Chrysanthemum Crescent

By Molly Ketcheson

The girls of seven Chrysanthemum Crescent were an odd bunch. There was the youngest, Ellie, who liked to pluck carrots out of her neighbour’s garden and wave it about as a wand. The oldest, Maude, could be seen perpetually at a seat near their front window, playing an invisible piano across her plaid-skirted legs. And then there was the middle girl, Katrina, who sat on the front porch, camera in hand, waiting for a picture-perfect moment to come traipsing by.

They all had tempers as mighty as the lightning of a July storm and liked to dance with their hands out wide, wearing circles into the carpet of their living room. Ellie hated math class, Maude swooned at the sight of algebraic equations, and every time Katrina saw numbers her head filled with rainbow whorls. They looked at each other like the ocean looked at the beach it clung to, the sun looked at the trees it shone through, the rain looked at the grass it raced to.

They were Maude, Katrina, and Ellie, and they moved as one.

Until the day the sky broke apart.

It was a Tuesday in May and the girls of seven Chrysanthemum Crescent were walking home from school. Ellie still had the carrot she’d stolen that morning, and was poking Katrina in the arm with it. Maude was mentally composing a symphony to match the beauty of the functions she’d created in math class. Katrina had her camera gripped in her hands, scanning the quiet street for any sort of noise.

Their house was loud when they reached it. Well, Ellie thought it was loud. Katrina thought it was silent. Maude knew it was empty. Or maybe not empty. Un-full. That was a better word for it.

Their father was perched on Katrina’s spot on the porch. His eyes were streaked with something that would’ve been devastation if he’d had the energy to conjure it up. “Girls,” he said, or yelled, or moaned telepathically through his eyes. Their eyes. At the word all eight irises were streaked with something like devastation.

The girls of seven Chrysanthemum Crescent had a brother. Much older than them. And that brother had worked in a radio factory until today, when that brother became no longer alive. Ellie dropped her carrot, grabbing instead the hem of Katrina’s denim jacket. Katrina squeezed her camera so tightly it groaned and she accidentally took a picture of their feet, anchored forever to the pavement. Maude played her fingers on her thighs, trying to make sense of the discordant thrum of her heartbeat in her ears.

There was no dancing that night. Their mother cried. Their father sat on the porch, though he moved over a foot so Katrina could sit too. Maude looked at her mother across the room, in a chair at the kitchen table, and wondered how she could be so far away. Ellie went up to the bedroom she shared with Katrina, took her blanket from her bed, and curled herself into the corner, pulling the warm blanket over her head. Trapping her in with only her breath. She closed her eyes, and could almost imagine the breathing was not hers but somebody else’s. Katrina’s. Maude’s. Their brother’s, mother’s, father’s. Anybody’s but hers.

Katrina found her there hours later. She pulled the blanket from Ellie’s head and jutted her chin as if to say Get up. But Ellie shook her head and tugged the blanket back on top of her, gripping it under her chin. Katrina looked at her, tilted her head to the side as if she could not imagine what Ellie was thinking. It was a new, unwelcome sensation. But then she nodded and went to bed.

The next morning, Maude was making eggs and toast when the others came downstairs. That was a Friday breakfast, but Ellie and Katrina excused her mistake. The oldest sister did not say anything to them, did not even look up when Katrina got three plates from the cupboard, and Ellie poured three glasses of milk. When the toast popped and the eggs crackled, Maude plucked one of the plates from the table, placed the toast on it and lathered it with peanut butter and apricot jam, scooped out the eggs next to the toast, making sure they didn’t touch. And then she sat down and ate her breakfast, never even glancing at the two other dark-haired girls at the table who stared at her with their devastation-streaked eyes.

The funeral was on Sunday. The girls had not spoken to each other since before the sky broke apart. Their parents may have noticed this and tried to intervene, if their vision had not been a haze of misplaced obituary commas and the shirts their son had never worn but still kept perfectly folded at the back of his closet.

Standing by their brother’s grave, Ellie, wearing a too-small black pinafore and squeaky Mary-Janes, reached her fingers for Maude’s. Maude felt Ellie’s sticky hand, squeezed it in hers, but did not look at her littlest sister. When Maude heard that her brother had died, the music had left her. And without it she was a stick in the ocean. She could not understand numbers anymore, without hearing their matching symphonies. She could not make sense of her sisters, these people with her eyes and her hair and who she had always been able to hear – Katrina sounded like a waltz, Ellie a foxtrot – without the music. She lost them, somehow, in the distance between their fingers and hers. Scrambled radio waves. Snapped guitar strings.

