The Inkwell of Loneliness — Flora Jardine
Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong. I was named Eva “after the first woman,” according to my mother. It has always seemed an odd choice, considering what happened to Eve, and considering what she’s been blamed for.
I think about this while I await the plane. I am travelling to escape, and I de-part in parts and pieces. This trip diary begins as a double-pieced journal about the traumatic events which led to my flight. It will be addressed as a letter to two readers: “To Petra and Maggie, love from Eva.”
If I hadn’t been named Eva, maybe Sam wouldn’t have conceived an irrational underground rivalry between himself and me, that weird competition of which I’d only gradually become aware. How could I have foreseen it, when he became my PhD adviser?
***
It was her friend Petra who first suggested that Eva should go on holiday. “You need to get away from S/he who shouldn’t have been obeyed,” she had said, referring to Eva’s thesis supervisor Sam. Sam too was a traveller — between genders. When Eva first met Sam she wasn’t sure, (Samuel? Samantha?) but soon realized that he had started female, and in some ways remained female despite the deep voice, sinuous muscles and mannish swagger. That foundational “Eve” had become an androgynous Adam.
Eva’s PhD topic was about gender and food. Sam designed it and Eva went along, Sam suggesting, critiquing, “advising.” Ad-vising, from the Latin videre, to see. “You see?” Sam would ask Eva at each advisory session.
“Yes,” Eva replied. She didn’t really see, though. She didn’t see what was really going on with Sam; that only came clear later.
“The Literary Cookbook in a Historical Gender-scape,” was the title Sam suggested for Eva’s thesis.
“No,” said Eva.
“Why not?”
“It sounds ridiculous. What the hell’s a gender-scape?”
“You know what it is.”
“Pretentious drivel.”
“How so?”
“‘-scape’ is a pop-buzz-suffix.”
“And you say I’m pretentious …”
“You know what I mean.”
“Literary analysis examines textual ingredients. It’s rather like devising a cookbook.”
Eva had had the good luck to stumble on an old journal in the University`s special collections, falling apart at the seams, a recipe book by an obscure Edwardian called Mrs. Cross. Mrs. Cross was really Miss Cross: the diary which she kept in the back of her cookbook revealed her to have been a nun who fled, or was evicted from, a convent. Before leaving she had worked in the convent kitchen, and after leaving she presented herself at a wealthy household which had advertised for a cook. She called herself a widow with cookery talent. They took her on for a one-month trial and kept her for thirty years.
“Maybe she became what they call a gem,” said Eva.
“She`s certainly a gem of a PhD topic for you,” said Sam.
Every day Mrs. Cross made filling, unexciting meals for the household, and every night she lit her lamp and rewrote her recipes as complicated dramatic stories, stirring up characters and mixing ingredients into patterns of meaning and conjecture. Eva, reading the manuscript a hundred years after it was written, thought it a masterpiece. Unsurprisingly for a former nun, Mrs. Cross often chose religious themes.
“After being thrown out of paradise, did Eve carry on eating apples?” was her opening sentence.
Eva, being named after Judaeo-Christianity’s First Woman, was enthralled. Did Eve, asked Mrs. Cross in a weirdly modern voice, loathe apples after her eviction, they being the cause of her fall? Or did she eat even more of the luscious fruit, thinking “what the hell—now that we have hell—now that I’ve invented death and pain, what more can happen to me?”
Or maybe, continued Mrs. Cross scribbling by candle-light in her attic room, maybe Eve became anorexic and irrational, thinking that any bite might bring more banishment, might make her fat as in the pregnancy that led to the birth pangs Jehovah had decreed, and the labouring to feed offspring which Adam was now condemned to do.
“She can ask that question, but no one could write an Origin Story today,” Eva had told Sam, showing him the manuscript. “Not one that people would believe in.”
“Why not?”
“We just can’t,” she said. “You just can’t start a religion any more. Only a primitive culture can do it. Humanity has developed to a different stage, for better or for worse.”
“There’s an Eng-Lit thesis in that,” said Sam. “I’ll take you on as your adviser. I’ll tell the Department, you do the application rigmarole.”
“Well, I’m not sure …”
“Of course you are, don’t be daft,” said Sam with finality. Later, Eva understood that Sam had needed her to explain to him the gender he had left and to elucidate why he had done so.
