SPOILER notes

The Spike Garden notes
Or: a pointed person and the people impaled
Water garden aunt
Names: Stare, Look, Aura, Tarot, Sight, Seer
Contemplative (originally Deep and romantic)
Interested in the occult
Told Echo to imagine herself with the man she wants whilst in “private ecstasy” This is when Echo bit into her mirror. WG aunt told her this, knowing it to be false.
Spring garden aunt
Aunt Blush
What happens in other seasons
Youth obsessed
Adopted faddish ways of talking
Hated her birthdays. Received presents but they were not called birthday presents
Portrait is of her as an old woman
?Kills herself when she starts to get wrinkles
?suffocated by a corset
Narrator was excluded for telling a man Blush's real age
Fruit garden aunt
Aunt Carbon
Wants to be a mother so that she can copy herself
Only wants daughters
Eats a lot
“The fruit does not resemble the tree”
Green garden aunt
Aunt Halo
Eternality and consistency
Liked exercise and used to go running in the gardens
Ate in moderation
Made long-term investments
Few new clothes
Obsessed by sleep
Died by sleeping draught overdose
Rose garden aunt
Aunt Echo
Obsessed by her own beauty
dies biting a mirror in ecstasy (narr. may have cracked the mirror first)
Had many nudes painted of herself, by painters that she was trying to ensnare
MC’s mother
Names: Stiletto, Mantrap
?died in childbirth
?weakened by childbirth

parts
1. now
- starting a relationship
- with a painter who has been commissioned to do portraits of the gardens
- some of her sentences are like a full moon, others like a partial moon
- each portrait brings in an element of the aunt’s personality, like the mirror
- each portrait tells us a bit about the artist
- finally, he plays in the spike garden. Could be chasing his artist. Her name might be the same as his mother's.
- The aunts all hate each other but they hated his mother more.
- “Owning a penis makes you a rapist. Owning the spike garden makes you a madman”
2. childhood
- when I had more gardens, aunts and mothers (or but not mothers because his mother died when he was born or just after)
- he is barred from the gardens, one by one, for doing various things in each one
- like pushing the rose garden aunt into the water (because the world in the mirror could not be entered because the mirror is hard) enough water to break your fall, but not enough to drown you, like a good depth of shame
3. adulthood
- each aunt dies
- Narrator murders them with weapons that he has found harmful to himself
4. before birth
- told by his father
- how his mother met his father
she competed with and defeated all his aunts to gain the attention of his father
- Narr. father was killed by the defeated aunts

Bits
“An unstoned sinner”