Sugar in the Garden

I used to think Mother and Father used religion like a shield. When we went to mass and I sat through excruciatingly long homilies and was warned against sprinkling my garden with sugar because it would bring about the sugar gliders and God would no longer see me as worthy of ascending after death, I though they were telling me a story, to warn me. Fairy tales are warnings, I reasoned. But in the end Red Riding Hood escaped the wolf and her grandmother was saved. That is a single version of it, but I believed it. Because I wanted to.

Which was how religion worked, I thought.

I wasn’t to speak to sugar gliders. I was not to posture about whether or not they belonged in heaven or hell because they were unlike any creature on earth and therefore belonged in no place that had been concocted by a mind on earth. Even purgatory didn’t seem the place for them. Consider fairies: angels, not good enough for heaven, cast out. Sugar gliders knew nothing of heaven or of being cast out. There was nothignt o cast them out of. They appeared and disappeared, riddled with brevity as mayflies.

I knew sugar gliders- no, I knew of them. They sometimes peaked at me from behind the wall of wisteria in our front garden, though there was nothing about me that could hold their attentions for more than a few moments. Attentions as fleeting as mayflies too, Mother used to say. I saw them on the street when it was too cold too early and the winter struck them down mid-flight. There was an awful winter in which we could not drive down the street without the car rattling, bumping over each sugar gliders’ body. I’d thought they were beautiful, covered in new frost. But when I’d seen enough of them, their beauty became invisible. Wonders get tiring very quickly.

One of our neighbours did sprinkle his garden with sugar. It glittered like snow atop the hydrangeas and grass and morning glories. Butterflies rested before the sugar gliders came. There were two of them, when they did, and my neighbour looked pleased, pleased and proud as though he had drawn them there himself. The sugar gliders ran long fingers along the tops of leaves and the thorn-less parts of vines and licked the sugar off their fingertips. After, they lay down in the grass and ran their tongues along the grass blades. There were many of them that summer in our neighbourhood because someone had decided to sell lemonade and orange juice on the street perpendicular to ours. They were spilling sugar daily, handing out 25 cent cups to anyone that came by. Until their mother told them not to sell to sugar gliders, and then had to explain who they were. She tried to point them all out but sguar gliders grow rapidly, and it was a lot of work to be able to recognize both child and adult sugar gliders.

I rode my bike in the park every afternoon that summer, trying to rid myself of the wobble in my wheel. It was possible less a fault of the wheel and more a fault of my own. Balance required speed and speed required confidence. Atop a bike I was skittish, and I could hardly keep my wits about me enough to stop when someone did enter my path. I rode under the horse chestnut tree, tried to avoid the spiky green shells, and barely avoided hitting the sugar glider.

“Oh. Are you alright?” the sugar glider asked, looking down at me. I was doubled over, my legs on either side of the small bicycle, feet on the ground, waiting for the ground to feel as though it had stopped moving. I had nearly hit the sugar glider, though she didn’t seem to mind. She had a face like a sunset, which was to say a face that blazed and made you feel as though she were already leaving. I quickly did a mental inventory of my person, but I’d left my sweets (I’d bought a packet of sugary gum against Mother’s wishes the day before) at home.

“I’m fine,” I said, wishing she would look the other way. Sugar sliders were never disgraceful. They moved with the ease and certainty and balletic glide of huge cats. I knew because I’d watched them often. Mother said that the youth these days were going to waste away watching either television or sugar gliders. I could not see how she and Father couldn’t see the way sugar gliders were beautiful. “I’m sorry I almost hit you.”

“Don’t be.” She sounded like she was smiling, or chewing. Maybe she was chewing a horse chestnut. But no- they were too busy for sugar gliders. She folded her hands in front of herself; I saw them because I was still looking down. There was delicate, diaphanous webbing between her fingers, the same pale shade as her fingernails. “You didn’t actually hit me. What do you think would have happened if you had?”

She sounded amused. Like she had looked at me once and already knew the answer.

“You’re fragile,” I said, because it didn’t occur to me that she might be insulted. I saw those pale hands twitch. “Frost kills you. Cars kill you.”

“And neither of those would kill you?” she said. “Or not in the same measure?”

I frowned. I could be brave enough to contradict her if I was not looking at her face. “Winter kills your kind. If I touch you, I could kill you.”

The sugar glider laughed. It was less delicate than I thought it would be. A jackal’s cry and a small explosion that rippled through the air. It drew my eyes; I saw her throw her head back. Her hair was the muted colour of wheat. It was wild and unbrushed, curling between her shoulders and around her arms. “How do you think you would accomplish that?” she asked.

I looked up at her bright face. She might look older than me, as any sugar glider over a day old did, but I was older, I reminded myself. By years. I tried to summon those years into my voice when I replied. “My touch could tame you. What will you do when you don’t know anymore how to hunt? How to feed yourself?”

Her mouth half-curved, gravity and lingering bemusement warring in her face. Her sunset expression darkened. She was leaving already. “That is always a very real risk,” she said. “But if it were so dire and easy as all that, do you think sugar gliders would walk around the street so easily?”

