Om and lotus inside a brush circle

The queen had a pond in her courtyard where the lotus grew up through black mud every summer, and she loved it more than she loved her husband. One morning the mud stank and the flowers came up brown at the edges. She sent for the painter, a woman with ink under every nail, and said, Paint me a flower that does not rot.

Padma went down to the pond with a brush and a bowl of soot and water. She did not paint the flower first. She knelt in the mud until the sun was in her eyes and hummed the old sound her grandmother taught her, the one that sits in the throat like a bee in a jar. Then she drew a single breath of a circle around nothing at all, lifting the brush only once, and the stroke came out ragged where her hand shook from the cold.

Inside that ring she set the sacred syllable above the flower, and beneath it the petals, layer upon layer, each one lifted out of the water as though the pond had only been waiting to give them up. The queen came to look and found no flower she could have picked, only a black ring and a shape of light held inside it.

She wept, and then she laughed, and the pond has not stunk since.