Bronwerdd
Imogen Rhia Herrad

I think I may have made a mistake.
She is looking at me oddly, and she has been asking me some strange questions.
Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't done it, I can see that; but there's not much I can do now.
She's gone out. I don't know where she is. The house is chilly and silent.
I don't think I knew what I was doing at the time and I wouldn't ever have thought that it would come off. I think I must have been a bit drunk, on the wine and the summer heat and the moon.
I'd been longing for a companion. Well, not longing. Wishing. I think the move had unsettled me, and the new job. Being made head chef, just like that, when I'd never expected it. In that big old castle too - somebody told me the foundations went right back to the Middle Ages. And the cellars. The wine cellar.
That's what started it, those old bottles of wine. I know wine couldn't really be that old, but I wonder about those dusty bottles we found right at the back. When I went home that night I took one of them with me, just to taste.
Perhaps there was something in it besides wine, something that came out when I opened it, something that came over me.
I've never felt as strange as I did after that first glass.
I'd been in the kitchen all day long, with the heat and the steam and all the smells of herbs and vegetables cooking; and I had just one glass before going home. All night long I dreamt, of juicy leaves and succulent greens, so many shades of green. The piercing smell of rosemary, the sweet stinging scent of lavender, and above all the dark, green fragrance of spinach.
I woke up with spinach on my brain. I woke up and saw green. I could not get spinach out of my mind.
I was like this for a week. Obsessed. Its iron taste on my tongue, its bitter scent in my nostrils.
I fell in love with spinach.
It was perhaps in the nature of this love that it was unrequited, but I could not accept that. There must be something, I thought, something I can do.
I wanted consummation, not consumption.
I dreamt again that night, and when I woke up, with the moon shining right into my eyes, so bright I that for a moment I thought it was the sun and time to get up, I had an idea. I got up and went down into the kitchen like a sleepwalker - but I was wide awake - and I got that bottle of wine out, which wasn't maybe such a good idea.
There was spinach growing in the vegetable garden. I pulled up a lot of that, and a couple of lettuces for lightness and strawberries for sweetness.
I made myself a fair maiden, out of vegetables and fruit, not flowers. I made a spinach woman to be my friend and my companion and my only love.
I gave her wine for blood and lemon juice for zest. Lavender for longing, sage for wisdom and also bitterness. Cinnamon and ginger and saffron for dreams and mystery, olive oil for depth, and a pinch of salt because without salt life would have no taste.
I gave her rose petals for lips and black cherries for her eyes; and I named her Bronwerdd, because her skin when she came alive in the moonlight was as green as grass, as green as spinach, and she was beautiful beyond my dreams.
For many weeks I was happy. I wanted nothing more than her tender fingers, her tendril fingers, curled round mine; the taste of her green green skin, her rose petal mouth, on my lips.
I was content.
But now things have changed. She has changed.
She does not like me eating vegetables; she calls me a cannibal. She has taken to reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. I have not dared tell her that I am a chef in a vegetarian restaurant. She insists that I keep a non-vegetable diet. When I tried to explain that I am a vegetarian because I do not like eating living things, she went dark green with anger and said, 'Are plants no living things then? I'm alive, aren't I?'
I have thought it better, for the time being at least, to eat eggs and cheese when I'm in the house and have all other meals at work.
The country frightens her, because although there is a lot of plant life there, she is afraid of the sheep and the cows and refuses to come hill walking with me.
'Come on,' I said the first time we went. 'They're not going to eat you, are they?'
I wasn't thinking.
She gives me odd looks, and she spends a lot of time sitting in the garden, sifting soil through her fingers and toes.
A couple of weeks ago she got drunk on plant food and refused to come in for the night.
She is giving me powders to take with a glass of water every day. They are to grow me out of my cannibalistic habits, she says. She has made them out of minerals and ground stones. They taste very strange.
I have begun to feel funny, these last few days.
The day before yesterday I caught her kissing the rosemary bush.
She pretended she had only been smelling it, turned away immediately and started to talk about the weather. She said she was hoping for rain; it had been dry for so long and she was drooping.
At work, I made a huge bowl of leaf salad and ate it all.
I felt very sick afterwards.
I looked positively green in the mirror.
Maybe I have made a mistake. Perhaps we are not suited.
But then I think of her eyes and her rose red lips and the sweet, bitter taste of her skin, and everything else melts away.
When I came home yesterday there was the scent of rosemary all over her.
She had a glass of plant food on the rocks in her hand, and offered me one too.
'No, thank you,' I said. 'I don't think it would do me much good.'
'Are you sure?' she asked, watching me. 'Do you think it would it poison you?'
'Probably.'.
She wanted to know how what dosage might kill me.
'That glassfull might do it,' I said, pouring myself a glass of white wine. She has only got to the letter R in the Encyclopedia Britannica and hasn't found out yet that whisky is a vegetable product.
I have been home from work for over two hours now. I have just taken the last of her powders, and it is making me feel most peculiar.
The wine tastes odd, too.
She has gone out. I don't know where she is. The house is chilly and silent without her.
There is a patch of newly dug, dark, moist soil in the garden. The air is filled with the heady scent of fresh earth. I am feeling very tired; my feet are sore and dry. It strikes me that this cool, damp soil would feel wonderful against my skin. So I take off my shoes and dig my feet into the ground.
This is heaven.
I had no idea the earth felt so good.
So like home.

First published in "The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers" 2002. © Imogen Rhia Herrad 2002

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