Sundays with Scheherazade

From Frieda, to Iris

6 From Frieda, to Iris

8:45 pm, 30 Sundays in, New York Luxury Apartment

From what Mel could recall of the Legend of Scheherazade, Scheherazade had been a famous Persian queen, the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights. The tale, dating back centuries ago, described an Arabian king who married a young girl daily; at the close of each night, he would order his new wife's head chopped off. How macabre.

She tried to toss the unsettling thought of the Persian queen and her bloodthirsty spouse out of her head, and rummaged through her purse for her notebook. Which of course she had forgotten, yet again. These past six months had made her lose her concentration on just about everything. Though her family was mostly preoccupied with Leyla's pregnancy, she could feel Maggie's eyes following her as she made her way past the living room and out the Vera Manor front door. Mel briefly considered opening her own window and surreptitiously jumping into the bushes but didn't want to risk dire injury and not being able to see Abigael again.

Mel found a postcard from her last museum visit, a sublime, tropical portraiture of Frieda Kahlo, with her prominent unibrow, a tiny black panther cub situated on her left, and what looked to be a baby gorilla on her right. "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird," the underlying caption read. This would have to do.

Pulling out a pen, Mel wrote three columns on the postcard's back:

Pros: Most powerful tour-de-force I know, beautiful, intelligent, classy taste in decorating, amazing at defensive magic, skilled barrister, her voice gives me the shivers in a cool spine-tingling, sparkly unicorn sort of way

Cons: Does dangerous highly lethal things, keeps secrets, has mommy issues, daddy issues, issues with her extended family, issues with my family...

Other: Nickname/Iris, has a thing for childhood nostalgia, repurposing fanciful items as weaponry, loves animals, and has an internal moral compass inscrutable to all but those who truly understand her

"What've you got there?" Mel heard a familiar smooth voice and looked up at the shadow looming above her seated form. Mel tried to hide the postcard, but Abigael snatched it away, turned it over, and angled it this way and that, poring over it for the next minute or so before finally speaking.

"It's a list," Abigael stated, turning it over to Mel who ripped it out of her hand. "Is there another woman? I hadn't any idea." She appeared to be playing things casually, but Mel could have sworn for half a millisecond that there were bright crimson flames flickering in her corneas.

"No, it just a list—of you," said Mel. "You know there isn't anyone else."

"Of...me?" Abigael appeared pleasantly surprised, though somewhat puzzled. "But—who is this Iris you speak of, pray tell?"

"Oh," Mel blushed. "It's my nickname for you, from my favorite Georgia O'Keefe artwork, Black Iris II, depicting a smoky grey iris flower in full bloom, with white petals atop dark, damask, and grey-lined petals, all lifted together by a sturdy emerald-colored stem."

"Fancy that," Abigael murmured. She again reached for the postcard and before Mel could stop her, walked over to the kitchen and pinned it to the bare stainless-steel fridge with an equally grey metallic magnet. "I've been called so many names in my lifetime—Desdemona, Delilah, Bathsheba, Scarlet Woman, Cayenne..."

"Cayenne?" mouthed Mel, giving Abigael a questioning look.

"As in, the pepper. But never Iris."

"I can scratch it out—we can pretend I never wrote it down—" Mel started.

"No," Abigael responded abruptly. "Iris, Iris, Iris. I rather fancy it," she said, her tongue exploring the floral analogy; she found herself altogether amused by Mel's startled expression. "Perhaps it's time we added a bit of sultry color to this drab endroit."