The Trees and the Frogs

THE TREES AND THE FROGS AND THE SUN ON THE WATER

by M. R. Robinson

(Content note: references to a past house fire)

Before Rosemarie fell in love, she filled every scrap of silence with a song. A harvest tune, sung over the thwick-thwack slap of dough against the countertop; fragments of a lullaby, the melody guiding her needle until even the embroidered birds seemed to sing along; or, sometimes, both parts of a carol, call and response alike, pretending she wasn’t nearly so lonely. 

Then she met Leonora, and she learned to listen for a different kind of music. 

Now, with a loaf taking shape under her hands, Rosemarie works quietly. She pauses to bask in the sounds of her wife at work across the cottage. After nine years married to a poet—ten come midsummer—Rosemarie can translate every noise. The sound of poetry being born makes her feel warm, like a crackling fire on a winter night.

And—it makes her feel nervous, too, in truth. Like watching that fire, waiting for it to leap from the hearth and swallow her up.

No, no. It does no good to dwell on such things. Rosemarie shakes her head, hoping to shake the image of licking flames and blackening thatch. Fire is her friend; fire turns dough to bread and cold to comfort. Yet even that thought can’t dispel the memory of last winter’s disaster—the fire that leapt from Leonora’s lips and almost turned their cottage to ash and stone. The thought distracts her. She doesn’t notice Leonora’s pen has fallen silent until she feels her wife’s hand on her hip, tugging her back to the present.

“I wrote you a sonnet, Rosie. A love poem.”

Rosemarie’s stomach cramps. She stares at the dough for a moment longer, trying and failing to tamp down queasy fear, before she turns to face her wife. “Oh,” she says, then tries again: “I—oh, Nora, you really shouldn’t have.”

“This time will be different. I know it will.”

“You aren’t going to read it aloud, are you?”

“I thought I would try.”

Despite the lines at Leonora’s eyes, they shine with an earnestness that makes her look just like the girl Rosemarie fell in love with ten years ago—so lovely that even Rosemarie, as sharp-tongued as anyone in Little Green, had found herself wordless the day they’d met. 

And, though she’s had ten years to find her tongue, Rosemarie has never learned how to say no to Leonora.

“Well,” Rosemarie says. She takes Leonora’s face in her hands, leaving floury thumbprints on brown skin. “Let’s go outside, then. We’d best not take any chances.”

They walk past the corner of the garden. When Leonora pauses, Rosemarie pulls her on until they stand closer to the treeline of the Whistlewood than the cottage.

“Ready?” Leonora asks.

“Ready,” Rosemarie lies.

Leonora unfolds her page. Despite her misgivings, Rosemarie’s heart clenches at the sight. She loves Leonora’s poetry. She always has. She can’t let a bit of misfired magic ruin that.

“I love you like the darkness loves the stars,” Leonora begins. “With wordless wildness, with—”

A thunderclap splits the sky in two. Rosemarie claps one hand over her wife’s mouth, but not before the flowers at their feet begin to howl like wolves.

•••

There’s no such thing as poetry without magic. No such thing as magic without poetry. Even the littlest child chanting couplets to make a kite fly higher knows as much. But some poems—some poets—hold more magic than others. Long before Rosemarie first glimpsed Leonora at the harvest festival, she knew her by her reputation: the finest spellscribe born in the parish for a hundred years.

Some poets built bridges; others cured the sick. But Leonora wrote about gentleness—green things—growing things. Early in their courtship, they would walk the Whistlewood for hours as Leonora recited verses, speaking blooms into being or summoning birds to the branches. She would slow a stream so Rosemarie might cross without wetting her boots, or pull the sun from behind a cloud, or redden any apple that caught Rosemarie’s eye. 

And with every rhyme from Leonora’s lips, Rosemarie—who had never thought much of poets—fell deeper into a love like drowning.

“Do you ever write poems about people?” she asked once, made brave by damson wine and Leonora’s mouth on her throat for the first time. 

“People?”

“Pretty girls, say. You know—rosy cheeks and heaving bosoms.”

At that, Leonora’s face turned darker than the wine, and Rosemarie laughed and kissed her. She didn’t care about love poems back then, not with Leonora underneath her. 

Four days later, Leonora showed up at Rosemarie’s door. She managed to get out three lines before an ink-black cloud formed above the cottage and lodged there for a fortnight. 

•••

Eventually, the sky above the Whistlewood brightens and the grass stops screaming. Leonora doesn’t say a word as she tears the sheet of paper to pieces. Rosemarie can’t look her in the eyes.