I was frustrated, by the answer to her question, by raising more questions for me than I had answers to. Sugar gliders were tricky things, I decided then. Mother would have been pleased that I’d learned it, finally. Even if I didn’t learn it in a church.

The sugar glider was distracted, already. She walked away, toward a group of sugar gliders opening a packet of hard caramels on the baseball diamond. I wheeled my bike home and blamed my skinned knee on my wobbly wheel.

At the beginning of high school, academics and the church tried to teach me the importance of silence. It was not forbidden to speak to sugar gliders, but God didn’t like it, the pastor didn’t like it, and my teachers didn’t like it, nevermind that it was the hottest summer for years and over-heated sugar gliders were dying on the green outside, plastering themselves all over school property. A group of seniors dragged away a dead sugar glider, pulling her by her hair. She must not have weighed much. I knew nothing about the weight of them, but she slid along the grass easily as they turned toward the field in the back.

Sugar gliders were not allowed in churches. Mother and Father impressed upon me that it was not safe for them either; they were clearly trying to appeal to my empathy. Mother had wanted an empathetic child and did not realize how well her plans were working until I asked her one day for a spoonful of sugar for the starving sugar glider outside. Empathy can be a sin, now, she might as well have said for the long lecture she gave me before confiscating my empty spoon and closing the front door to the sugar glider.

Mass occurred twice a week, and with the installation of crews the regularly clean dead sugar gliders from the pavement, I saw fewer and fewer of them. I proposed bringing one into church and tried to explain what the sugar glider had told me a few years before. “They’re not that fragile,” I told Mother. “The church won’t hurt them that much.”

“It absolutely will,” Mother said. “You don’t want that kind of pain on your conscience, do you?”

“No,” I said. Then, because she hadn’t actually explained why the church could possibly hurt a sugar glider, I went to Sister Agatha. She told me that church was safe only for those with souls, though that didn’t mean, of course, that I had to fear sugar gliders. Or I would never step out of my door otherwise.

“So they don’t have souls?” I said. “Not like us.”

“We don’t have souls either,” she pointed out. “We are souls. We have bodies. Now do you understand the difference between sugar gliders and yourself?” There was a scorched quality to her expression, as though she wished I hadn’t come to her with this line of questioning.

“So they can’t go to heaven?” I said. It was unfortunate, I thought, that they should have nowhere to spend eternity. They lived so few days, and now had no other days to spend, in any state, in any place.

Sister Agatha’s arched brows arched higher. The mouth beneath them twisted and thin. “With what? There is no soul, and God only chooses good souls to ascend to heaven anyway. If they had souls, do you know what they would be?”

Sinners was probably the answer she was looking for. I pretended I did not know and Sister Agatha pretended she was too busy to answer questions and asked me if my parents expected me home for dinner?

When Sister Agatha was busy, I tried to coax one of the sugar gliders into the church with me. She didn’t seem afraid, not the way I expected, but perhaps fear only existed in those with souls. I pulled her along by her hand. It was the first time I’d touched a sugar glider, and their hands felt very much like ordinary hands. Maybe a little softer, for not falling down or lifting heavy objects. The webbing between her fingers felt like I was pushing at cloth. Her hands were small; I’d chosen a sugar glider only a few hours old. She was already almost as tall as me, but she smiled a kitten smile. A budding spring smile. I squeezed the bones in her hand; they were thin as toothpicks, strong as iron rods.

“Why the church?” she asked. Her eyes were very wide, very alive, very oceanic. She was like one of those Russian dolls that opened up over and over again until they were too small to open, but in reverse. I felt I could open her up as much as I wanted and find only more layers, and if I backtracked she would be as impenetrable as a fortress.

“I want to see what God thinks of you,” I said.

She shook her head. Her hair flapped around her like wings. “He won’t think much,” she said. “It’s a He isn’t it?”

I nodded and pulled her inside, right up to the knave. When the sugar glider didn’t take her hand out of mine right away, I remembered what Mother had said about taming them. Taming them didn’t seem as awful though when you considered they only lived a few days at the most.

“I thought this would hurt,” the sugar glider said.

“Why?”

“They told me it would.” She looked at the pews. “What are the seats for? Without tables?”

“We pray here,” I said, and sat down and plucked a volume of songs from in front of me to show her. “For mass. Or when we need to.”

“I could never simply sit that long,” she said. She sounded confused, and lacing that was admiration.

I wanted to show her what praying looked like, so she would understand that it was not as incredible as she might have thought it was. Instead I put the book back and closed my hand. I could not tell if I was feeling my fingertips in my palm or my palm with my fingertips. Only that my hand was colder than the sugar glider’s.

There were a few harsh winters and short summers after that. Sugar gliders died all over the streets, frozen solid in snowdrifts, blocking traffic, leaning against street signs and rubbish bins and cars. In the summer they were ravenous, and desperate to get their population back up. There were few of them, then, suddenly, hundreds. All over the place. There were new names for them, too. But I didn’t say them and pretended not to hear them.

Because Mother hated when I used the word whore.

