WATER LILY
by
NaOH_r
 
 

Lanie sneezed as she always did when she stepped into sunshine.  She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light.  Although the sun would set soon, it was still a bright day out in this elaborate garden she had just stepped into.

'You've got a beautiful place out here,' she said as she took in the curiously manicured shrubbery around her.

Her host half turned to glance at her as he preceded her down the flagstoned walk.  'I work at it,' he told her.  'It's the background for many of my paintings and sometimes my inspiration too.'  He stopped at the edge of a garden pool and gestured at it in pride.  'I've become fond of the calmness of water plants, lately.'

Lanie could see why.  The pool was as formal as a painting, not a hint of disorder intruding on its loveliness.  Immaculate white flowers floated on its surface, in contrast to the dark green foliage all around the edges.  Its serenity was almost hypnotic.

'I'd like to shoot some photos of all this, for the article.'  She waved vaguely around her.

'We'll have to see about that,' he frowned.  'As I said, I use this garden in my own work.  I don't know about having images of it used in a mass publication, especially when I'd have no control over them.'

She turned her attention to him.  Paul Angeli could be described as perhaps distinguished,  maybe handsome, in a minor-key sort of way, greying toward age but not  there, not yet.  He didn't grant many interviews but then again, he didn't get many requests.  A not very prolific, not very glamorous painter, he was well enough known to have no trouble disposing of his meticulously detailed work, mostly landscapes and still lifes, at decent prices but he was no great star of the art world.  She recognized several of the features in this garden as elements in some of his paintings, including the walk they were standing on and the flowering bushes bordering it.  She searched her mind for images of the pool but came up empty.  It  subtly fascinated her, gently drawing her gaze from Mr. Angeli and the rest of the garden.

'I could give you prior approval of my shots,' she told him.  'I wouldn't submit ones you didn't like.'

'But what about your editor?  How would they be cropped? Who would insure the color rendition, the composition?  I don't think so.  You can shoot interiors of my studio, even some works in progress.  But not here.'  He looked contentedly around him, basking in the harmonies of the scene.  'Not out here.'

He led her back inside as the sun began to sink and the colors of the garden and pool blurred and faded.  'Why don't we wait until tomorrow to begin the interview?' he suggested.  'I'm at my best in the morning and you could probably use a good night's rest after your flight.  Meet me here at, say, eight tomorrow morning.  If I'm late, just let yourself in the side gate and look over my garden more thoroughly.  Just leave your camera in your car please.  Deal?'

'Deal,' she said but her eyes drifted back to the glass doors leading outside, to the bushes and flowers hiding the pool she could feel tugging at her.
 

So the next morning, she was early of course, at the studio door before seven, giving the doorbell a perfunctory ring and glancing into the dark interior before she hurried through the small iron gate beside the building into the garden.  Finally she stood before the pool again, still sleeping in the shadow of the studio.  She was content for a while to merely stand and look at it, trying to soak it in, trying to figure out why this secluded scene, charming though it was, had such a grip on her.  Was it the composition of the pool's shape and its surrounding vegetation?  Or  the obscure blue of the water setting off the almost unearthly white of the floating flowers on its surface?

When the sun finally rose above the studio roof, bathing the pool in the cool morning light, she decided it was the huge floating blooms.  She recognized them as water lilies but she had never seen such huge ones.  Only five of them floated on the still water but they covered half its surface, the smallest of them a good two feet across.  She knew she had to have pictures of this, for herself at least.  She glanced at her watch.  At least fifteen minutes before he gets here, she thought, probably even longer.  She hurried to get the camera and lenses she had obediently left in the car.

But fifteen minutes later, she was no closer to having a keepsake photograph than she had been yesterday, before she'd even seen this place.  She didn't want a sloppy, incomplete image to take with her, she wanted to capture the peace and fascination of the scene but she couldn't find a usable vantage point.  She had immediately discovered that a wide-angle lens was worse than useless, distorting the pool's composition, twisting its lines.  Perhaps she should try a close up of the lilies, or even just one of them, if they were the key to the scene anyway.

That was the trick, she realized immediately, as she moved to the edge of the pool and looked through the finder at one, then another of the giant flowers.  She found that she wanted to look down on them, to capture their shape and details from directly above.  She moved to the side of the pool and leaned over the largest of the flowers, its edge almost touching the shore at her feet. She leaned forward still more, focusing on the details of the petals, leaned more.  And lost her balance, taking an involuntary step forward from the water's edge directly onto the lily before her.

To her surprise and relief, she didn't step through the flower's fragile petals, tearing them as her foot sunk to the bottom of the shallow pool.  Instead the flower dimpled gently under her weight, supporting her as her other foot staggered onto it.  She stood horrified for a second, walking on water through a thin white veneer, then jumped back onto land, her heart pounding.

She tore her gaze from the unblemished pond flower to the watch on her wrist.  A couple of minutes past eight.  Mr. Angeli wasn't here yet, he said he might be late, he'd never know.  Her eyes moved back to the lily on the surface of the pool.  Only now it wasn't merely soothing her, it wasn't merely drawing her gaze, the bloom seemed to be inviting her to step on it again, to walk onto the pool's surface.

Against all her better judgment, Lanie took the camera from around her neck and laid it on the ground.  She kicked off her shoes and cautiously, gingerly touched the giant floating bloom with the toes of her right foot..  As before, the flower didn't sink under the weight but gently supported a little, then some, then all of her weight as she stepped onto it with both feet and carefully walked a few short steps to its center.  Not a ripple disturbed the still water of the pool.