“The cookbook as novel,” said Sam. “Mrs. Cross invented a genre, but it didn’t catch on for a hundred and twenty years. Now it will. You’ll publish an annotated version and it will trigger a spate of imitations. You’ll re-start a genre. Just see if I’m wrong!”
“Well I don’t know, I’m not sure I’m up to that whole annotation thing.”
“Of course you are. Why did you take a degree in English Literature? There’s no use having less than a doctorate.”
“What’s my thesis? My argument?”
“Look at every single word, every single piece of punctuation, and then you’ll know.”
“Sounds laborious.”
“It will be a fascinating journey.” It was a journey into a growing intimacy with Professor Sam, as all the students called him.
Eva thought about Mrs. Cross spending her days in a hot kitchen where everything was done without modern conveniences. She would be invisible to the household whose members would assume that meals constructed themselves and appeared by magic. Mrs. Cross would go to markets, and deal with delivery men, blocked pipes, trugs of earthy vegetables that needed scrubbing and heavy greasy pots: more scrubbing. She would put her feet up for a few minutes after lunch, dozing in the armchair beside the stove, and then she’d work until night. Then she’d go to her room and dip a pen into her inkwell just as she had dipped her ladle into the stew, her work-worn hand now grasping the pen as if she was a pampered lady of letters.
“Now,” Eva told Professor Sam, “her concoctions became stories, her ingredients characters. She stirred up relationships, the plot a recipe which comes to a climax as the reader consumes the meat of the tale …”
“Yes? And?” asked Sam, pushing Eva.
“I don’t know, my metaphor has run down.”
“That’s when your thesis begins.”
“I think she was influenced by Beatrix Potter too. You know, when she added ‘The Tale of Tom Tomato’ and the ‘Plot Pertaining to Peas’. She tended the kitchen garden plots, you see…”
“She loved a pun.”
“Gathered them in her punnet! … And wrote what reads like chapters for children, but not actually for children.”
“Like an epic. Like Viking myths and Arthurian tales.”
“Maybe. The ‘Tale of Walnut’ began with ‘The soil which the walnut trees’ roots pulled their goodness out of, born when glaciers cracked the Earth in a fit of pique before they receded, was a soil of many colours ….’”
“What gets me,” said Sam as they contemplated Mrs. Cross’s manuscript, “is the punctuation. It goes all over the place, a pop-up surprise seemingly without methodology. She uses commas that over-enclose, periods that puncture, that prick the point of the larger meanings.”
Now what was he on about? Eva had never looked at punctuation that way.
It got really interesting when Eva found a folder of dates and seasonal schedules, including the Church year, which was no surprise, and the produce-growing year, showing what ripened when.
“And what’s this one?”
Sam took a look at the page Eva held. “Easy. That’s her menstrual cycle.”
Eva looked again. “Really? How are you so sure?” But looking, Eva too became sure. “Why would she record that?”
“That’s for you to figure out. It’s your thesis.”
“Is it a code for a mystery which the cookbook’s really about? Some tale she couldn’t tell openly?”
“Must have been a real pot-boiler…” Eva groaned. “But seriously, I still say look at the punctuation.”
“Textual criticism rather than biographical clues? Not so interesting, to me.”
“Well, go and moon over her grave then; it’s probably in the churchyard near the big house she worked for. But close text is con-text, and punctuation is text-ure.”
“‘Text’ from the Latin for weaving—yeah yeah I know—and words weave stories like cooking blends ingredients.”
“Now you’re catching on.”
“Whatever.” Eva tried to be insouciant, but she was becoming as obsessed as Sam about Mrs. Cross’s story-diary.
Then she met Conrad. He worked in the building next door on campus, in the Computer Sciences Department, and they shared a cafe in between. Eva hardly understood a word he said about his work. He continually mentioned “algorithms,” but it didn’t prevent them becoming intimate. Conrad was blond with what Eva called Viking Good Looks, which contrasted pleasingly with her own dark colouring. They were both tall, he solid, she slim and willowy. Sam stood half-a-head below them when they bumped into him at the cafe.
“That weedy little guy’s your thesis advisor?” asked Conrad, afterwards.
After spending a day with the recipe-diary, Eva would tell Conrad more about Mrs. Cross. “She uses an odd system of punctuation,” said Eva. “Sam thinks my thesis should focus on that.”
“Is that what you think? I can run it by a stylometrist in the department, if you like.”