Without Mother and Father around, breaking their rules was easy. There was only one rule I didn’t break and, in fact, if I hadn’t gone to mass, I wouldn’t have seen her. She was just outside the church, looking at the sky. It was cornflower, stretched over the top of a yellow-leafed tree. It was just the edge of summer, with spring still lingering, and the yellow tree looked out of place. Ridiculously bright and buttery, insincere. It was still a little cold for sugar gliders, but she was there, sucking on a jawbreaker that stained her lips green.

She looked a little lonely. She was the only sugar glider visible across the green and she would probably be dead before she found another. She was perched on top of a bollard, hands curled around her knees, ocean eyes damp and wide. Sugar gliders were rarely this close to a church, and the church-goers went around her as though she spat sparks.

When they had all left and the pastor was back inside, invisible from the doorway, I went to the sugar glider. I had walked past several dead ones the other day in an alley. They tended not to get cleared away unless they were blocking major throughways for pedestrians or vehicles. I tried to gauge her age from her face. She looked a bit older than me, so she’d probably been around a day and a bit.

I stopped in front of the bollard. She looked at me and her green mouth was curious.

It was hard to be brave, face to face. So I looked at the green stain.

“You’re alone,” I said.

“So are you,” she said.

I remembered the first sugar glider I’d touched. I’d pulled her into a church. And here was another, just outside of one. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

She nodded. So we went to get food. The grocery store was a few blocks away, and she looked like the wind blew right through her, but she didn’t want my coat. I realized that I was supposed to be seeing my professor for History to the 16^th Century about my thesis outline. Instead I bought a bag of sugar and we went outside to look for grass.

“What was that you came out of?” she asked me. “Just now. Before you came up to me?”

I looked at her over the top of the sugar bag. “Mass? In the church? It’s something the pastor leads. I go to it twice a week, usually.”

She lifted her hands and looked at them as though they were the concerning thing. “But why? What do you get out of it?”

“I go to pray,” I said. “So I won’t get sent to hell before I die.” I realized that even if I explained hell to her, she might not understand it. Sugar gliders only had a few days to commit sin, if it were possible to get them sent to hell. There was so much more time for the rest of us.

“That’s what you’re doing with all of this?” The corner of her mouth twitched, like she was amused. She was not trying to hide it. It prickled me, strongly, like stinging nettle. I wanted to rub my skin where she was looking at me. “Just praying to try and take care of yourself when you die?”

“What do you mean all of this?” I asked her.

She made a small flourish with her hands at the sky and the street and the grass, then sat down in the middle of it. Her gaze bounced onto the bag of sugar, then away. “All of this. What if the point of the rest of it? School and everything you all do?”

“To learn. To grow.”

“Are you grown yet, then?” She pulled apart the seal on the bag, licked her finger, and dipped it into the bag.

“Grown for us means dead,” I said. “At least, when we’re done growing.”

“And then what?” She tipped the bag over and sprinkled it in the grass, then sprawled on her belly. Her long legs tangled with one another. They were bare where they emerged from the hem of her dress. It was not warm enough for that kind of skirt yet. “You go to heaven?”

“Hopefully,” I said. So she did know a little about religion. Did she care that she didn’t have a soul, I wanted to ask. Did she even know? “That’s my plan post-mortem. What about you?”

“Oh, I don’t plan.” She shrugged and licked at a blade of grass. Sugar glittered on her tongue for the long moment it took her to pull it back into her mouth. “That’s ages away. Have some.”

I should not have laid down next to her, but the grass was cool and it sparkled with sugar instead of frost. The dirt was hard and cold, but she was warm and soft. She got older as she licked the sugar off the blades under her. She got older as she kissed my mouth. Then it was harder to forget she would be dead soon.

She refused to go to church with me the next day for mass, but we went in before, when the pastor was still driving to the church. She looked as unperturbed as the first sugar glider I’d brought into a church. She didn’t burn without a soul. She just looked at the candles at the altar and asked what happened when one was lit. She looked unimpressed when I told her that nothing happened.

“So if I believe in Him,” she said, “I would have to decide between heaven and hell by doing something good or something bad.”

“By being good or being sinful,” I said, but these were not easy concepts for her grasp. I didn’t tell her that she was thinking of religion the wrong way, either. “If it doesn’t happen, what do you think does happen when you die?”

“You stay dead,” she said. “And you don’t have to go to hell.”

“Or heaven. Aren’t you afraid?”

She put one of her fingers on my cheek and pressed until I opened my mouth. But she didn’t kiss me, just stood next to me and wrapped her webbed hand around my fingers. “We should go,” she said. “If the church is making you cry.”

Mother did call, a few days later, when the sugar glider was dead. She asked if I’d been to mass. She asked what I’d been up to. I didn’t tell her that I’d had to take a dead sugar glider out of my room the day before, into the main street where she would be cleaned up and taken away. I still had half a bag of sugar in my cupboard that the sugar glider hadn’t eaten. She’d gotten older until she hadn’t been able to anymore and if she had a souls he would have gone to heaven. I’d been with her most of her life, long enough to know how many sins she had committed.

Long enough to know I would commit many more.

Since I had so many more days to go.

Art by Rebecca Yanovskaya

Text by Lucie MacAulay