Syringo/ Syringa by Susan Barsby
My hands are my mother’s, are my grandmother’s hands, gnarled, lined and twisted with time and disorder and work.
Veins run, raised, across the bones and sinew, knuckles slightly pinker than the rest of my pale skin and, in places, age spots colour me in to match the amber in the rings on my fingers.
I see my hands as I sew, mix and knead dough, as I type or scrawl a to do list, as I press buttons on a lift or turn the keys in my front door. I see my grandmother’s hands as she made apple pie, as she ironed creases in my jeans, as she held a book on her lap. Hands that cared for me as they had tried to care for my mother, to restore her. Hands that did less and less as my grandmother’s condition intensified.
She liked that it sounded like a flower. Syringomyelia, close in name to syringa, close enough to reconcile herself to the way it had twisted and stiffened the hands that once tended the garden.
The women had come, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, but always quiet. There was an unspoken agreement, the space was to be respected, expertise was not questioned, mistakes could be made without fear. The overgrowth didn’t phase them. They started small, tentative. Sometimes it was enough to sit in the sunshine and listen to the birdsong, find tiny ants or beetles or woodlice scurrying, hear the thrum of bees’ wings as they shook the pollen of the Japanese anemones that went on a glorious spree. A patchwork garden, in spring the banks covered in the pale creamy yellow of cowslips and later punctuated with clumps of blue-purple lupins – no one knew how they got there – and daisies waving among the grass.
The tree trunk lay where it had fallen, a scar that cut across the space. Itself felled, it felled in return, and the crushed limbs of plants and flowers lay beneath it. My mother, herself broken, dropped to the ground beside it, laying her hands on the ruined and hacked edges of its bark.
I take some lotion and massage it into her skin, using one hand to soothe the other, rubbing between the bones, working loose the stiffness and the pain, pushing the oils and goodness into the sullied covering. Hands are the last to be tended, reserving all the tension from elsewhere, the final release as my fingers pull out the strain and discard it.
Along the back walls of the garden, the lilac climbs, reaching and twisting higher, beckoning us with its scent, to give us a way to the beyond, escape the desecrated space, stretching its tendrils further.
My daughter slips her hand in mine as we walk, her soft skin warm and comforting. Each time she does this I think it may be the last, as she grows and begins to climb her own way.
Susan E Barsby lives in Nottingham with her husband and daughter. By day, she is a senior internal communications executive, caffeine addict and museum giftshop enthusiast, and by night she reads, writes and knits. She was shortlisted for the Blue Pencil First Novel Award in 2018 and has had short fiction published in ‘24 Stories of Hope for Survivors of Grenfell Tower’; ‘It Came From Beneath the Waves’ anthology; and on online fiction websites including Reflex Fiction, Fictive Dream, The Beach Hut, and MIR Online’s ‘Stories in the Time of Covid’ series.
Photo by Jael Coon on Unsplash
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