The Cherry Robbers

by Sarai Walker

It’s long been assumed that I’ve been making some sort of feminist statement by refusing to be interviewed, for being entirely absent from public view, with only my art representing me. Women are raised to be accommodating, so I suppose a woman who draws clear lines that others are not allowed to cross becomes remarkable for that fact alone.

This story is jagged, could cut a deep wound. It isn’t a story I can tell with a thread and a needle, stitching in clean lines. It’s shards or nothing.

Belinda had an intimate connection to her flowers, as a baby does to its mother through an umbilical cord; her flowers fed her life. After a long winter, she came alive at the sight of petals in her garden blooming like lights turned on after months in darkness.

a garden in each room, and each one at the edge of a dark forest.

was afraid of the toxicity of lilies, which she claimed could cause asphyxia if placed in a closed room. For

She’d told us many times that on the day she first stepped into the wedding cake she felt the chill of a house paid for by death. She heard voices.

Since none of us believed her stories, we weren’t afraid that our house was haunted. We were more afraid of Belinda and the power of her imagination; we pitied her, my father and sisters and I. As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t the house that was haunted but Belinda herself. I grew up believing our mother was haunted, and since my sisters and I had each lived inside her for nine months, I wondered if we were haunted too.

Rarely do I see her tethered to earth. As it was, she seemed wasted on us, all that boundless energy and heat locked in the chill of the wedding cake, with marriage the only way out she could imagine.

Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly stressed, she radiated the kind of spaciness that was typical of someone who’d been medicated, staring into the void, then snapping back into conversation.

Belinda didn’t seem to have any vices—didn’t smoke cigarettes or drink coffee or alcohol; she faced every day head-on, defenseless. As a result, she seemed to shrink away from life; as if she were staring into the sun, she couldn’t help but turn away.

I didn’t understand how she could know such things, but I’d felt something was wrong at Grouse Court. Rosalind had warned me about Mother’s dark ideas, but I no longer knew which were mine and which were hers.

But the stories of her life always ended at her wedding day, as fairy tales so often do. Most children can’t imagine their mothers having a life before them, but for my sisters and me, it was the opposite. The wedding day was always the end of her story. We were the epilogue.

And with that, we were finally, actually motherless.

“I want to be an artist,” I said, unexpectedly enjoying this conversation. This was the first time I had ever acknowledged my ambition. Calla’s question pushed me to imagine a different future from the one I always expected to have, and if I could be anything, I would choose to be an artist. I had never seen a painting by a woman artist, not once in my art or Western Civ classes, but I was sure they existed.

“Pain and more pain. That’s a woman’s fate.”

“On our honeymoon, I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I felt like a shadow walking around. I was surprised other people could see me.” “I really don’t want to hear this.” She looked at me with her old fierce intensity. “Who’s left to hear it but you?”

“Women aren’t always believed.” “That’s true.” “It’s easier to say that women like my mother are crazy. Then you don’t have to listen to them. And so maybe in a way she became crazy. Maybe she could communicate only by screaming.”