Chirologia

CL Glanzing

My cotton gloves are caked in soil now.

Vincenzo once said my hands were divine. As graceful and pale as the spathe of a calla lily. When he brought them to his lips, I knew he was sincere.

“You love the man,” he said, the first time he showed me his home. “But can you love the scientist?”

My husband, the great tenured botanist. The esteemed professor.

The house was tucked in a remote corner of pine wilderness. A sunken bridleway leading to a bastle house inherited from his family. Such a stoic heap of grey brick, with few pin-prick windows. Like a cenotaph. I loved it all the same.

He pushed aside the front door and revealed his cave of wonders. He explained how he had dismantled the old conservatory and installed a greenhouse, as long and wide as a tennis court. From every wall burst a cacophony of leaves, foliage, spines, and fronds. Some crowned with dainty pink blossoms, others erupting with carmine and gold. The air was dank, oppressive, but peppered with the spice of watered earth and rotting mulch.

He led the way, his hand reaching behind for mine, our index fingers lightly hooked. There was cork mulch scattered on the floor, dampening our footsteps.

The end of the greenhouse arrived before I expected, the clutter masking the space. One long dolly zoom. I was crawling into the ventricles of Vincenzo’s heart. Deeper, I was certain, than any of his other graduate students.

In rows and rows of plastic shelves sat ceramic pots, each containing a small flower nestled in a squirt of leaves. Less planted, more bursting, from a green cowpat.

I remember the way his face illuminated when he spoke in front of a crowded lecture. Oenothera caespitosa, the desert evening primrose. Four heart-shaped, white petals surrounding a spidery caudex. No stems. Opening white at dusk, wilting pink the following morning.  Utterly dependent on the five-spotted hawkmoth for pollination.

I was encouraged to audit his botany class by my theology tutor. My thesis, entitled Father of Modern Genetics: The Augustinian Influence on the Science of  Reverend Gregor Mendel, apparently exhibited a ‘superficial’ understanding of Mendel’s experiments with plant hybridisation.

He stood before rows of wooden seats, and caught our eyes on the tip of his finger as he punctured the air to make a point. He growled theories into the air, and let them settle over us like snow.

I studied a missing button on his shirt, and wondered why he had no one to mend it.

Seeing his primroses in his greenhouse was daringly intimate. Like seeing his naked organ. I brushed a finger against a petal, and he let me.

I knew his research, but I let him explain it to me anyway. Flowers respond to pollinator sound within minutes by increasing their nectar sugar concentration. The flowers vibrate mechanically, their bright faces a sensory organ. The frequency is specific. Flowers are selected for their hearing ability, and are more likely to pass on those clever genes.

Vincenzo recorded the miniscule dances and flutters of hawkmoths, playing them back to his primroses, measuring the sweetness of the nectar they produced. A vibrometer determined the movement of the flower petals. A beautiful dialogue between insect and flower.

Perhaps if he breeds the best listeners, maybe they will learn to respond to other sounds. Perhaps even the human voice.

The Eternal Word, imprinted on everything. Arising in the silence of the greenhouse, recorded on phonographs and analysed by my clever Vincenzo.

I left University. So I could become his wife. I planted my thesis in a wooden box and tucked it under my bed. Perhaps like a potato, it would sprout on its own.

Moving into his cottage was a lesson in patience. I learnt his routines, the little idiosyncrasies that kept the house quiet, and his plants healthy, and his experiments uncompromised.

I learnt the softness of silence, its plumpness. I appreciated a world without televisions and radios. No microwaves or washing machines.

He made me aware of how noisy I am. My unnatural state is chatter, humming. The vocal clicks and ticks from my throat - my unconscious mind speaking. Not just in my mouth, but my whole body. My joints click, my knees creak. My nose sniffs and sneezes. I sway and collide my hips with his unfamiliar furniture. These little corporal indulgences. What sins of the flesh. Excessive, excess.

“Hush, hush, my love,” Vincenzo would say. “Too much.”

I scolded my body for crowing when it should be listening.

I would fold my cottoned fingers as I sat in the library watching the light catch leather book spines. Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors…

Then his plants began to stagnate. They grew unresponsive to his insect melodies.

There began our Great Silence. Not just from Lauds until Compline, but all day and night. 

I wrapped my feet in felt slippers so that I may tiptoe. We removed the doorbell. I helped cover the windows with egg box foam to dampen birdsong and the spatterings of countryside noise. We built a compost toilet in the garden.

No cooking. Water must drip from the tap slowly, carefully. I learnt how to open a can of soup slowly, silently, and eat with a plastic spoon.

Each motion of my body became fluid and patient. I felt beholden to the spark of life that gave my body energy. Every accomplished action under silence felt more significant than it had ever been. Even washing dishes, dusting.

God is unseen and unheard, I told myself. In the Book of Revelations, the second coming will begin with a mighty silence, overtaking heaven and earth. Silence is sacred.

I created little index cards, and carried them on a string around my belt buckle. “Good morning,” I would raise. And, “I love you,” or “Coffee?” But the cards were cumbersome, and they rustled. If I fumbled for the right response, Vincenzo would raise his finger to his lips, brow furrowed, and I knew I must exit the greenhouse quickly.

