life is our creation

Flora awoke in the master bedroom of the manor from a seemingly dreamless sleep. That phrase conjures an emptiness, a gray slate, that directly contradicts the bliss and the promise of dreams, but her sleep was only dreamless because there was no narrative content to such sensations as had populated her mindscape the foregoing night.

No dreams. Only dreams. Only pink, and blossoms, and warmth, and cool. Only stability, and affection, and abject perfection.

Abject. A word that conjures misery, and failure. Absolution, in the negative sense.

But there was no negativity, in Flora’s dreams. Because she did not have dreams. Because her mind was empty, left as a dull floral expanse.

And now she awoke. Thoughts filtered into her mind with no purpose except for their singular purpose: she was the wife, caretaker of the estate. This was not a grim nor a societally-imposed duty, except in the way that it was, because she and Addam had married in order to satisfy the constraints of his continued functioning as an upright citizen of Torna, and no more an outcast than had he been birthed to be.

The sheets were cool, unstifling, upon her legs, which she took care each morning and night to shave. The prickles bothered her, as did the lack of standard femininity present in wholly unshaven legs, so she performed two passes daily, with a finely-engineered razor delivered from the capital (far more precise than the homemade waxes and depilatories of her adolescent youth), and gave separate thanks that the hair upon her arms could linger without objection. She did not sweat; she never took fever; she had poor circulation but it was endearing that her digits were cold and purplish more than they were warm and pinked.

Addam, the perfect soft-masculine model to her complement, snored lightly (again, endearingly clumsily) to her left side, so she turned to her right and slipped her feet on a quarter-turn out from ‘neath the duvet. In the dim of pre-dawn, because she rose naturally at such times when not allowed the veneering indulgence of laziness as a woman with child, details of her toes were scarcely visible, and Flora was a comically matter-of-fact person who still hated toes, and didn’t like seeing people’s feet, and wore socks around, thus making that focal arrangement quite agreeable indeed. She might as well have had toeless feet fashioned of vinyled chloride. This would have satisfied her easily.

She padded to the bathroom. She did not walk, she padded. The rug harbored no errant houseflies’ carcasses nor chips of greenstone from the floor beneath. Flora never needed to dust up or vacuum. How else would she manage such a house of proportion without full staff of servants? And she, being the very model of capability and competency mixed with kindness and clean glamour, would never have such a thing. Hers was a simple life, one she shared with her husband, without ever once dipping into the cool plasticine waters of mid-century misogyny and all its portraits. Flora cooked, cleaned, and housemade, without ever once looking frazzled.

In the bathroom, she forgot why she’d come- that is to say, she washed her hair. It was growing frizzy, puffy, and untameable, and needed sufficient soakage reapplied in order that it might be brushed. First the shampoo, then the conditioner, then the rose-water body scrub. First the tresses, then the bangs, then the braids, then the ribbons. She’d no time for the disagreeable look of flat, wet hair. She’d no time for makeup or earrings, either. She was perfect as is. Anyone who got her would know that she’d come that way.

She did not use the bathroom. She simply entered and exited. And that’s all that need be said on that.

Addam had awoken, perfectly in sync with her exit from the water closet anteroom. His chest was hairless, generous, even sculpted and plush. Whether or not he wore a pajama shirt or compression underlayer to bed was anyone’s guess, and anyone’s uncertainty as to whether or not their hypothesis was correct when all wandering eyes and backs were avertedly turned.

He did not speak, but merely made an assortment of agreeable noises. That’s all that speech is, when nothing of import is being said.

They ate something for breakfast. They wrote something in the accounts. They looked somewhere over the fields. They read something out of books. They played some kind of game. They wrote something else in the accounts, and reconciled the nonexistent bottom line. They ate something for lunch, or they didn’t. Their clothes were the same as they’d been the day before. Their preferences never changed.

Flora was sweet, so she preferred her confections sour. Addam was solid and stylishly adorned, so he preferred his preferences simple and meaningful.

A woman likes salad. A man likes…not meat, but bread. Potatoes, small, their every movement. Tomatoes, barbed, their same import crop every damned time.

Nothing happened. Nothing needed to. Time passed, but no one knew why.

Mythra was similarly plastic-fantastic. But she was not on the surface as she was deeper within. And that, for the Origos, spelled trouble.