Zoey, Willow, Clover Honey

I fall asleep with names settled like flavors onto my tongue. Their tastes bring memories: June strawberries, plump after a rain; grilled corn at the fair; Echinacea tea sipped to ward off a cold.

Meredith, Cora, Alisha, Grayson. These names are as sweet as sugar pills. They dissolve into me until I am what is left of them.

I remember. The past has not been educated out of me. It exists in a day's last moments of awareness. During the remaining, wakeful hours, there is no past. Those names and the people called by them have never existed. Our doctrine is one of amnesia.

I walk the garden path, head tilted towards paving stones, hood low. Amongst root vegetables squats another cloaked guardian of names.

Our homes share plots of tenable land. Hands drawing turnips from soil, we meet. Or, rather, we inhabit adjacent spaces. Her hood is low, too.

We are in the garden together for many days. We harvest acorn squash, we raise lettuce in the winter greenhouse, we grow babies. Both of us.

Our homes are blessed.

We are blessed.

Eventually, our hoods are pushed back. Slightly.

With eyes and hands tending the earth, we manifest words out of our forgetting, forgotten world.

"I remember." Each syllable spoken, a murmur. "I remember who I am."

I know what she's called now but her name from the past that never existed is a secret kept. At night before sleep, I taste names on my tongue, and I search for hers. It's not Amanda or Blaire. She's more of an end of the alphabet woman. Zoey, maybe. Willow.

Her flavor is clover honey. She stays on my tongue; thick, crystalized, refusing to dissolve.

There's only time for clipped phrases between us. We have minders; their ears hear the way my tongue tastes.

I tell her I am someone who hates cages. She tells me she is someone who bends bars. We feign obliviousness and blind adherence like everyone, but we have not forgotten. Our rage at the erasure of lives is as red as our wardrobes.

Her baby will come in April, mine in May. We sow seeds in spring, waiting.

One day, she hands me a spade. "Not his."

This isn't news to me. She borrowed it from my shed yesterday.

I pierce the earth, turn it, pierce it again with the "not his" spade. Then I understand: she holds the name of a man on her tongue at night. He tastes like everything she will never have again.

I'm careful. I wait five days, then ask. "Do they know?"

"Doesn't matter. They're getting what they want."

Mid-April, a baby's cries echo through the garden. I don't have the heart to weed the clover creeping its way into the beds of marjoram.

I am a guardian of names, but I don't need to know hers. She is raw honey from the hive. A borrowed spade.

She has bent the bars wide enough for both of us.