Vegetable
Section VI
Gate
Light poured through his office window, spilling onto the floor. “That won’t do,” he said, setting a bucket beneath the window and filling it to the brim.
Walking home from work that day he spotted a tiny pebble: warm grey with bright flecks of blue. “You can’t leave that on cement,” he said, “It needs proper care.” He picked up the pebble, putting it safely in his pocket.
Broken glass littered the footpath outside his house, but the evening sunlight refracted a field of rainbows in front of him. Before dinner, he put a shovelful into a clay pot, made a small hole with his index finger, dropped the pebble inside, covered it up, then measured a half cup of light from his bucket and poured that into the pot as well.
In a few weeks, a small shoot sprouted and grew quickly. It soon needed to be moved to his backyard, growing into a tree called beauty. He ate its fruit when sick and wrapped its blanket of leaves around him to sleep. He planted more of its seed until he had a garden filled with color and light. And he wondered if Eden was utterly lost after all.
Picnic
The odors of macaroni salad and fried chicken mingled with the earthy smell of nostalgia. It had rained that morning, and the sun was still invisible behind the worn-out clouds.
“I thought Jim was coming.”
Meghan was seated on the blanket, but reclined with one elbow on the damp grass that she plucked absent-mindedly. “I thought he was too,” she said.
“Did he decide not to come?”
Each blade of grass would fight against her grip for a moment just before it tore. There was something immensely satisfying in that moment of release, the same satisfaction she had gotten from shucking peas with her mother years ago. Meghan shrugged. “Apparently.”
“Well, maybe he’s just running behind. Do you think we should wait?
Meghan scowled. One of the blades had refused to tear and, consequently, a whole clump of grass had come up in her hand, roots and all. She tossed it aside briefly wondering if the roots would ever find their way back to the soil.
“Meghan? Should we wait?”
She sighed, pulled herself into a sitting position, and brushed the clumps of dirt and broken blades of grass off her elbow. “He’s not coming,” she said. “Let’s just eat.”
Iris
The movie was over and the DVD menu had just repeated for the fifth time, but no one noticed. Ryan was tearing paper towels into squares, Julie was applying a third coat of paint to her nails, and Celia was still talking. “I can’t wait to go to Scotland with my dad this summer,” she said. “I just want to go over there and find a man. A Scottish man—like a mix of Gerard Butler and Ewan McGregor. He’ll come up to me and say . . . and say . . .”
Ryan now had a stack of paper squares he began folding into origami flowers.
“And say what?” Julie asked.
“I don’t know,” she said “Something romantic and Scottish. I was trying to come up with something like: ‘Your eyes are as green as the fields of Edinburgh.’ But Edinburgh’s a city, so there are no fields, and anyway my eyes aren’t green.”
She sighed.
Just then Ryan spoke for the first time since the movie had started. “Maybe something like: Your skin glows like the sunrise over the highland hills.” And he handed Celia a bouquet of fresh-cut irises.
Bright crimson dawned on Celia’s face. “Um . . . yeah,” she stammered. “Something like that.”
Cotton
We never wanted blood on our hands.
I’ve worked these fields all my life, planted the seeds, picked the harvest. Just like my father before me. He was the first slave on this plantation. Now that he is old, he spends the whole day twisting hemp into rope until his fingers are as stiff and hard as cattle horns. My wife and my mother work the looms. Most of the cotton goes to factories, but we weave a portion into canvas to use on the plantation. My son is still young and strong. He turns the crank on the gin. If he is too slow, they whip him till blood runs down with his sweat. We’ve all felt the lash. Our blood has fed the cotton for generations.
But at least we had our lives.
A group of Yankee soldiers came to hang George Morris. Something to do with the war. They used my father’s rope to do it. They covered his head with one of my wife’s canvas bags, made from our cotton. They took his life, but we did the dirty work. We were slaves to a dead man’s blood.
That’s when they told us we were free.
Green
In my dreams, your hair is green. I know it must be a symbol, but although I have read my Jung and my Freud, I cannot tell if that green is the color of life and health or of sickness and decay.
“Is everything alright?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately.”
“About what?”
“It’s hard to say.”
In my dreams you smell like an earthy mulch of damp leaves and rotting bark. And when I touch you, my hands come away covered in a dark loamy hummus that clings to the grooves and creases of my skin, your scent following me long after we part.
We sit beside each other in silence. Neither of us can remember who spoke last, but we know that things are not the way they used to be.
In my dreams, when I say, “I love you,” you answer with the sound of creaking branches, burrowing roots, and rustling leaves. Twigs snap. Beasts chatter and moan. Wind howls. But I see no shapes I recognize, no forms to help me discern where we are in relation to each other.