Ellie looked up at Maude. Maude could feel her sister’s stare, as if she was at the bottom of a lake, and there was someone at the surface, blurry in the refraction of the water. Maude did not look down at her. She was struggling to breathe through all the silence. A priest was saying something about better places and second meetings but all Maude could think of was how her brother had turned up the radio when she was four-years-old, taking her bird-like hand in his and pressing her fingers to the radio so she could feel the vibrations of the melody in her bones. Her first real memory of music.

She couldn’t hear the music. Her memory was silent just like everything else. But her brother was smiling and looking at her and she’d felt full and now she was so empty.

Ellie’s fingers curled tighter around Maude’s. So small. Bird-like. She remembered her brother’s hand on hers, the rough scar in between his thumb and forefinger. She remembered him singing. She remembered singing with him. Somewhere, somehow, the vibrations came back to her. She could feel it in the back of her ankles, in her bones, her lungs. She was singing with him.

Maude felt her lips moving, chapped from the wind. The words on her tongue, the melody in her ear. The song returned to her, through the mist of a quiet night.

Ellie tugged on Maude’s hand, and looked up at her big sister once more. Maude looked down at her, and squeezed her hand. Maude brought her other hand on top of her sister’s. Maude protected Ellie’s hand as her brother had protected hers. And then she started to cry.

On Tuesday, a week since the sky fell apart, Katrina sat on the porch, clutching her camera. She watched Maude and Ellie huddled around a radio in the front window, but she didn’t go join them. She sat on the front steps, shaking her head to get her hair out of her eyes. Her lips were set in a thin line, her chin poised towards the sky. Her deep-thinking face, her father always said. Her world-destroying face, her brother always said.

She wished she could destroy the world. At least then she could aim her camera and understand what she was looking at through the lens.

“Kitty.”

Katrina looked up quickly - or maybe slowly, she wasn’t sure – and there was Maude. Her voice grated slightly after being unused for days.

“Don’t call me that.” Katrina’s voice was quiet, clipped, and she wouldn’t have been sure Maude heard her except that her sister flinched slightly, hand dropping from where it was about to touch Katrina’s shoulder.

Maude sat down a step below Katrina so she had to look up at her little sister. She squinted against the reflection of the sunset on the bay windows.

“Come join me and Ellie,” Maude said.

Katrina shook her head. She was cold. There were goosebumps on her legs below her shorts. But she did not want to go inside. She had not yet taken the perfect picture.

Maude reached for the camera in Katrina’s hand. Katrina pulled it back. If she wasn’t holding it, then there was no hope for her to understand the world anymore. Her brother had left and suddenly everything was spinning all the time and she didn’t know where anything was in her room anymore. She couldn’t make sense of her locker at school. She had been wearing mis-matched socks for the past week because she couldn’t tell the difference between them in her drawer. Sitting here, holding her camera, peeking through the lens, this was the only place where she did not feel dizzy.

But Maude had always been stronger, and managed to get it away from her.

Katrina reached out her hand. “It’s not funny, Maude. Give it back.” She gulped a breath, closed her eyes to stop the spinning. The wood of the porch warped beneath her thighs, the sky twisted to touch her toes. “Please.”

There was a click, and a soft whirring. Katrina opened her eyes, and Maude had the camera in front of her face, a polaroid coming out of the bottom. Maude pulled it out, set it face-down on Katrina’s knee to develop. She gave Katrina the camera back, then stood up and went inside, back to where Ellie had been watching them from the window.

Five minutes later, Katrina reached for the picture, holding it up so she was staring at herself, slightly discoloured because Maude didn’t fix the exposure. Her eyes were closed, her chin tilted. Deep-thinking. World-destroying. All she felt was a weakness between her ribs. Collapsing in on herself.

But the world was not spinning in the picture. It was still. A bit blurry, but still. Imperfect. But still.

She twisted so she could see her sisters through the window. Put the camera up to her eye, and snapped a picture. She put it face-down on the porch, and then stood up, not waiting to see it develop. She leaned down to re-tie the laces of her shoes, knotting them twice. And then she set off in search of more imperfect pictures.

When she came back, she picked up the photo from the porch. It was mostly just a reflection of her in the window, but at the side, where the light was right, you could see Maude and Ellie, leaning against each other. The girls of seven Chrysanthemum Crescent, window glass caught between them.

Katrina went inside and joined her sisters.