“Stylometrist” was a new job category, to Eva. “Thanks,” she said. “Maybe.” But it sounded like cheating. Surely literary analysis shouldn’t be so mechanical, so digital?
“I recommend a semicolon-oscopy,” joked Conrad, looking at the manuscript. “Might flush out this crappy punctuation—haha. What are all these extra symbols? Why does she keep putting periods in the middle of sentences?”
“She wants a full stop when in full flow, when it’s least expected? A full stop like when Eve got thrown out of Eden in the middle of what should have been endless paradise? When a snake grew fat and the garden became full of rot…”
“And they found some really strange weeds to smoke…. You sound like you have, Eva. Maybe your Mrs. Cross put something in the soup before she dipped her pen in the inkwell.”
“She must have been lonely. No family. Stuck down there in a basement kitchen day in and day out. No one to talk to in the evenings except her strange recipe-diary.”
“Still, why the period addiction?”
Sam came up with his own theory, which Eva didn’t much like. Someone else had done a thesis on whether female authors tended to use more or fewer periods when they were having their own.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Eva. “You’re making that up.”
No, she had used interviews, graphs, and algorithms (oh god, notagain, thought Eva), but never finished the thesis. She had a pregnancy scare which distracted her, although it turned out to be a false alarm.
“… and the periods resumed …” Dubious, thought Eva.
“The man she was with took off. Her therapist said her periods had stopped because she was obsessing about finishing her thesis, with all its tables and graphs and theories …”
“So it was sort of a case of suspended gestation? Like kangaroos have?”
“Do they?!” Sam seized his expensive nib pen, dipped it into his ink pot and scribbled a note in his leather-bound booklet.
“So she thought she was pregnant with an actual baby. Maybe she should have used the algorithm method,” said Eva.
Sam glared. “It’s not funny.”
He looked crestfallen and in that moment Eva realized it was Sam who had written the thesis, unfinished, about periods, Sam who had had a pregnancy scare. And later, a whole gender transition. He had put brackets around that first tale, and started a new paragraph. Later still he began a different thesis, which he did finish, on Edwardian fiction. Now Mrs. Cross’s Edwardian era manuscript had turned up, and brought the whole period thing alive again.
Was it the power of suggestion, or that Mrs. Cross`s cookery suddenly became indigestible to Eva? For whatever reason Eva too began obsessing about her thesis.
“I think I’m having a nervous break-down,” she told her friends Petra and Maggie when they met over coffee.
“Of course you’re not,” said Petra. “Your advisor’s having a nervous build-up, and is using you as his stand-in. “
How would you know, wondered Eva.
And then Conrad broke up with Eva. Eva was crushed. Her work suffered. She felt she could no longer dip her pen into Mrs. Cross’s inkwell of loneliness, so she considered taking a leave of absence. Conrad simply disappeared, stopped calling, refusing to answer phone or email messages except once, to say “I’m done. Don’t call again.” So Eva didn’t, and she began to think of taking a trip somewhere hot and sultry away from what was now cold winter, plus loss and loneliness. But what about Sam, her advisor, her partner in academia? Would she be letting him down?
Of course you’re not letting him down, said Petra, when they me for one of their Saturday coffee sessions. You don’t owe him a thing.
Eva, Petra and Maggie had been English undergraduates together. Maggie had moved on to become an impoverished poet who held readings in pubs which Eva and Petra faithfully attended. Maggie was plump, soft and sympathetic. Petra was, as her name suggested, hard as rock, precise and pointed. She went on to get a teaching certificate and now taught in a girls’ school with academic and behavioural standards as high as her own. Petra didn’t have much time for Sam.
“I thought you were supposed to move on to another institution to do a doctorate,” she now said in an accusing tone to Eva.
“I don’t find Sam very simpatico,” said Maggie mildly.
Eva shrugged. “He talked me into doing it here.”
“Is that a reason to take a course of action?” insisted Petra, as if speaking to one of her girls.
“He’s lonely,” said Eva.
“What’s that got to do with it?” asked Petra. “Don’t tell me you feel sorry for him.”
Eva did feel sorry for him, but also spellbound. Why, she couldn’t say. Maybe it was something about their coming across Mrs. Cross together. But why was Petra so interested, and so adamant?
“He’s bad news,” said Petra. “Remember, I had a class with him once, too.”
“I thought you got on well with him. At least, you seemed pretty intense at the time.”