I wake each morning knowing that, for whatever reason, you are a little farther beyond me.
Stains
Cody wasn’t quick, but he wanted to make a name for himself.
The sidewalk beside the cemetery became a hazard for the kids late each summer when the mulberry trees along the fence began to shed their berries. The juice from the fallen fruit left dark stains that could ruin even old, dirty sneakers. The challenge was to make it through the minefield without stepping on a single berry. Of course, this became increasingly difficult as the season went on. The dark stains that annually spread across the sidewalk testified to the impossibility of the task.
Only the bravest and most determined could make it across. The passing cars left clear tracks in the road where their tires carried away the berries and their juices. So, if there was a break in the traffic, a quick kid could jump in the road and dash past the danger.
Cody didn’t see the green light down the block. Cody didn’t see the car heading right for him. But the driver saw Cody. With horn blaring and brakes screeching, the car spun wildly out of control and plowed into a tree.
But Cody couldn’t looked back. He just ran and ran and ran.
Missing (ii)
The florists along 28th were all closing up when you arrived, desperate for something with orchids, my favorite flower. This time, you would do things right.
“You’re not even going to ask me to stay?”
“Maybe this is a sign.”
You dashed into the Duane Reade on 7th for chocolate. What they lacked in quality, you made up for in quantity, grabbing armfuls of dark chocolate. You tapped your foot nervously while the cashier rang them up, then ran out of the store without taking your receipt.
“So this is goodbye?”
At 34th and 6th you got on the B train to Flatbush. The subway ride gave you time to think, focus, sort out every word. I know I messed up before, but I’m ready to love you like you deserve. Whatever it takes, I want to be with you.
You arrived at my door, bouquet in one hand, a bag of chocolate in the other. Reciting your plea one last time, you buzzed my apartment.
No answer.
The lights of New York are receding as the plane ascends. Los Angeles lies ahead. Sailing through the night, I am suspended between the past and the future. I am missing you.
Cascade
Tom saw the eastern portal ahead on t
he tracks and reached for the egg timer. His shoulders tensed. Twenty minutes. This was why he hated the direct to Seattle route: 7.79 miles of darkness, the longest tunnel in the country.
The train dove into the abyss.
The engine car had lights, of course, but outside he could see only the tracks immediately in front of him. And blackness. The tunnel hadn’t bothered him before his diagnosis, but now it was a reminder. He had no guarantee the tracks would continue, no guarantee the mountain wouldn’t collapse on him, no guarantee he would make it to the western portal.
Tom wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead when he saw that first grain of light ahead, and he didn’t care. He simply willed the train toward it.
Ding!
Twenty minutes had passed. Tom exhaled. He had reached the end of the tunnel. But as the train leapt out of the darkness, he was bewildered by what he saw. His windows were surrounded by a flurry of small, pink petals. They seemed to come from nowhere, cascading over the train and enveloping it in color as it sailed over the tracks.
Veil
Dora’s brother was a meanie who pushed her into the mud in her favorite pink dress. She was beneath the maple tree crying when she heard a whisper. “Psst, it’s safe up here.” A grubby little hand reached down and helped her climb into the tree. Todd was hiding because he had broken Bobby Flenderson’s brand new Louisville slugger. He was a bit of a klutz, but he knew how to climb trees. He understood how time and space could dissolve behind a veil of shifting, shimmering leaves. And as soon as Dora’s hand was in his, he knew that he never wanted to let it go.
They ran through fields, waded through streams, chased the breeze. They tripped along on raindrops and gathered stars to light the paths to each other. There were soft kisses, tender whispers in the night, thousands of rising and setting suns watched together.
“Dora?” A voice called from the bottom of the hill.
“Todd Henry Sheffield!”
Startled young eyes opened wide.
“I gotta go.”
“Me too.”
The veil opened. They scrambled out of the tree and went their separate ways, but not without a glance back at each other, wondering when they’d meet again.
Maple
Whenever he faced a problem he couldn’t solve, Collin went back to the beginning. After the doctor’s call, he knew there was only one course of action. First, he went into the living room and kissed his wife on the forehead, “I have some errands to run, but I’ll be back in a few hours. I love you.”
She looked up from her book and smiled. “Love you too.”
It was a short drive to the next town over. There, Collin came to a small house of painted brick. He opened the front door and walked through once familiar rooms, still in their same shapes, but filled by different lives. Out the back through the patio, he approached the old maple. He was taller now and could reach the lowest branch with ease. In a moment, he was among the leaves and boughs, his muscles recalling deep-rooted habits. He peeked out of the treetop high above the world. He found a childhood joy and a long-forgotten peace. The wind grew stronger, and lifted him out of the tree.
