moment the blades decide they have something worth eating.
It is a good sound. Imagine thunder with intention.
Doctor Callaway watches with that particular blankness administrators wear to public apologies and funerals. She is an instrument finely tuned tonot reacting. I place things into the machine one by one, nice and slow, just to see if she breathes differently on the wordless beat between grind and silence. She doesn’t. I do. The rhythm is better than music because it never lies.
We are almost finished when it happens. The sun has shifted; the shadow of the supplies shed has slid across the beds like a big clock hand. I have dirt up both forearms and in one eyebrow, and when I catch sight of myself in the greenhouse reflection, I grin. I look domesticated. It’s obscene.
The new boy sidles again. The day has made him bold or stupid. He hands me the shears and, when I reach, he lets them linger. His fingers stroke the inside of my wrist, up, into the soft place where my pulse lives, like a secret handshake no one taught him that should never be attempted.
Strike two.
“Hands,” I say, still cheerful. “Off.”
He smiles in a way I’ve seen men practice in bathroom mirrors. “Relax. I’m just being friendly.”