“Hmm.”
“I know what Mrs. Cross was doing,” Eva told Sam at one of their meetings.
“What?”
“She was crossing over, not only from convent to country house, but from nun-hood to paganism.”
“Yeah?”
“You know that menstrual calendar she kept? She was using a sponge of moss to bury her blood in the kitchen garden, giving power-blood back to the soil, making a gift of it to the trees. For her, the god in the Eden story wasn’t the god who threw humanity out of the garden. ‘The Divine’ was Eden itself—Earth—the Mother.”
“Sounds more modern than like something from her time.”
“No. The concept existed back then too, in a certain undercurrent of thought: biology, evolution… Naturalists and transcendentalist ecologists knew about it.”
“But it was partly underground?”
“Literally. It was about the Earth, the soil, the source and recycler of energies.”
“Well, you’ve certainly got lots of material,” said Sam. “I told you it was a good thesis topic. Now I wish I’d kept it for myself. For my own upcoming book.” Sam’s eyes had gone hard, and Eva realized he meant it.
They only ever met in Sam’s office, which with the lights dimmed and the curtains pulled as the winter evenings came on, felt intimate. Sam kept a collection of wines in a cupboard which he opened ritually at six o’clock.
“Cast off the hard glare of afternoon light for the soft gaze of evening,” he’d say, handing Eva a glass. Then they would analyze what they were drinking. Sam talked about wine as about prose, holding both up to the light, testing with tongue and ear. “Spare and crisp,” he’d say of one or the other, or “rich and mellifluous” or “peppered with period-points …” and “highlights of imagery with an undertone of delay… commas at work…”
After the second glass Eva lost track of which thing he was talking about. Soon he waxed philosophical or sociological.
“I hated the periodicity of female life,” he declared. “I longed for torrents of raw life-force. Dionysus, not Apollo. The dark lord, not the nurturing mother.”
“Right,” said Eva noncommittally, feeling this was more than she needed to know. Too intimate. But she understood that Sam needed to talk, that he was lonely. Her role as audience and acolyte began to weigh on her. His conversation was flecked with eroticism, but cerebrally. He lived from the neck up. When these “thesis advising” sessions were over he would abruptly turn on his laptop, waving Eva out. “Now, I must communicate with the Secret Society,” he’d say, sitting at his desk.
“What secret society?”
“Well I can’t say of course, or it wouldn’t be secret.”
Eva decided eventually that he had made up the secret society, whose messages he wrote himself. He sent them from one part of his personality to another, thought Eva. It was so secret that his different selves didn’t even know who was who, except “through a glass darkly.” These writings would become the manuscript of his next book. She began to feel uneasy, not because of anything Sam did, but because he seemed to have a disturbing essence. Maybe the disturbing thing was the woman who still lurked there, the double-self . But of course one couldn’t ask. There was a couch in Sam’s office and Eva wondered whether he slept there, after talking to the “secret society.” Did he have a home life? She knew he had no social life, went to no departmental meetings, about which she had seen peremptory notes from his department head, making her think his job might be in jeopardy. What would Sam do, if he lost his professorial position?
“Not your problem,” said Petra curtly over coffee one Saturday morning. Her expression darkened when the subject of Sam came up.
“But still … the poor fellow …” said Maggie, vaguely.
“I’m not sure I can keep advising you,” Sam suddenly announced. This wasn’t during one of the cozy evening sessions, this was said formally in his office. He had summoned Eva, and now they sat with his desk between them.
“What? Why?”
“I’m too close to the subject,” he said. “It’s my work too.”
“Yours too? But … you told me it was right for me, you persuaded me to pursue it as my own thesis topic …” He interrupted and began blurring the sequence of events, re-telling at length the story of their collaboration.
“But wait,” said Eva, “I found Mrs. Cross—I found the journal in the library.”
“Ah, yes, the physical journal, but I found the author.”
“What do you mean? When?”
“Last night.”
“What do you mean, last night?”
“She finally came to me, fully embodied.”
“You mean, like in a dream?”
“More than a dream. A vision, a reality. It’s as I told the Viking: You, I, and the reborn nun were a threesome. No room for distractions. You’d put your situation in my hands and I knew you wouldn’t want to explain to him yourself, the way things were.”
“I put what situation in your hands?”
“All of it. I was your adviser, remember?”
