A Blue Rose

A BLUE ROSE



Elisabeth stood in the the center of the tunnel that lay carved beneath the great mountain that had separated two towns for so long. She had walked it many,many times as it was being born, a nervous midwife afraid of the final event. She had counted the steps from end to end and she knew her figures were honest. As real and true as God had once been to a young girl, kneeling on knees bent from the fields, clasping hands burnt and torn from husking the corn as it ripened, the silk cutting like metal as the thousandth ear lay white as a lamb in the wicker basket.

The church had been small and the man behind the alter swift with both praise and blame. She had stared always into his eyes, as blue as the one panel of stained glass soaring over his head. As blue as the blue rose clutched in the hands of a saint she could never remember. She would pray desperately to Mary, who befriended all women, to descend from heaven pluck the blue rose from the glass and give it to her. She would do it at night,Elisabeth knew, she would not want to play favorites. She would give up her place beside the cross for just one hour and lay the blue rose across Elizabeth's pillow.

Each day Elizabeth woke with an expectant smile that faded only long enough to grow in the aging sunlight as another night of hope and devotion approached. She was still waiting. She might have lost all the girlish dreams of city lights and silk dresses, but the blue rose remained. It grew in the one patch of soil that had not yet been deserted by rain and ravaged by the fear that had taken everything else from her.

The flower she clutched in her hand now was not blue,but it had rested so gently in the florist's box, in the hour before daybreak as she had started her journey, that she could not pass it by. As forgotten as she wished to be it reached out to her and she took it as a wicked elf from a book of tales stealing a firstborn child, leaving only a small copper piece in it's place.
She could hear screaming as she entered the shade and knew that the alarms must had been raised but where she stood now she could hear nothing. The tunnel was understanding. It was giving her time but not too much time. She must make a choice which way to go. Two directions.

The west was her past. Her simple wedding in a borrowed dress to a man she loved for his steady unmarked hands, for his voice, and for his place as the minister who preached beneath the blue rose she coveted. He had been raised in town and never knew the slouched backs and twisted feet of the land workers. She had never let him see her own hands. She covered them with gloves made of fine linen and rough wool. It had been the only dowry she had asked from her father.
She wore black velvet gloves for her husband's funeral, he had died in winter. She wanted to be certain that even as she placed a bloom on his grave he would not feel her touch.

Elisabeth turned her head. The east was what lay ahead if she choose it. There was a house there waiting for her. Not as fine a one as she had married into, this east house was a room to let with narrow doors and a rusted bed frame that creaked from the weight of a man who drew off her gloves slowly finger by finger before running them down his body.
After these visits she would run swiftly through the tunnel to return home knowing that all she could ever ask now would be to wake next to the blue rose and she would have everything.

“Perhaps I am your blue rose, Elizabeth.”
He had said to her as she dressed smoothing her gloves over her palms.
She had looked at him for the first time with anger.
“Do not speak blasphemy.”

“How can you be so sure it will come?”
She left him that day, but returned, always returned. When she started feeling sick in the mornings his smile only grew wider. As the months passed she became bound to him, they would marry and she would sleep and wake each day beside him never again returning home to wait for a glass flower. She would put away her nonsense and be a mother, he told her firmly. She would do well as a laborer's wife she had been born to it. Her first marriage to a preacher had raised her above her station, had put foolish ideas of dreams and flowers in her mind. The new life would heal her.

Elizabeth lay awake in her childbed praying to Mary. She knew somehow this was her last chance. If the rose did not come tonight she would never have it. She would have to leave this place of hope and expectation for another of hot sun and exposed marked hands.

In the final hour before dawn she closed her eyes and entered the tunnel, the tunnel carved beneath the great mountain that separated her heaven and hell. She could see light at both ends as the pain cut deeper into her skin. She held up her stolen flower in the growing light. It had changed. It was blue. It had become a blue rose but not the one she prayed for. Not the one in the stained glass of the church she had prayed in, married in, not bright and blooming ever fuller. This one was dying, it's color already darkening to midnight and now black. As it crumbled in her hands she could hear a child crying. Was it east or west? She couldn't tell. She wanted to go to it but stood frozen afraid to lose a single petal .

The lights were getting brighter. She heard people calling out to her, saw her new husband reaching out a hand as marked as her own asking her to be brave and hold on. She refused to take it, her hands were full. She held on to what she had always wanted and watched as it turned to death.