And then I realised I should not need cards. Two married people know each other’s faces well enough to comprehend the smallest of thoughts that illuminate them.

From a book in Vincenzo’s extensive library, I found a book about monastic sign language. The Chirologia, it recorded. In their vow of silence, Trappist monks’ hands were permitted to speak for them. What a beautiful idea.

“I’ve made progress, my love,” he said – when he speaks, it is allowed. It is calculated, factored into the experiment. His sounds are not uncontrollable variables, like mine.

I raised my cupped hands to face each other - supplico. Tell me, my hands said.

“Caespitosa-1991002B increased sugar nectar in response to 350 Hz.”

I opened my palms, fingers splayed heavenward, like I was holding a golden sun - admiror. And I beamed at my clever husband.

He looked down his half-moon spectacles. “Do you have a cold?”

I shook my head, one fist lying gently, humbly, in the other palm - innocentiam astendo.

“Your nose is whistling. You should build up the muscles of your nasal passages. You can’t let them sag.”

That night, I found a roll of adhesive tape resting on my pillow - the kind that trains stems to grow along poles. I knew he was trying to be helpful, supporting me as much as I supported him. I tore a small piece and pressed it to my lips. He smiled as I nestled quietly into the nook of his arm.

But the tape never stayed secure. I would wake up with it dangling from my cheek.

“You snored in the night,” he told me when I brought him his lunch. “You mouth was wide open.” He looked like he could weep, his fingers hovering protectively over the primrose blossoms. Covering his infants’ ears.

I interlocked my fingers and raised them to him – poloro – grief. I could not bear his disappointment in me.

That night, I took my sewing basket into the bathroom and set it quietly beside the sink.

I promise you, it was my idea.

I threaded the sharpest, finest needle I owned with white nylon. Strong, as I knew it had secured a button to a winter jacket.

In my mind, I remembered Palm 39. I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue: I will keep my mouth with a bridle.

I pulled my bottom lip from my teeth. What a superfluous pink slug. I pierced the underside and watched the needle burst through the slick flesh. Like a serpentine fang.

Tears burned as I pulled the needle, watching red thread emerge, until my skin met the knot. My breath came in silent, quick bursts. Excess saliva filled my mouth and pooled around the eyelet I had created.

A ribbon of blood dripped down my chin and onto the breast of my nightgown. I resolved to make the next holes smaller.

I joined my lips together with twelve reverent holes creating three holy crosses - XXX. Nice and tidy.

When I had washed the blood from my face, I turned off the bathroom light and went to bed. I gingerly ducked my body beneath the covers, beside Vincenzo. I found his hand in the dark, and squeezed.

In the morning, he kissed my forehead. “You didn’t snore at all,” he said, so very pleased. I could not smile, but my hands expressed joy.

I could picture my husband standing before the Nobel committee, holding a bright medal, thanking his wife for all her selfless support, and her nurture.

But then his plants became ill, their nectar thin and watery. Their beautiful, heart-shaped blossoms collapsing into a papery fist. Leaves tipped with yellow.

What was I doing wrong?

“They are dying,” he whispered, clutching a handkerchief under his nose. I rubbed his back, futilely.

We tried making the greenhouse brighter. Then darker. Then moister. Nothing worked.

Vincenzo stopped eating the meals I brought. He recoiled from my touch. He would not come to bed, keeping vigil with his plants.

The bastle house grew colder in his absence. For the first time, I felt lonely. I longed for his warm hand on my cheek.

When Caespitosa-1991002B died, he washed the soil from its crevices, and lay it on his bench, roots splayed wide like a beached squid. I could not tell if he was preparing it for dissection, or a wake.

My husband was wilting before my eyes. No amount of hand-waving could draw his attention to me.

I don’t know why my husband had lost his ability to speak to his treasures. Even in a silent house, with my silent body. I had failed somehow, and my husband had lost his mastery. His ability to translate.

At night, I dreamt about the silence of the grave. How the Lord awoke the dead through the power of speech. Come forth, He said to Lazarus. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, I remember. Proverbs 18.

I took a spade from the greenhouse, and walked into the garden. I began to dig. Pressing the blade into the earth with my slipper. I heard grass roots splinter. Even outside the house, I tried to be as quiet as possible.

The bottom of my nightgown stained brown. My cotton gloves soiled. I dug a trough five feet long, and one foot deep.

My panting breath tugged against the stitches in my lip. I felt grateful for their presence, the taste of blood in my mouth. It told me to slow down and pace myself.

At last, I lay down in the pit and began to scoop the mealy soil over my feet and knees. Then over thighs and stomach and shoulders. And finally, a thin layer over my face. It trickled into my ears, muffling the world above.

I rummaged my arms beneath the soil, like letting myself be swallowed beneath a warm blanket. My cottoned palms resting against my slowing diaphragm. Ten fingers touching, pointed towards the surface of the earth. My hands say oro - devotion.

And so I lie here, buried. My hands at last still, ready to receive. My faith seeded.

I await my clever husband. And for him to speak:

Come forth, my love.

This story first appeared in Gutter #33

CL Glanzing is an Edinburgh-based writer. She is currently working on her first novel, a work of speculative fiction with elements of body horror, which was shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Award 2026. She was one of four writers selected for Gutter’s Finishing Your First Book workshops this year.