Gaias lover, p.1
Gaia's Lover, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Gaia's Lover
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Author’s Note
About the Author
Gaia’s Lover
Zoe Cannon
© 2022 Zoe Cannon
http://www.zoecannon.com
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Gaia's Lover
The thick scent of violets and rich earth woke Allie from the honeysuckle sweetness of her dreams. Even before she opened her eyes, she knew where she was: the same place she woke up every morning these days. Sure enough, when she blinked her eyes open, she saw her own nude body, covered in the dirt she had torn up in the night. The grass of her sister’s lawn, mowed to within an inch of its life, tickled her nose.
Her sister wouldn’t be happy to find that she had disturbed the grass again. She wondered how long she would be able to chalk it up to sleepwalking before her sister followed up on her threat and made a doctor’s appointment for her. But calling it sleepwalking was still better than saying, My lover called to me in my dreams again, and we made love in the middle of your perfect backyard, while flowers bloomed all around us.
The flowers had grown overnight, just like they always did. Certainly her sister hadn’t planted them. Violets grew all around her head like a crown. Some kind of flowering vine, with shy pink blooms like tiny drops of hard candy, twined up her legs. She sat up and started unwrapping the vines from around herself, gently, so as not to disturb them. They were a gift from her lover. They were her lover’s touch, her lover’s hands on her body, and ripping them out would be like breaking the fingers of her beloved. She brought one of the flowers to her lips and kissed it softly as she stepped free.
She looked around for the clothes she had slept in. It would be bad enough for her sister to catch her out here again without her sister also finding her naked. She wasn’t worried about the rest of the neighbors. The sky was still gray with the first light of dawn. No one else was up at this hour. No one except Melinda. But for Melinda, rising with the dawn was a part of her religion, along with tracking her calories and water intake every day and listening to the news on her morning commute instead of music.
There were Allie’s sweatpants, half-buried in the dirt. She picked them up and shook a clod of earth free before slipping them on. The familiar numbness came over her at the touch of the fabric—time for another day to start, another endless stretch of time away from the embrace of her lover, another countdown until she fell asleep again and dreamed of flowers blooming. She bent down to kiss the earth, temporarily putting her quest for her shirt aside. Some things were more important. I’ll be thinking of you, she promised, and breathed in deep. She smiled at the loamy sweetness.
The slam of the back door made her jerk her head up. She covered her breasts with her hands, but of course, that only emphasized the fact that they were bare. Melinda’s eyes went wide, then narrowed. “What are you… get inside. Now.” She shot a furtive look from side to side, at the right-hand neighbor’s house and then the left, making sure no one else was awake to catch a glimpse of her embarrassing baby sister.
Allie’s cheeks heated. She hadn’t been ashamed a second ago, when it was just her and her lover waking lazily together. But Melinda’s embarrassment was catching. She hurried inside, head bowed, bare feet taking quick steps over the dew-dampened grass.
Melinda shielded her with an arm as she ushered her inside. Once inside, she grabbed the closest coat off the coat rack—her long black coat with the thick belt, very fashionable, very businesslike—and draped it over Allie’s shoulders.
“Sleepwalking again?” Allie couldn’t tell whether her sister was starting to doubt the excuse, or just tired of this latest failing of hers.
Allie nodded. “I’ll call the doctor next week,” she said, like she always did.
Melinda took a step back and crossed her arms over her black silk nightgown. “I’ve been doing some reading.”
With an effort, Allie managed not to groan aloud. When Melinda began a sentence with, I’ve been doing some reading, nothing good ever followed. It was always cardio and superfoods and career goals.
“The understimulated mind,” Melinda continued, dissecting Allie with her eyes like Allie was that poor helpless frog back in high school biology, “will search for an outlet for its energies. If it doesn’t find one during the day, that energy comes out while the body is at rest. A recent study showed that thirty-one percent of sleepwalkers were unemployed, compared to—”
“Maybe they lost their jobs because they were too tired from all the sleepwalking.” Melinda’s coat smelled like her eau de boardroom perfume. It made Allie want to sneeze. She wished she could shrug off the coat and stand here as she was, since it was only the two of them in here. But at thirty years old, Melinda still hadn’t come to terms with the fact that humans had messy and inconvenient bodies that were sometimes—gasp—naked. Allie wouldn’t have been surprised if Melinda refused to even look down at herself in the shower.
“We both know that’s not your problem,” said Melinda. “You haven’t had a job in six months—before the sleepwalking started.” She drew an imaginary tally mark in the air, like she was keeping score. Melinda was always keeping score.
“I didn’t have enough time for my schoolwork. You were the one who told me I should quit. Waiting tables isn’t as important as your degree, you said. You told me I should move in with you to bring my cost of living down, and promised you’d support me until school was done. Mom and Dad didn’t even ask you to do it.”