“Maybe next time,” Rosemarie says after a minute, her voice clipped.

Leonora makes a choked sound and turns her back to the trees. They walk home in silence. More than once, Rosemarie starts to reach for Leonora, then thinks better of it. 

Magic is dangerous, Rosemarie knows. Poems misfire all the time, even in the mouths of the most skilled poets. Even poems written by the finest spellscribe born in the parish for a hundred years. One sour rhyme, and anything might happen. 

She knows this.

And yet.

The raincloud at the start of their courtship. The blight that blackened Rosemarie’s garden two years into their marriage. The lightning strike that killed her favourite pine. The fire. Only Leonora’s love poems ever break the world.

The day before the fire, Rosemarie had lounged at Leonora’s side while her wife read an ode to an oak that made it shiver. Later, they’d traded handfuls of blackberries ripened by a stanza as sweet as the juice on their tongues. Every line did what it ought to do, because Leonora’s poems always worked, didn’t they? Always—except the poems about Rosemarie.

And oh, what is Rosemarie supposed to make of that? After the fire, she’d cried and cried. It has nothing to do with how I love you, Leonora had said, crying just as hard. But how could Rosemarie not doubt? How could she not worry, with soot on her cheeks and their bed smouldering? So many years she’d told herself she didn’t care. The fire burnt her defenses down to the ashes. 

Nine years married, and not once has she glimpsed herself in Leonora’s verses. Nine years, and some part of her still wonders if she will always be the one who loves Leonora more—if she will always be that dolt from the harvest festival, rough gardener’s hands clasped behind her back, scrambling for words worth speaking to the prettiest girl she’d ever seen. 

It is a foolish thought. Rosemarie feels twice the fool for thinking it. 

•••

At the dinner table, Leonora picks at a piece of bread, then excuses herself. Rosemarie lingers as long as she can. Only when the last candle has burnt to a sputtering stub does she pinch the wick and join Leonora in bed.

After what seems an eternity in the darkness—a minute, maybe two—Rosemarie touches Leonora’s arm. 

Not for the first time, Rosemarie feels keenly aware of the roughness of her fingertips against her wife’s skin. They are so different. Leonora is as tall and slender as Rosemarie is short and stout, as gentle as Rosemarie is not. More confident in her quiet way than Rosemarie has ever been. When they were younger, Rosemarie loved the differences between them: the ease with which she swept Leonora over the threshold, the way Leonora curled against her side like she knew Rosemarie would keep her safe. All her life, Rosemarie had looked at the earth and seen work waiting to be done; Leonora taught her how to find beauty there instead.

But they are older now, and sometimes Rosemarie wishes they were not so different. Oh, she would not change a thing about Leonora, but she would remake herself as a braver woman, a wiser woman, a woman who did not fret over love poems. Once upon a time, she’d been silly enough to think everything would be easier with age. Nothing is easier, though. Only—changed. 

“I don’t need a poem,” she says. “I know you love me.”

Leonora doesn’t answer right away. Rosemarie levers herself onto her side to drape an arm over Leonora, hand on her belly. 

“I do love you,” Leonora says then, like she can hear the worries Rosemarie hasn’t voiced. “Of course I do. I don’t understand what’s wrong with the magic.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rosemarie says, which is simpler than speaking the truth. 

“I could write a thousand poems about trees and frogs. But I can’t write a poem for you. I don’t understand.” Leonora inhales in the way Rosemarie knows means she’s trying not to cry. “I love you so much. I love you more than trees and frogs and the sun on the water.”

Rosemarie gnaws on the inside of her cheek for a moment, considering. “It’s me, then. I’m what’s wrong, somehow.”

“No. No, Rosie, it isn’t that. I’ll figure it out. I promise.”

She laces their fingers together and guides Rosemarie’s hand to the hem of her nightgown. If she means it as a distraction, it is a good one. Before Rosemarie can say anything else about love or fear or doubt or want, Leonora’s breath hitches. Rosemarie holds her own breath as long as she can, all the better to listen.

But when she falls asleep, she dreams of fire.

•••

Rosemarie wakes before dawn and finds Leonora already gone. She lies alone in the dark for a time, knotting her fingers in the sheets where Leonora had been, then rises to light the hearth. Distracted by the quiet of the cottage, she almost forgets to fear the first spark.

