Buttercup Milk
Contours of a Silent Storm
What if the most profound connections are the ones we cannot name?
Buttercup Milk is a short story that follows Maud and Ben through a tropical storm and the storm within, where memory, desire, and silence shape a moment neither will forget.
It was an early morning, and yet the sun was already baking the concrete of the road when they left the beach town of Lovina. The endless grey ribbon connected them to either a presumed paradise or an imminent disaster. As if their hot hearts had the power to transubstantiate even the hardest matter into flames. The air conditioning didn’t work, and the breeze from the open window offered no relief—it felt like a foreign, unwanted embrace. An unwelcome intimacy in the overheated atmosphere of the car.
A quiet recognition stirred between them for a long time. It was less a memory than a shared echo, as if something ancient had passed through their lives long before they ever met. A knowledge that had remained inexpressible, resisting words or form. The alienness of the many foreign places they had wandered made them even more aware of it.
“Do you think we’ll ever explain this?” Maud asked quietly, unsure what she meant by this. Ben didn’t look at her. “Maybe it doesn’t need explaining.” Maud insisted, “ But I keep wondering if it’s real or if I’ve just imagined it into being.” Ben paused and then said, almost to himself, “Some things are truer when they’re not named, despite their urgency.” And here, in the foreboding storm, the unnamed trembled insistently between them.
When Maud had woken up, she swam one last time in the too-warm ocean that offered no respite. Even the white frangipani she placed behind her ear as so many of her Balinese friends did, wilted in the relentless heat. Her friend Sonia had told her that a woman wears a frangipani behind the left ear when seeking a lover and behind the right when already taken. Maud had placed hers behind the left. She hoped the heat would ease as they crossed the mountains toward Ubud.
Their Hindu driver was taciturn, his fervour expressed instead through loud devotional songs on the radio. It was obvious he didn’t want to look back at the two strangers in his rearview mirror, foreigners adrift, inching toward a reckoning.
As Maud stared out at the slow traffic on the steep mountain road, the thick air felt as sticky as her guilt. Ben seemed oddly focused on the Hindu songs, as if he understood their message or needed them to guide him on a path of no return. She wondered what messages Ben might have retrieved from those monotonous prayers that cut the thick air like a relentless knife. Perhaps he found comfort in his own gentle brand of faith, a calm contrast to the zealotry they'd often encountered. Still, Maud couldn't tell why she felt more alone with Ben than without him.
The driver, deep in his meditations, seemed to pretend they weren’t there, refusing to be pulled into the chaotic gravity of their emotional lives. He was no follower of Aphrodite. He would not become a character in their unfolding story.
Bali had only been a short pause in Maud’s broader travels. She had brought Ben to Singaraja for a six-week residency. Afterwards, she was meant to return to Kerala, where she opened her workshop and her current project, an exhibition in Calcutta, was laboriously taking shape and where, strangely, her heart still felt most at home.
She had reunited with Ben at the airport in Denpasar. They’d known each other through a residency in Cape Town and shared a close, if undefined, friendship. Despite being twenty years her junior, Ben often seemed the more grounded of the two. As if his soul had waited patiently to be born and, once released, carried a calm restlessness, he managed with grace.
He had begun his career only two years earlier, but it wasn’t just his success that marked him; it was his incorruptible optimism. No longer naive, he balanced his artistic promise with intellectual depth. His confidence and potential surrounded him like a shrine, and so too did an erotic energy that Maud had sensed even before meeting him in person.
Whether Ben explored this eroticism consciously or not, Maud never knew. His sheepish stubbornness often cloaked inner depths he refused to reveal, even though he had been emotionally generous with her in the past. Maud suspected greater fulfilment lay just beyond those boundaries. But she also knew herself too well, her tendency to idealise relationships, often at significant personal cost.
Her Indian lover had once moved with the clumsy grace of a puppy: uncertain, unaware of his body’s power. Ben’s frame, by contrast, conveyed a confident receptivity to life. He didn't hide it. Perhaps he was too curious, too eager to finally live, to ever consider hiding. He could make anyone comfortable, even a drunken Brazilian philosopher at Maud's house in Kochi at 2 a.m. He listened with an attention that felt rare and sincere, without offering anecdotes or performance.
