The Question of the Roses

In your hands were thorns, grape red and yellow. They grew from your palms, a vine twisting bright and green as it newed, and golding as it stayed. You understood but didn’t know how it came to be this way; they hadn’t been there when you’d gone to sleep. For years your hands were empty when you’d wake. At ten, your mother told you to prepare, the way her mother had told her to prepare, the way she told your mother’s sisters to prepare. So at ten, each night, before sleep, the ritual began for you, as it had for them, and would for your daughters, too.

First, the salt, a full palm, from the mine where the castle had been carved, to root you to your memory of caves, and to the caves’ memory of you, too. As the salt slipped through the webbing of your upturned hand, you’d place one chipped stone, vermillion clipped from the canyon land that is all mothers, into the receding, pour water sourced from a running stream, and press your fist together, for the root to take, to go to bed with your palm still closed.

For years, in the morning, the stone was gone, your palm empty.

Until the day the thorns appeared.

You woke one day like your mother had done and as she said one day you’d do and found your palm to be abloom, a rose move stretching limb from limb as broad as the room you kept.

Only your mother didn’t keep roses blooming from her wrists, she kept ocotillo, long and leaning along the length of your home, spare mariposa in the wind, and her mother, too, an ocotillo, and each of their sisters, lean and leanings.

The Question of the Roses, then, grew as the tree of you grew, too, a tall and winding branching.

The tree of you continued, and your mother and her sisters split soft cords of their ocotillo and tied to you and your vining a scaffold, braided you up and across to train the wild of you into awnings, until soon the roof of you was the whole city, and people could pass below you in a storm, and after each long night you would bloom.