The telephone’s ringing woke Collin from a deep sleep.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick? This is Dr. Datar. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Ivy
She waited with her hand in the air so that he’d see her waving. Only he didn’t look back. The car ambled down the long gravel path and even paused before pulling into the street, but he never looked back.
Still, they were in love—they’d told each other so—and she would wait for him. She stood on the steps, her eyes rooted on the end of the drive both day and night. When she became too tired to stand any longer, she sat on the railing, leaned against the old brick walls of that house.
Friends came, begging her to come in or to come away, to give up her watching, but she would only shake her head and say, “He will come; he will come.” She did not move for friend or family. She did not move for heat or cold. She did not move when the creeping ivy coiled itself around her feet, reached up, embraced her like her lover used to. She waited.
One day, an old man came to the house and unlocked the door with a tarnished key. That night, with tears in his eyes, he burned the house down, ivy and all.
Flowers
Elsie usually didn’t like to see people on the anniversary. Unfortunately, someone had knocked and Arnold was out. She peaked through the curtains and saw a small group of kids standing on her porch. In truth, they were probably adults, but at her age, most people looked like kids. She cautiously opened the door but kept the screen shut tight. “Yes?”
“Sorry for disturbing you,” a girl at the front of the group said, “but we were wondering what these white flowers are that smell so wonderful.”
Elsie didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t planted flowers outside her house for forty years, not since they had lost Dorothy. “What white flowers?” she asked.
“These,” one of the others said, pointing.
Elsie opened the screen slightly and stuck her head outside. She saw them—lush, thriving bushes thickly covered in white flowers. She gasped. Eyes shining she said, “Why, those are azaleas.”
“Azaleas,” she said. “They’re lovely.” And with that the kids left, thanking Elsie as they went.
She stood in the doorway until they rounded the corner. Then she stepped outside. Elsie reached out to touch one of the bushes, making sure it was real. “Azaleas,” she whispered.
Woven
You asked what I was thinking, and I lied.
Walking beside you in the cool of autumn, I said I had work on my mind. In truth I was thinking about the tree in the chain-link fence. Planted too close together—over the years, bark has swallowed metal, tree has uprooted fence, and fence has stifled tree. Now the two are fused, inextricable. To separate them would be the destruction of both, but neither is what it was meant to be. I was thinking that is how we love each other. I don’t know whether I am the tree and you the fence or the other way around. But I am sure that there is more to love than that. More than what have.
But how could I tell you this? Hand in hand, how could I say that our life together has been nothing more than painful familiarity, that we are woven together, but have never been one? Ashamed to think so little of our thirty years, I kept my silence.
Perhaps that too is love. Or something less.
I asked what you were thinking. You said your neck was bothering you.
I kissed your cheek. We kept walking.
Chainsaw
I borrowed the chainsaw from the neighbor on one side and gasoline from the neighbor on the other side. I look up at the spreading green, which shades my head for the last time.
The tree was struck by lightning twenty years ago. In the fury of nature it had lost all its branches but one. “We should chop it down,” dad said.
“But it’s over sixty years old,” my mom said. “It was here when my grandfather built this house.”
“We could plant a new tree. Maybe a fruit tree . . .”
“My mother would disapprove,” she’d say.
“Your mother is dead.”
But mom would look out the window, sad and silent until dad gave up.
The charred, black pillar remained in the yard, like a shadow of death. Gradually, new shoots ventured out, and after a decade, there was shade in the yard again, where the ghosts of my ancestors sat on hot summer days.
The house is mine now, though it still doesn’t feel like it. Surrounded by the belongings of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, not yet dusty, I feel like I am trespassing on their graves. I cannot breathe in these shadows.
The chainsaw roars to life.
Leaves
“Maybe we were like the leaves,” you say, “only showing our true colors right before the end. They’re fiery and beautiful, but just the last gasp b
efore the end.”
We’re standing outside the cafe, figuring out how to say goodbye the last time. The air is as dry and as sharp as a snapped twig.
“We were like a leaf,” I say. “We died and fell a long time ago, but it was slowly and gently. Now we’re dry and crumbling, but the wind keeps picking us up and tossing us around. Sometimes it almost looks like we’re alive.”
You look at me with blank eyes. You don’t know whether I am being poetic or cruel. “Well. We had some good times, right?” My mouth stretches wide, but not exactly into a smile. You try again: “Remember that weekend in Vermont? The place in the mountains?”
“I try not to,” I say. “But I can’t help it.”
“Remember how we watched the leaves turn colors?”
It’s cold. I sigh and ask you why you’re doing this.
“I just don’t want to forget stuff like that. We had some good times, didn’t we?”
“We were a leaf,” I say. “We fell.”