Once there she was truly enraptured.  If the pool and surrounding garden had attracted her before, now the view was wholly captivating.  Every shape, every color in the scene was perfect, in complete harmony with all other elements.  She stood upright in the exact middle of the enormous water lily, still as a flower on a windless day herself, drinking in everything she could see.  Only her eyes moved, calmly, methodically trying to absorb it all.  Paul Angeli was the furthest thing from her mind if she could just stand here, just look at the magnificent perfection around her for a little while longer.

So she didn't notice as the flower she was standing on began to shift, its center sinking a little beneath her feet as its petals began to move inward.  Its circumference contracted as the white surface rose and flowed over her feet and ankles and began to creep up her legs.  She stood at rapt attention as the gentle white tide moved up over her knees, her thighs, her hips.  The outer edges of the flower lifted free of the water's surface as its diameter decreased and then raised up around her, enveloping her from the neck down in a white cocoon.

Lanie perceived a change in the scene around her.  The water lilies floating serenely on the pond around the one bearing her seemed to be changing somehow but she couldn't make out in exactly what way.  They were as white as ever under the sun rising over them, certainly they weren't moving but somehow they were changing.  She realized they were changing in size, becoming smaller in diameter, slowly shrinking to the size of their ordinary cousins in other, ordinary ponds.  This surprised her vaguely but did not disturb her, as their change did not disturb the perfect beauty around her.  She was conscious of her surroundings, as a sleeper is sometimes conscious of being between dreams and wakefulness, but, like the sleeper, she was unwilling to break free of the dream just yet, not for just another second.  She stood stock-still, unconscious of the lily's gentle embrace.

The embrace was becoming closer.  The petals closed ever more snugly on her figure, pausing for an instant as they closed on her casual, attractive blouse and pants and then suddenly flowing through and beneath the various fabrics of her clothes and stockings and underwear.  Her outer garments were now outer indeed as they slipped from her body and quietly vanished under the pool's surface, making not a sound, not a ripple.  Now every curve of her slim body was revealed by the petals covering her as close as her skin, and as gently.  She noticed her involuntary disrobing not at all,  still entranced by the pool and garden.

She didn't notice either that  as the other lilies shrank, so did hers, and so did she.  As long as the perfection of the the garden wasn't being diminished, it didn't occur  to her that her size was.  The great flower carrying her was becoming smaller and soon she was half as tall as she had been when she stepped from the shore, then a third of the height the water lily had folded in its embrace.  Then she was a fifth, an eighth, a tenth perhaps of her original size and all the flowers in the pond around her were as large, but no larger than their ordinary cousins.

At last she forced herself to full consciousness and turned her head to look around her, and look down.  At first, she didn't even comprehend all the change that had taken place, she was so startled as she became aware of her white, seemingly nude body.  She still had the same slim, pretty figure she'd had before, shapely as a lily herself, only now she had the the color and texture of one too.  Before she could try to raise her arms or take a step, she felt her second skin shift and she watched it flow down off her, sliding into the calm water, an ordinary water lily now except that a tiny woman was standing in its center.

She realized now that she was tiny, that she had shrunk with the floating blooms and a mild alarm woke in her.  Not at being changed, not at being shrunk, not at being nude  but at the knowledge that  Mr. Angeli would find her.  What would his reaction be?  She looked at the shore, now far too far away for her to step or jump to.  She could swim that far, certainly.  She gauged the distance, trying to decide whether to dive in.

A branch rustled as Mr. Angeli stepped out from the shrubbery near the pool and looked out and down at her.  'I thought, last night, that you might be one.'  He reached out with a wooden rod and urged the floating plant toward him.

'Might be one,' Lanie wondered.  'One what?'

'One that the lilies spoke to.  Or maybe one that could hear them.  Same thing.'  He shrugged and swept his arm around him, taking in the garden and pool with his sweep.  'I laid out this garden so that the lilies could be heard, heard by a few.  I can hear them, or maybe I should say feel them.  You know what I mean.'

'So will they do this to you?'  She gestured at herself, at her new size.  'Will they...will they take you down, shrink you like me?'

He laughed quietly at that.  'Take me? Take a beat-up old has-been like me?  No, I can hear them but that's all.  They'll accept beauty and only beauty.  A lovely girl like you? Certainly.  Obviously.  A beautiful young man?  They might but I'll never know.  I have no interest in beautiful young men.'  He raised his hand at her suddenly fearful look.  'Don't worry.  I won't harm you.  I'm a gentleman, after all.'

He looked at her more thoroughly, as if judging her.  'I can use you, though.  I can use you and, who knows, maybe some others.  I'm tired of still life and landscapes and the pretty, predictable things I've been doing.  Nobody will think it terribly odd if I indulge in a bit of whimsy, fairies in my garden, all that.  Fantasy.'

'They'll call it fantasy.'

'And after, when it's time, the lilies will change you back.  Next year, or the year after.  They've taken you as a guest for a while but not forever.  I'll call your editor, tell him it didn't work out, I couldn't work with you.  I'll bring a phone here, you can call him too, give up the assignment.  Tell him you're taking a break, whatever.'

She nodded.  Deep inside a voice was trying to tell her that this was wrong, that she should be terrified of all that had happened to her, that she should be trying to escape but she wasn't listening.  She looked at the garden and the pool, with its ordinary floating blooms, and knew that everything was fine.  She'd be fine here, she belonged here, for a while.


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