She knows better than to worry. It took her a long time to learn this lesson, in truth, but Rosemarie understands now that Leonora needs space to think when she’s upset—not a morning spent jabbering away over a cup of tea. So, she fills the silence as best she can. Hums a tune that trails off to nothing. Lets the cupboard door slam without catching it. Puts the dishes up with a clatter so fearsome she makes herself flinch.

Nothing works. Rosemarie is so used to listening for Leonora’s pen that its absence seems unbearably loud. After Rosemarie has swept every inch of the cottage twice, she looks at the desk beneath the window. Surely, surely she has waited long enough! She opens the door to brush cobwebs across the threshold, hoping only to see Leonora coming down the road.

She does not.

Rosemarie drops the broom and takes two halting steps onto the path—no longer dust and dirt but a carpet of wildflowers. The flowers stir with a breeze that tugs at Rosemarie’s hair as if to say follow me, follow me!

And, oh, Rosemarie has never learned how to say no to Leonora.

She follows the flower-path all the way to the edge of the Whistlewood. More than once, the breeze blows harder—hurry, hurry!—and Rosemarie can hear Leonora’s spellwork in the air, all sweet words and slant rhymes. But she doesn’t need the path; she knows where she’s going. Rosemarie lets the blooms guide her to the clearing where she’d asked Leonora to marry her ten springtimes ago.

“I thought you’d never come,” Leonora says when Rosemarie steps into the grove, her smile lovelier than any flower Rosemarie has ever seen. “Too subtle a spell?”

“Oh, aye.” Rosemarie sits at Leonora’s side and, giving her knee a squeeze, points at the stack of papers in front of her. “It must have taken quite the poem.”

“Ten years of poems, in fact.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing? Reading through old poems?”

“Yes.” Leonora reaches for Rosemarie’s hand. “I figured it out.”

“You figured—?”

“The love poems,” Leonora says. “I figured out why they aren’t working. There’s too much magic in them. I know this sounds silly, but—well, I love you too much. More than any one poem can hold. And the truth is, those poems are all wrong anyhow, aren’t they? They’re no good, not when I’ve already written you a thousand better ones without meaning to. The trees and the frogs and the sun on the water—oh, Rosie, it’s all been for you.”

Rosemarie opens her mouth and finds her throat thick. “Oh,” she manages.

Leonora reaches for the top page. “The first poem I wrote after I moved into the cottage. An ode to the bluebells you brought me. Do you remember?”

Rosemarie doesn’t need to see the page to remember the poem, or to remember the sight of Leonora with bluebells in her curls. “I do.”

Leonora turns to the next. “And this one. Older, from when we were courting. The dragonfly in the spiderweb.” She laughs. “Do you remember when I read it to you? I wanted you to think I was so serious.”

She passes the pages to Rosemarie, one after another. Rosemarie recognizes every image they describe. The moths that danced alongside spellwork lanterns on their wedding day. A basket of sloeberries—blue-black stains on crisp white sheets—the smell of rain through the window. A plum cradled between brown hands that, for the first time, Rosemarie understands as her own. Two vines growing together. A beech tree with a songbird sheltered safely in its branches. The trees and the frogs and the sun on the water.

As Leonora sets down the last love poem that is not a love poem, the trees themselves exhale—as if they too have been listening in, left as dazed as Rosemarie by ten years of poetry and magic. The wildflowers tremble and fade.

“It’s all been for you,” Leonora says again. “Every word.”

Rosemarie is not a poet. She has no skill with words. But she knows how to make things. She knows how to turn soil to wheat and wheat to bread. And she knows how to make the finest spellscribe born in the parish a hundred years go as speechless as a stone. “Come here,” she says, and before Leonora can answer, they are tangled together in the grass—Rosemarie’s hands in her hair, Rosemarie’s lips on hers, midmorning sunlight dancing across their skin.

Before Rosemarie fell in love, she filled her days with music and told herself she was not lonely. But oh, in all her life, she has never heard a song as sweet as this: the birds in the trees, the wind in the branches, Leonora’s laughter, every word, always.

M. R. ROBINSON is a scholar of early modern literature and a writer of speculative fiction. A graduate of Viable Paradise, her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Small Wonders, and Haven Spec, among other publications. When not writing or teaching, MR and her wife are very slowly restoring a crumbly old house, which they share with two dogs and far too many books. You can find her online at www.m-r-robinson.com or on social media as @mruthrobinson.

The Trees and the Frogs and the Sun on the Water was edited by Lois Chan. It can be found in Tales & Feathers Volume 4.