Ellie lifted her arm, conducting a symphony with the muddy carrot in her hand. Maude thought she was okay, but Katrina knew she wasn’t. The symphony she was conducting was too chaotic, too loud; even the birds, who usually circled Ellie while she played, had flown away.

It was a hazy, drizzling Friday, and Ellie had not been to school in a week and three days. Maude and Katrina had gone back after the funeral, but Ellie had claimed she had a stomach ache, then her arm was burning, then her toes felt prickly. Their parents let her stay home, because they didn’t know how to tell her that she still had to go to school. That her brother dying did not matter as much to the universe as it did to her. They too thought the universe should stop for their son. That everything should pause for the foreseeable future. Until they could learn to breathe without one of their lungs.

Instead Ellie spent her days under her covers, or in the back garden. She listened to her breathing, made herself still. She tried to remember what about a carrot had looked so much like a magic wand. On the third day, Ellie sat on the grass for an hour, staring at the tree branches.

Life was very long when you were eight-years-old. It all stretched ahead of you, like spilled water on a sloping floor.

Life was very short when you were eight-years-old. It was all in reach of your trembling fingers, all crammed into your stomach.

Ellie did not have the years of memories of her brother that her sisters did. He had moved out when Ellie was only four, and her life could fit in the palm of her tiny hand. But before that, Ellie could just remember soft breathing at the side of her bed when she was sick. Thick fingers holding her own.

So, Ellie made herself quiet, she pretended to be ill, she waited in the garden. But he did not come. Life was very long and very short but it was not supposed to just end without her getting a say. That was not part of the deal. Ellie knew fair, and this was definitely not it.

So, she conducted violent symphonies with carrots that were just carrots and lay under the covers, clenching every muscle to stay still.

Katrina and Maude watched Ellie from the back door. Maude nodded, then went to the kitchen, mumbling something about a snack, but Katrina closed her eyes. She sighed, and then opened her eyes to find Ellie standing still, staring at the carrot in her hand. Katrina went outside, letting the door slam behind her, loud enough that Ellie’s head jerked around.

“That was one loud performance,” Katrina said, stopping next to her sister, but not looking at her. Katrina hated it when people looked at her when she was about to cry. And because Katrina hated it, Ellie did as well.

“There was no sound.”

Katrina nudged her sister’s shoulder with her own. “You know what I mean.”

Ellie was silent for a long time, and then she whispered. “It’s just a carrot.”

Katrina couldn’t help herself, she started laughing. Ellie had always thought Katrina’s laugh sounded like church bells at noon on a Sunday.

“Yeah, it’s just a carrot,” Katrina said once she managed to stop laughing. “It’s always been just a carrot.”

Ellie looked up at her sister, tears in her eyes, just as Katrina had predicted. Katrina’s heart deflated like a tire that had run over a nail.

Katrina took the carrot from Ellie’s palm. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t also be something else.” She tapped Ellie’s nose with the tip of the carrot.

Ellie nodded, taking the carrot back. She expected Katrina to leave then, because Katrina didn’t often engage in conversations longer than a minute and forty-three seconds, but she didn’t.

“Hey, Ellie.” Ellie looked up once more. Katrina was looking down at her. “You gotta go back to school.”

“But –“

“Nope.” Katrina shook her head. “Life doesn’t work like that. You just keep going on.”

Before Ellie could protest, Katrina turned on her heel and went back inside.

But I don’t want to move again. That’s what Ellie was going to say. Of course, Katrina knew what Ellie was thinking before she even finished the first word. She always did.

Ellie liked being still. She liked pretending like there was something to be still for. But life was very short. It could not be wasted. And life was very long. She needed to get a move on.

Ellie lifted the carrot in her hand, brandishing it like a sword. It was just a carrot. But still magic.

The girls of seven Chrysanthemum Crescent were missing pieces. Everyone was, some more than others. That was just how life worked. Pieces chip off you as you move through the world, losing and finding, being lost and being found. The sky broke apart above their heads. It tore down the sun, the trees, the moon, with it, but the girls survived. They found their way back together because those three simply couldn’t function without each other. It was dreadful, really. Definitely going to cause problems. But they were interlinked at a circuit-level, for better or worse.

Maude, Katrina, Ellie. They had drifted. They had let go of each other’s hands amongst the chaos of the sky. But they refit the sky, put the trees back up, rehung the sun and the moon. It was not perfect, you could see the cracks clear as the threads of a spider’s web, but it was intact. It was stable. It was the sky, and it was theirs.

Maude, Katrina, Ellie. They put the sky back together. And they moved as one.