I pulled the kettle from the stove before it boiled to a whistle, and I lurched down to the basement as silently as my creaking bones would allow. That is where my flowers slept, waiting for me. After all, is it not good to spare our loved ones pain? She need not know, my Dinn, I told myself. I must swallow this tea alone in the dark with the eyes in the dusty cabinets watching, I must bury my heart with the shelves of useless alchemical ingredients: Moses wart, bitter grass, blend of inept spirit. I must do this, I repeated to myself, as I often did those lonely months. 

The flowers were dark purple, delicate things. They grew only in ultraviolet light. If I took them out in the sunset or even the stars they would shrivel up and burn to ash. Pulse flowers, they are called. They are the only thing an old man like me is good for. 

With a stone pestle, I ground the flowers into a paste and poured the water thricely onto it. Thricely, yes: that is how it must always be done. First in the shape of a circle, then a square, then a five-sided star. 

I heard knocking upstairs. My poor, determined Dinn; she must have noticed I was gone and had come looking. I wondered if I erred in the brewing of the tea, would she be strong enough to find me in the basement, the charred corpse of an alchemist who had once summoned storm and spirit. 

What small loss that would be, my body, my soul. That is where the old hold advantage over the young. If a young man died performing a great and dangerous ritual, Gods should weep. But I am an old and useless man. 

I sipped and let the convulsions take hold of my body. With each taste my muscles clenched and my veins throbbed in violet exhalations of misery. But I continued with the ritual. If I were to stop halfway through, I would die. It required art and a stubbornness to force the pulse flowers to submit to my will, but of all alchemy, it was one of the few rituals that required no true sacrifice. 

Swallowing the last sip, I bit down on a rag to keep myself from screaming. My whole body clenched in a raw fist of pain, but I knew I mustn’t scream. I had known pain my entire life. That demon would not get the best of me and would not make me cry out. My poor Dinn, I reminded myself, she must not know what I do in the basement.

***

“I can feel myself ending,” Dinn said. She lay on the couch, looking out the window at her flowers that danced colorfully in the wind. 

“You mustn’t say that darling. The doctors said you may have some months yet. Perhaps you may even make a full recovery. We mustn’t give up hope,” I said. 

“Only a moment ago, when you were away, I was so afraid. I tried to find you, but you weren’t there. And I kept thinking, this is it, I’m going to die alone without my Gabriel beside me. But now that you’re by me, all my feelings are gone. I have a stone for a heart.” 

“I’m right here.” 

“But where do you go when you leave me?”

“I only stepped out for a moment. I wasn’t away for long.” 

“I came looking, but I couldn’t find you.”

“I’m only trying to maintain the house, darling. It is still the most comforting place, isn’t it?” 

“It is. We made it so.”

It took many years of living for that house to become a home. I bought it shortly after we married and I became the village alchemist. A good living it was back then, and we were in want of nothing before science replaced my rituals one by one. But the house was as new as we were. It took years to make memories and endow each corner with meaning. I looked at our bookshelf, topped with a photograph from our wedding. Dinn was beautiful, young, and full of promise and life in her white dress, ready to take off and sail the seas with me. Beside the picture was a ship in a bottle, the first gift I had ever given her. 

“Why can’t I feel anything,” Dinn said. 

“It is better than being filled with grief, isn’t it darling?” I felt for both of us. 

She stared at the flowers. “I know they’re beautiful. But they’re not beautiful to me. I’m a stone, dear. A stone.” 

I found myself appreciating the flowers as I never had before. To me, they’d always been an ornament, something that decorated our home but was not essential to it. But now, gazing on them through Dinn’s heart, through the power of the pulse flowers, I could feel the life in them. They were like little children waving in the wind saying, “Look at what I can do!” 

I mustn’t cry, I told myself. Dinn must not know.

“You must only be tired, darling. Perhaps you should sleep?” I said.

“I am not only tired,” she said. “I should feel something. I should be upset at you for not believing in what I’m saying, but I’m only a stone inside. There’s nothing.”

The feeling surprised me. I wanted to say something mean under my breath. I wanted to look away and ignore myself. I wanted to raise my voice and say, shut up, you don’t know anything. But I also felt deeply ashamed. I had always thought my Dinn was impervious to such things, that no matter what happened her heart would remain placid, forgiving. 

I stroked her hair, and the feeling had passed. There was still a current of worry, yes, but any meanness had dissolved into a deep sea. 

Dinn eyed the bottle on the shelf, “I still wish we had gone on our honeymoon.”

“Disastrous luck, those years ago,” I said. We had already booked the cruise for our honeymoon, set to sail to tropical islands, and drink beneath palm trees when I received an offer for my first serious alchemical job. I had to take it. I had to. So we put off our honeymoon until I received payment. 

A small village was dying under a three-year drought. Master Langdon, a former teacher of mine, had pulled out of the job when he learned they could not pay him until after a successful harvest. He said he could guarantee no success to recoup the necessary investment. But I was young, full of blood, and ready to prove myself a greater alchemical prodigy than any of my mentors. 