Now, the car was filled with his silence. It drowned out even the loudest hymn. His stiff posture communicated a language too intimate and too destructive to name.
Maud longed to forget the consequences of the decision she'd made days earlier under wine, after innocent kisses. She admired the temple goers through the window, their sense of belonging. A belonging she'd once felt with Ben. She considered asking the driver to turn around and drop her off at Denpasar airport. She could return to Kerala early, hide out in the anonymous calm of an airport hotel. No decisions. No trespasses.
She turned to Ben, whose face was an unreadable mask. Silence thickened, perfumed with musk, amber, and cloves: the scent blowing in from the Spice Islands. Another place of longing. Ubud, once paradise, had long lost its innocence. But their destination, hidden in the rainforest, still held promise.
Maud had been there before. She wanted to share it with Ben, whom she considered a soul mate from the moment they met. Their journey had been planned in unspoken wishes before it ever took form.
She’d dropped him at his residency near the rice paddies and stayed at her beach retreat, hoping for reflection time and solitude. These ten days in Lovina were meant to prepare her for a group show with international artists in Singaraja.
She shook her shoulders, trying to shrug off the unease like a second skin. Even the clouds were gathering now, promising the long-awaited rain. The silence between her and Ben grew denser, cotton-like, impenetrable.
They had shared little time during the residency, taking occasional moto rides and enjoying casual meals. She remembered lunch on a rundown pier, light-hearted teasing, and too much beer. They laughed about her Indian lover, joked about Gedok, a student of Ben’s whose beauty outshone her professional diligence. That lunch had felt effortless, full of an innocent intimacy Maud had taken for granted.
Ben had always had a soft spot for her. Now, she peered sideways. He was staring into the approaching storm. She remembered their first meeting, how she’d bought his first volume of poetry before knowing him. Even then, a promise had glimmered, quickly repressed, but never extinguished.
The villagers outside the car buzzed in anticipation of rain. Maud imagined the dust transforming into fertile soil, the air reborn with the scents of jasmine, marigold, and incense. The ancient rhythm of life.
The car crawled behind a monstrous truck belching smoke, and Ben’s face, stoic like an Easter Island Moai, betrayed nothing. Had he withdrawn into himself completely?
Friends often reminded her how beautiful Ben was. She rolled her eyes. To Maud, beauty was a suitcase; it mattered only for what it carried inside. His erotic energy lived more vividly in his poetry than in his body. That’s what bound them. He knew it, too. Their bond was forged in mutual recognition.
Ben’s quiet confidence belied inner struggles. Her Indian lover fought himself and others; Ben embraced. They were two opposites. The first raindrop splattered on the windshield, smearing dead insects into a dull paste. The driver pulled over to clean the glass.
Maud stepped out, letting the wind whip through her hair. The trees trembled in anticipation. She felt her anxiety loosen in the coming storm. She didn’t notice Ben join her until he stood beside her in silence, calm, collected, a strange anchor.
He had never seen Bali until now. One of his books had made it there before him, dedicated to Maud. She loved his writing but found it overpowering, too erotic, too alive. It felt painfully close to her. She later put the book on the table in her studio, and it watched over her with an animalistic presence. Familiar. Authoritarian. Erotic. Unsettling.
While the driver argued into his phone to outshout the radio prayers, Maud turned to Ben. Something yellow on the ground caught her eye: buttercups, delicate against the ragged grass.
She remembered childhood dandelions, wishes whispered into seeds, sent flying into the unknown. A child's way of negotiating eternity.
Ben met her eyes for the first time that day. As always, there was this unspoken recognition between them, something ancient, something outside logic. They stepped out of the car, drawn by the rain and a promise of release. He placed his arm around her shoulder. They smiled into the tropical storm.
The driver gestured frantically. But by then, the warm, heavy rain had embraced them completely. They ran back, soaked and breathless, laughter cooling the air inside the car. Ben leaned in and tucked a buttercup behind Maud’s right ear. Its yellow blossoms spilled on his fingers and her neck.