“You… what?” The fact of his fantasizing was sinking in, but Eva felt dazed. “By the Viking, you mean Conrad? You’re saying you told Conrad there was a threesome, and he was a distraction…”
“Yes, that as your advisor, it was my role… but now I see that the threesome was a premature construction… that it wasn’t you, me and an old nun that were involved here, but only me and the new pagan…”
So Conrad had broken up with her because he thought… oh god, what had Sam done? Eva shook her head angrily, but Sam was continuing. Now he stood up. She noticed that his hair was cut even shorter than usual, and spread like fine fur across his scalp. His cheekbones looked more sculpted under the overhead light in the “hard glare of afternoon.” He was wearing a black suit with a military cut, and looked like a miniature commandant.
“So, I need to take it back,” he was saying. “Thanks for your help. Your research will be acknowledged in the printed book, of course.”
Take back the topic? Take the manuscript? Surely he couldn’t do that. The Department had all the documents going back to her initial proposal, and he wasn’t the only one sitting on her academic team. What was wrong with him? He was ill. (“The creature’s ill”, Eva remembered Petra saying, and she remembered thinking, how would Petra know?)
“Well, let’s take a step back,” said Eva placatingly. “Maybe I should take a leave of absence, and think things over while we…” She didn’t want to work with him any more, but he couldn’t just steal…
“Yes, do that. Take a voyage. Thank you. I knew you’d understand.”
She stood up and left in a daze. She phoned Conrad. He didn’t answer.
She decided finally to visit the grave of her subject. This was something Sam had suggested sarcastically at the beginning of their project. Eva discovered that it lay in a tumbledown graveyard behind a heritage church which stood near the ‘big house’ in which Mrs. Cross had been the cook. The graveyard was on the far side of town, a long drive away. Eva took a couple of wrong turnings. By the time she arrived the light was failing. Would she be able to read the old headstones? She rummaged until she found the flashlight in her glove compartment. Under tall evergreens the churchyard was darkening so she walked slowly, training the beam on each headstone in turn. At first she thought no one was about, but soon soft laughter broke into her concentration. She stopped, thinking she saw a flicker of light behind her. She turned nervously.
Why hadn’t she set out sooner in the day? How annoying to leave now, having come so far, but it was too dark and too uncomfortable to keep searching for a headstone in the shadows. Eva didn’t fear ghosts but she didn’t want to meet contemporaries in this place. Who lurks in a graveyard at night? Drug dealers? But to get back to the gate she would have to pass the place the light seemed to be coming from. She would switch off her own and slink by.
She walked on the grass verge so as not to crunch on gravel, and saw no more light. Had she imagined it? Then the sound of giggling made her jump. Beside her, not five meters away, lay a figure writhing on a grave, arms waving, voice laughing. With an odd experience of simultaneous disbelief and certainty, Eva recognized Sam. Who was he talking to? Was that a movement in the bushes beside him? Yes. Now she saw a figure, which ran, fell, got up and ran again. Too alarmed to scream or speak, Eva froze. So did Sam, still supine on the grave.
“Well, hello Eva,” he said when he saw her, “come to do a bit of grave-robbing?” He laughed again. “You scared off the Secret Society,” he said, giggling.
“I… was that…? Didn’t I see…?” stammered Eva.
Suddenly Sam broke the wine glass he was holding. Still laughing, he stabbed the sharp shard of the stem into his throat. The manic laughter turned to gurgling, and even in the dark Eva could see blood gush over the written pages which littered Sam’s body and Mrs. Cross’s grave. Now she screamed. A light came on in the church and someone ran out.
“Call 911! Call 911!” shrieked Eva, over and over, watching herself become hysterical.
Someone called, and someone else came out of a house nearby bearing blankets. Then over her own panting wail Eva heard the sirens. Abruptly she became silent and still, letting go. The deliverers had come. She picked up the other, unbroken, glass which still held wine, and placed it gently on another grave, out of the path of the ambulance.
***
I depart nervously, in pieces. I am Humpty-dumpty at the airport, still not re-assembled. Petra and Maggie saw me off. I will write separate letters, some for Petra, some for Maggie. Mrs. Cross is with me. Although I’m no longer doing a thesis about her, I write like her. As a traveller, that is, crossing between worlds, escaping a past which is, as has been said, another country.