Poor people—they were thin and dry as husks of wheat. I arrived under the oppressive sun, an unblinking glare in the sky that burned the uncovered skin on the back of my neck in the short time I spent walking from house to house, gathering sacrifices. At each house, I was surprised to find no celebration. Some husbands and wives argued in whispers when I told them what had to be given to break their drought, but by nightfall I had what I needed to perform the ritual. 

I donned my ceremonial black cloak, and began with an incantation and sprinkling of alchemical treasures said to boost the effectiveness of the sacrifice. It was important to convey to them that while the ritual was taking place, I was not the young man they had met merely hours before. I was instead an agent of conversion. I would convert the lives of their livestock into rain. 

One by one they brought me their dire beasts—famished, lean animals that seemed fortunate to be headed to death. First I drew my blade across the throats of the rabbits, then the goats, and finally the cows and bulls. As I finished the final few animals and threw their bodies into a flaming pit that stank of flesh, I felt the first feral drops of rain that the landscape had known for years. I shook with the power. 

By the time the dull, red blood of the last beast joined the rest, it fell not into dust, but into pooling mud as hardened dirt struggled to accept the downpour. Children danced. Mothers and fathers lifted their hands to the sky. 

I left like a victorious warrior of old.  But it is no virtue to accept thanks you do not deserve. And I never would receive payment. No, a three-year drought could not be stopped with the price of a mere two dozen beasts. When the rain ceased that night, it did not come back. And I was not remembered as a hero for my work that day. 

Sometimes I looked back and shuddered at what price the villagers would have had to pay to truly cure their drought. I remembered the hushed stories my masters had told me of villages in the grotesque, ancient years that had drawn lots and sacrificed their children. I should have known, watching those young bodies dance in the mud.

***

“Whenever you come near, I stop feeling,” Dinn said. 

“It must be that my presence is a comfort,” I said. But I could feel the disquiet within her and knew even as the words left my mouth that she would not accept the idea. 

“This is some alchemy, isn’t it? Tell me you’re not doing something dangerous.”

A tangled knot of emotion spun rapidly in my stomach. It was not all anger. It was also concern and love, and things my foolish, old mind had no name for. It felt like a volcano swallowed by the ocean floor. 

“You needn’t worry, darling. I’m simply trying to help in the only way an old alchemist can.”

“What is it you’re doing down in the basement? You know I can hear you. Though my body is dying my ears still hear as well as when we were young.” 

She mustn’t know, I reminded myself. But it was too late. One way or another I would have to tell her. My lips mumbled out the words. “Pulse flowers. I began cultivating them in the basement when you came home from the hospital.” 

“You wouldn’t,” she said.

“I did. You shouldn’t have to carry this burden alone.” 

“But it violates the doctrine. It’s dangerous.”

“Yes, yes. I know. The Doctrine of the Immaterial, as if the clergy understands a thing about alchemy.” 

“But even other alchemists—”

“I know. I know. It has no blood cost so the price must be immaterial. That’s the clergy’s logic. The alchemists of the old books had no fear of losing their souls.”

Dinn sat silently, not even looking at me.

“I am not afraid of the church and their paranoias,” I said. They could charge me with heresy. They could execute me. But I was an old man. Once Dinn passed I would not have a life worth taking. 

“But I’m dying. What if I get there, and you’re not able to join me? I want you by my side, wherever it is that I’m going.” 

Tears came to my eyes, and I drew myself away from her. 

“Are you sure you want to carry this burden on your own? I felt the grief. I know how heavy it is,” I said. 

“Yes. I’m certain. I want to be fully myself when the moment comes. Having you by my side is enough to give me the strength. I don’t want to die with a heart of stone.” 

We sat in the living room, speaking little, as the pulse flowers’ effect waned. Dinn’s emotions left me, and I saw her softly letting tears run down her cheeks. I understood. She needed the depths of her ocean.

By the time the alchemy faded it was nearly dusk. I helped Dinn out to the garden where we could watch the sun go down, as we had done countless times in our life together. “This could be our last chance to watch the sunset,” I said. I wanted to hold onto the moment forever: the blue mountains in the distance, the magenta glow of the horizon waiting to accept that glowing yellow ball, the stream trickling down to the river in golden threads of light. 

“Don’t think about it like that,” Dinn said. 

“When you mentioned how we had to cancel our honeymoon, I felt something. There was a deep current of sadness buried somewhere in your heart. I want you to know I’m sorry I never took you to the tropics like we planned, that we never had our grand adventure.”

“It was an adventure though, wasn’t it? In little ways. Our life was quite enough for me. You have to believe me.” 

The first stars poked through the sky while it was still blue. I went inside to grab the ship in a bottle. “What if this ship takes the voyage for us?” I said and sent it sailing down the stream. 

That night, as Dinn had made me promise, I carried the rest of my pulse flowers up from the basement and set them in the moonlight where they burst into black flames. Their ash caught in the wind and left no trace of the plants that I had once meticulously maintained. 

By then the ship must have sailed to the larger stream, making its way to the ocean. Where it would go from there, nobody knows. 

Mark L. Anderson lives and writes in Spokane, Washington. He co-founded the popular Broken Mic poetry series and has traveled the United States performing at open mics, poetry slams, taverns, coffee shops, and libraries. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Spokane’s poet laureate. His first book, Scarecrow Oracle, was published by Korrektiv Press in 2022.