“And when is the last time you’ve been to one of your classes?” Melinda drew another tally mark in the air.
This time, the shame Allie felt was real. Her cheeks heated. She stared at the floor. She hadn’t been fair to her sister these past four months. She kept meaning to go back to class, she really did. But every time she started driving, a patch of flowers or stand of trees caught her eye, and she found herself lying in the grass, running her fingers gently along the earth and dreaming of the next night.
“You need a job, or you need to go to school,” Melinda recited. Allie had lost count of how many times she had heard this speech. She might have hit a dozen by now.
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m going back this week, I promise. I’ll talk to all my professors, see if there’s any makeup work I can do…”
“The semester is over. Did you even sign up for any new classes?”
She thought she had. Maybe. She had meant to. She remembered opening up the course catalog on her computer, at least. But every time she had tried to read the descriptions and figure out what she needed for her degree, the words had started swimming in front of her, rearranging themselves into nonsensical patterns. Or maybe they had been in nonsensical patterns to begin with. Civil War literature, environmental engineering, comparative media studies… what did any of it matter, compared to the scent of flowers in her nose and the soft brush of wet dirt against her fingers?
She had been studying biology. It had been important to her, once. But all the biology she could ever want was right outside her back door. A hundred species of trees and flowers and weeds, and all of them were the hands of her lover. The thought of sitting in a classroom, listening to someone transform the buzzing tingle of vines wrapping higher and higher around her inner thigh into dry words and diagrams and scientific names, felt like sacrilege of the highest order.
“You know, I keep asking myself if you’re depressed,” said Melinda. “If I should be pushing you to see a therapist, or even make the appointment myself. But you’ve been skipping everywhere you go, did you know that? You keep going around with this little smile on your face. You’re even wearing it now.”
Allie brought a hand to her lips. She couldn’t help it. She had been thinking about the smell of violets she had woken up to this morning.
“You know what I realized the other day? You remind me of when I got my first boyfriend, back in ninth grade. I acted exactly the same way you are now. Okay, maybe not the skipping, but I know I had a silly smile on my face everywhere I went. Mom kept asking about it, because you know I’m not normally a smiler. I always lied, but in retrospect, I’m pretty sure she knew the truth. I kept skipping classes, too—the school called Mom and Dad at least a dozen times that year. I’d had straight A’s back in eighth grade, but that year, suddenly nothing felt as important as… you know, I can’t even remember his name now.” The scalpel of her eyes dug deeper into Allie. “But you never had a boyfriend in high school. You never even went on a date. After a while, we all sort of figured you just weren’t interested.”
They had talked about her behind her back, Melinda and Mom and Dad? About her lack of a love life? She supposed that shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was just one more failing of hers for the three of them to dissect. Not interested enough in romance to go on a date, not interested enough in school to study for her tests, not ambitious enough to push for something bigger and better than community college. Stop floating through life, they had been telling her for as long as she could remember. Even Melinda, who at ten years older than her had basically been a third parent from the beginning. And Melinda had always been cut from the same cloth as Mom and Dad—always wanting to go, to do, to win, to be the best. Stop dreami
And now, at twenty, she had finally found something—or someone—she was passionate about. It was ironic, after how many times she had heard Stop dreaming when she was growing up, that the only place she could fully experience that passion was in her dreams. Stopping by the side of the road and running her fingers through the grass for hours on end was nothing more than a pale echo.
“Although I did wonder from time to time if you were gay, and you were just afraid of how we would react,” said Melinda. “You don’t need to worry about it if you are, you know.”
Was she? Did those distinctions matter with her lover? Gaia—as Allie had started calling her lately, because it was the closest name she had been able to find—was always portrayed as a woman. Mother Earth, that was what people said, although Allie’s feelings for her were far from daughterly. But gay or straight or bi seemed beside the point to Allie. She wasn’t interested in women so much as she was interested in Gaia. She had never felt attracted to anyone before Gaia had come into her dreams.
That first night, she had thought she really had gone sleepwalking. She had dreamed of flowers sprouting from the earth to caress her with their skin-soft petals, and vines twining around her skin and reaching for her most intimate parts. They had all whispered to her with a woman’s voice. She had woken in the park across from her apartment building—thankfully before anyone was awake—with her clothes lying next to her. Even after she had seen the freshly-sprouted flowers beside her, the same flowers she had dreamed of, she had thought it was nothing more than an exceptionally vivid dream. An out-of-character one—Melinda wasn’t wrong when she said Allie had never been interested. She had never even so much as had an erotic dream before that night.
But it happened night after night And every morning, when she woke, there were flowers blooming around her that hadn’t been there the night before. She started going out to the park in the evenings and taking meticulous pictures of every inch of the grass, just to make sure the flowers really hadn’t been there before she went to sleep.
