SPOILER notes

The Spike Garden notes
Characters
Water garden aunt
Names: Stare, Look, Aura, Tarot, Sight, Seer, Mist
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.
A liar
Her death is first and a genuine accident. Narr is a witness and decides not to help her.
?She falls off her secret roof during an experiment to catch lightning. Narr had to help her as punishment.
Banned from her garden for switching an animal to be sacrificed. Mist had acquired a stray moggie but Narr substitutes a pet of one of the other aunts.
Loses a man through not being direct
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
Suffocated by a corset. This is the last death and the one most like a murder. Narr. Ties her up and gags her with a powder puff before tightening her corset to the point where she cannot breathe. He tightens it a little more with each cough.
?Kills herself when she starts to get wrinkles
?Her life stopped when she stopped being young (because she killed herself or let herself waste away)
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
plays strip brag
But only wants sex for reproduction
MC sees evidence that her lover has an STD and does not pass it on. ?She asked him to check her lover's penis's apearance. he does so but then does not tell her what he sees.
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. Narr kept waking her, secretly, so that she took stronger and stronger doses.
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
All the grace of a spider on the underside of a labourer's boot. A broken umbrella.
Her orifices are traps
Narrator
His artist
Narrative
Part one: Now
7 chapters
- 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”

Water
Spring
Fruit
Green
Rose
Mist
Blush
Carbon
Halo
Echo
6
5
7
4
3
Halo
Mist
Echo
Carbon
Blush
Breakfast
Fortune telling
Leaving a funeral
Picnic
Dressing for a ball
Sacrifice switch
Revealing her age
Giving a prophylactic to a man
?Tripped when running
Pushing her into pond
death 1
death 5
death 2


Fell
Corseted
STD
Overdose
Biting mirror

Part two: Childhood
5 chapters
- when I had more gardens, aunts and mothers (or but not mothers because his mother died when he was born or just after)
- descriptions of gardens themselves
- 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
Part three: Adulthood
5 chapters
- each aunt dies
- Narrator murders them with weapons that he has found harmful to himself
Part four: Before birth
? chapters
- 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”
“We do not sleep alone. When one is alone one cannot come to harm.”
“When I read the words Prison Creater I was in love.”