Fields of Freedom

In dreams, she walked through endless fields of marigolds. The sun bathed her skin in its balmy glow, and the wind tickled her hair gently. A carpet of butter and orange-peel petals danced around her ankles with each step forward. She was free.

The soft buzzing of bees accompanied her footsteps through the sea of sunny flowers. Butterflies kissed her on the shoulder as the golden light bounced off her skin. Although the sun shone high where midday resided in the topaz sky, there were no clocks here. There was no beginning, middle, or end, to her slow meandering through these fields. Time had set up a deckchair, content to watch her whilst its work was put on hold.

Marigolds had always been her mother's favourite. Every summer, their citrine hues would adorn the kitchen table, a beacon to the light and warmth that enveloped their home. Mari had loved their trips to the flower fields after school. She'd know where they were headed the minute she left the school gates, just by seeing that familiar glint in her mother's eyes.

"Shall we go to the place where rainbows grow?"

"Yes, mamma! Yes, please!"

Off they'd drive to Flevoland, the view from their window growing evermore multicoloured as they neared the fields of Noordoostpolder. Mari had felt that she'd been transported from a land of green and brown to a world populated with more colours than one could imagine. Her heart would pick up speed as Mamma slowed the car and pulled into the car park of their favourite fields. It was time to go and pick some rainbows.

Mamma and Mari would spend lazy afternoons bending down to pluck the blooms from around their feet, with Mamma always taking her first to the marigolds, of course. Her laughter would trill and intertwine with the birdsong above them, and Mari would smile and think that surely no one could ever be as happy as she was in that moment.

Little did she realise that she herself would never again be as happy as she had been in those fields of Noordoostpolder. Shortly after her eighth birthday, the usual marigold glow on the kitchen table had been dimmed by a note leaning in front of it. Mari had got home before her mother, who was working the late shift at the local hospital. Although addressed to her mother, Mari had always existed on the nosy side of curious, so she eagerly unfolded the letter.

'Mila,

I'm leaving with Lotte today. I'm sorry, I can't stay.

Thijs.'

Where was Pa going with Mamma's friend? Why couldn't he stay? Mari's mind contorted itself into a thousand knots as she puzzled over the piece of paper. Surely Pa was just going on a trip out of town, like grown ups do, and would be home before Mamma turned a year older next week, his arms full of marigolds. Surely.

How quickly the innocence of children is robbed with reality knocks on its door. Pa had left for good, Mamma explained as she threw both the flowers and the note in the trash. Lotte was having a baby, and Pa was to be a father to another child. The knots in her mind grew tighter.

Mari never did see another vase of marigolds on the kitchen table again, just as she never saw that familiar flower field glow in her mamma's face. Her mother's light dimmed year upon year, just as the flowers had done that day a note extinguished their glow. She wasn't proud to say that she did not so much as shed a single tear on the day of her mother's death; it had freed mamma from a prison of grief, and for that she was thankful. Besides, she had planned her vengeance meticulously for a decade before, and she was primed for the kill.

It hadn't been easy to drug her Pa and Lotte into a frothy death, despite drugs of all colours and concoctions being residents of every corner around her flat in Amsterdam. However, awakening from her sleepy reverie in the dank cell of Jongeren, it felt to Mari as if she'd ended up here far too easily nonetheless.

Her only escape from the monotony of a life in jail came from her dreams in fields of marigolds. Each night, she would travel to kaleidoscopic grounds of Noordoostpolder, and meet Mamma underneath the hornbeam trees that lined the fields. There her mother shone. There they co-existed in a world of blossoming bliss, where could while away the hours under the mighty summer sun.

Mamma and Mari would watch the godwits swoop and sway on the currents of wind blowing in from IJesselmeer, and let the juice of the ruby ripe strawberries that Mamma had packed for them drip down their chins.

There, they were free.