Only once she had the photographic proof, a dozen different befores and afters, did she start daring to believe that this—whatever this was, this affair, this heady romance with nothing less than the earth itself—was real. After that, she couldn’t help but see the earth differently during the day—every blade of grass a beckoning finger, every soft press of dirt against her bare feet the warm and yielding flesh of her lover. It had taken her a long time to stop feeling like she was crazy. She still did, some of the time. But it had taken her a lot less time than that to fall in love.
She wanted so badly to talk to her sister about it. To have those conversations she had missed out on in high school, the conversations girls were supposed to have with their older sisters, where she would ask shyly for romantic advice and they would conspire together over how to win somebody’s heart. But she wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t know how this would all sound to someone else. She had never even told any of her friends—not that she had many of those anymore. She had always resented it when one friend or another would drop out of contact for weeks or months at a time because of a new boyfriend, but now she understood. Even though she could only truly meet with her lover in her dreams, it was still all but impossible to think about anything else. Like friends. Like schoolwork.
Melinda would have understood that part. It might even have made her more sympathetic. Half a dozen times, Allie had opened her mouth when they had sat together over takeout in the evening, intending to tell her sister everything. But she had never been able to get the words out. She knew what would happen as soon as she did. The look in her sister’s eyes, concern edging into panic—What am I supposed to do about my crazy sister? Then her sister really would make that therapy appointment, and some doctor would put her on drugs, because who would believe she was anything other than delusional when she started saying the earth itself had chosen her for a lover? Even now, with those before-and-after pictures stored in a secret folder on her laptop where she could look at them whenever she had doubts, she still didn’t believe it half the time.
“If there’s someone new in your life,” said Melinda, her voice uncharacteristically gentle, “you can tell me. You don’t have to bring him—or her—over for dinner anytime soon. I won’t even ask questions if you don’t want, I promise. I just want to understand what’s going on with you.”
And Allie wanted her to understand. She wanted it so badly. Yes! I’m in love! She wanted to shout it so loudly the roof popped off the house.
Yes or no. That was what her sister was waiting for—a yes or a no. She could say no, deny Gaia, betray her lover. Her sister could decide she was depressed after all, make her go to a therapist and a doctor and get those drugs, march her to classes and job interviews when all she wanted was to lie in the sun in her lover’s embrace. Or she could admit the truth and get the same therapist, the same doctor, the same drugs. The same worried look in her sister’s eyes.
Neither option was acceptable. But now that the question was out there, it wasn’t going to go away. She couldn’t get away with blaming her nighttime wandering on sleepwalking anymore. She couldn’t keep saying she would go back to her classes next week. As long as Gaia was the most important thing in her life, answering her sister’s questions would be impossible—which meant it would always be impossible, because she didn’t ever intend to let Gaia go.
“Allie? Are you okay?” And there was Melinda’s concern, right on schedule. Allie wondered if that look would ever leave her sister’s eyes. Allie had almost preferred it when her sister had looked at her like she was an embarrassment. At least she had known how to deflect that.
“I’m moving out,” she blurted, before she knew what she was going to say.
Melinda blinked, too surprised to look worried. At least for a second. Then the worry came back in full force. “You’re what?”
Allie hadn’t meant to say it. But now that the words were out there, she knew she had meant them. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t keep going about her life as if the most important part of it didn’t exist. She had to get out of here and… and what came after that, she didn’t know. All she knew was that it would involve Gaia. Not waiting tables for drunken idiots. Not listening to a professor blather on about floral anatomy. Just Gaia. Just love.
“I need to do my own thing for a while,” she said aloud. “Get my life figured out.”
“You don’t have a job. You don’t have a degree. What are you going to do?”
“I’ll figure something out. I need this, Melinda. You know what I’ve been doing hasn’t been working for me.” Before she had finished speaking, she was already jamming her feet into her shoes and digging through the laundry basket in the hallway for a bra and a shirt. Five minutes ago, she hadn’t known she was going to leave. But now that the idea had come to her, she couldn’t stand to stay in this house one moment longer.
“There are other options. You could see a therapist, go to a doctor…”
Allie grabbed a t-shirt with a picture of a kitten playing with a ball of yarn, and pulled it over her head backward. She didn’t bother with a bra. No more talk about doctors or therapists. She needed out of here now. She all but ran for the front door.
Melinda ran after her. “Let me help you. Please.”
But Allie was already out the door. “I don’t need help,” she called over her shoulder with a smile. “I’ll be okay. I promise.”
And she would. She had no doubt of that. Her lover was the earth itself, and the earth would take care of her. Gaia would take care of her, because they were in love. Always.
* * *
It was still dark when the flashlight shone into Allie’s eyes, dragging her out of a restless sleep. She groaned as her back loudly reminded her how tired it was of sleeping on the cold, hard ground. She had never hurt like this when she had woken up in the park, or in Melinda’s backyard. Back when she had woken in Gaia’s embrace. Now she only ever woke alone.