Maggie, you’re back there in the past, while you Petra are in the future carving out clear brave new paths with your girls. (Thank goddess for them, you would say if you were Ms. Cross.)
***
Dear Maggie,
I did try to help Sam. I know I should have had my eyes open sooner. I know that you in your Earth Mother guise see him as some sort of emotional-shipwreck victim. He’s certainly a wreck. You have no idea how suspicious and mean those cops were when they arrived at the graveyard, thinking I had stabbed him, and not believing that I had only just arrived. They found the other wine glass with my fingerprints on it. They soon found out that I had been Sam’s thesis student and that we had had, in the helpful words of the department secretary, “a falling out.”
I did not tell them who the running figure was, whom I had recognized not by sight but by instinct. Now I knew who Sam had exchanged Secret Society messages with, but how could I explain all that to cops? They would think me insane. Criminally insane. They’d have me locked up. The least said the better, with cops.
***
Dear Petra, my rock,
The thing is, anger saved me. It woke me up, at last. How dare those police accuse me! Thank god you told them what Sam was like, and showed them email exchanges we had had earlier about his behaviour. Of course, before long his colleagues were able to fill in the authorities on his problems. But even for a day, undeserved suspicion is an outrage.
My next thesis will be on the Police State. I kid you not. (Was Eden a police state really, with Jehovah as chief constable? But that’s not at all the way Ms. Cross the pagan nun saw it…) Anyway, I’d rather be an impoverished writer like Maggie than go into academia again. Better to be an obscure scribe like her and Mrs. Cross, living by their pens, living on the food of words. Best of all, is to be anonymous.
***
Dear Maggie, word-sister,
I’m in Mexico now. You would love it here. Lots of poetry in these old rocks that slip desultorily under the Pacific sun and into the warm sea. I snorkel, watching creatures swimming dreamily, exotically coloured, much more interesting in their aqueous medium than we humans are in ours. Don’t get too interested in Sam, Maggie, you’re too nice for him. I know you think he’s lonely in that psych hospital, but you can’t help; he’s lonely in the universe. That’s how s/he is. He’ll purr when you visit, but eventually he’ll tear you to shreds.
You say he’s drugged, that he sleeps all the time. Did you know the word “cemetery” comes from the same root as “dormitory” in ancient Greek? “Sleeping place.” Sam may be sleeping now, but he will wake up. Make sure he doesn’t devour you.
***
I write on two sides of each page, like Mrs. Cross did, one side for the ages, one for the kitchen. One side for dinner and one for imagination. One for Maggie the soft mother, and one for Petra, the rock.
No side for Sam. I can’t even bring myself to send him a “get well soon” card. What could possibly be an appropriate message?
Conrad I did write to, just to tidy things up. Maggie hoped we’d get back together because she always hopes for reconciliation even when there’s no need and no point. Conrad finally answered my letter. He’s with someone else now but even if he wasn’t, for us there’s been too much water under the bridge over the River Strange, maybe just too much literature for a computer guy. (Yeah Maggie, I know… pretentious… But pretence and pretending is our best thing eh? As long as it doesn’t go bad, as with Sam.)
***
Dear Petra,
I want to clear things up with you. I de-part as a friend. I knew right away that night in the cemetery that you were the figure running away from the grave, from the intoxicated and intoxicating presence of Sam. I saw you, although only for an instant in the dark, as clear as day and real as rock. I don’t know what you were doing but I know what Sam’s spell is like. I don’t know how much contempt was in your lust for him, but for me you saw the cops off, and that’s all I need.
Tell that student of yours (the one who’s graduating and loves History and gets straight A’s) about Mrs. Cross. Let her try to make something of recipe-tales by an Earth worshipper, but tell her to be careful of any academic thesis advisor. She and they (they as in a plural not unitary personality) may not see the same things. Tell her to tell the tale for the general book trade, and no, NOT as a YouTube video (“videre”—ha!). Give the old pagan nun some respect, eh? That’s the whole point of a diary. Words, phrases, tellings, prayers, grammar, punctuation… all the sustenance we draw from the deep and ancient well of ink.
Yours always,
Eva.
***
Flora Jardine writes stories, studies nature, walks on beaches and drowns in books on the west coast of Canada. Some of her recent work has appeared in The Writing Disorder, The Literary Yard, Strands Publishers, Popshot Quarterly, Pif Magazine, Short Humour Magazine, and the west coast anthology Wandering Words.