2/3/20 – the matchmaker

Maryann could not keep a plant alive. Their leaves turned yellow and fell, leaving shoddy patchwork on the dining room table.

“You’re probably over-watering them,” Kendra said. “Or you could be under-watering them.”

“How about this one?” Maryann stroked one rubbery, variegated leaf. “Its leaves are already yellow.” Light from the wall-sized window fell like a sword across her face, and she squinted.

The small plant shop on the corner smelled of soil and sage and grew from the jungled mind of a woman named Blue who smelled of lavender. Tall and feathery as a Norfolk Island Pine, Blue dyed her dreadlocks green, and they hung just to her shoulders. She never said, Hello; only, Greetings. Her feet were bare, always, even now, in February.

“A Croton!” Blue trilled. She carried something short and spindly in a gray pot on her hip.

“If it’s already yellow, how will you know when you’re killing it?” Kendra asked.

Blue placed the short spindly plant by the cash register. “Who is speaking of killing plants?” she called. Her feet pattered toward them over the concrete. The bell over the door jangled as it opened and closed. “Greetings!” she called to a man in a furry hat.

Closer, Maryann noted that Blue’s large toe was wrapped in a Star Wars bandaid.

“They can hear you, you know,” she said to them. She leaned over and kissed the yellow blade of the Croton. “Now, what is this talk of carnage?”

Kendra pointed toward Maryann whose hands fell at her sides.

“I don’t think I’m a plant person,” Maryann said. “I kill everything. Not on purpose. I just… I don’t know how to keep them alive.”

“Nonsense, Honey. Everyone’s a plant person.” She cocked her head to the side and studied Maryann’s face. “Come here,” she said.

Blue wrapped one hand around Maryann’s wrist and pulled her closer.

Lavender. And something else: Lemon. Cedar.

Her hands on either side of Maryann’s face, Blue’s fingertips felt warm pressed against Maryann’s cheekbones. She exhaled slowly through her nose. She repositioned her fingers, moved them farther out, closer to Maryann’s ears.

Kendra coughed awkwardly.

Blue closed her eyes.

The man in the furry hat cleared his throat at the cash register.

Maryann shifted her focus left, then right, then up, finally settling on an overgrown vine clinging to the far wall.

“Okay,” Blue said. She pulled Maryann’s right hand into her left, laced her fingers through. “Come.” She smiled broadly, and the two women followed obediently to a shelf by the front window. “Tillandsia Streptophylla: The linguine plant.”

Its leaves, slightly hairy, curled like party ribbons and spilled over the small wicker basket containing it. It boasted no flower, no bright flashes of gold or amber, no particular aroma distinctly its own. Its green did not shine.

“An air plant,” Blue said. “This is your plant.” Again, she smiled. “Soak it upside down once a week — but never at night. That’s when it likes to breathe. Otherwise, it’s exactly as it needs to be. Let it.”

Maryann pressed one finger to a pale green leaf.

“It takes care of itself, Honey.” She tipped Maryann’s chin with her fingertips. “Do you understand?”

Maryann nodded, and her eyes filled.

“I thought you might.”

Blue pressed her hands together and bowed, her face as pleased as a matchmaker’s.

 

1/30/20 – no fascism.

A ghost hair stretched from somewhere behind her right temple to her left eye lashes. It slashed her purview with a blurry, crooked line. She’d forgotten about the gathering, four blocks from her house, and had taken the wrong exit. Traffic stalled between bars and convenience stores, a pizza shop, the contained center of a college campus, and a grocer selling Halal meats.

A young man, tall and lanky, wore red pants and a cowboy hat emblazoned with the American flag and lined with red, white, and blue sequins. It shimmered under a layer of glitter. Cartoonish sunglasses — also depicting the American flag — covered half of his face. She watched him stride by the grocer, tapping the glass absentmindedly. His mouth pulled into a straight line.

A middle-aged white couple in matching leather dress coats and brown shoes held hands as they crossed the street, aided by a security officer waving one hand and holding the other to say STOP.

A boy in a parka, no older than 18, held a sign on the corner. “NO FASCISM!” it read, in thick black block letters. He stood motionless, his face grim, one hand in the pocket of his parka. She watched him shiver in the cold. There would be more of him. Where are the rest of you? she said out loud through the window.

Someone honked. Another car honked in response. Soon, the line of cars, all pointed at the same 4-way intersection all honked like overlapping Morris Code messages. She bowed her head over the steering wheel and exhaled long and slow until her chest emptied.

Between a van and a nondescript sedan, a child’s red wagon sat parked and unattended. Red ball caps and beanies, scarves, and lap blankets, sat in tall piles, each boasting the short quip of the man in the suit making his way by motorcade through the streets of her city.

The boy with the sign waited. The young man in the cowboy hat disappeared into a sea of others.

She opened her glovebox and dug through the debris, past her secret cigarettes until her fingers closed around the lighter.

The air was chilly but not frigid when it hit her face. It took four casual steps to the wagon and five pulls on the lighter to spark a flame. The lap blankets were felt and caught easily. Hungry flames ate fabric and propaganda. No one notice. When the world is on fire, what’s a few more flames?

The boy with the sign nodded his approval. She flashed him the peace sign on her way back to the car. The crackle of the flames only audible to her.

1/29/20 – sticky note

I’ve got sticky notes where my thoughts should be. Nothing is permanent.

I leave them on the bathroom mirror, and they lose traction in the steam.

I leave them on my computer screen, and they turn upside down, then fold in half, then disappear all together, turning up months later in crumpled knots between couch cushions or under the bed.

I leave them on the dashboard of my car, and the messages they contain bleach out in the sun. There, but not there.

The fancier the color, the less likely the content will stay long. An unassuming pale yellow would have such staying power if it weren’t for glue that never holds.

 

1/27/20 – banana bread

“I think I’ve started wearing life on my hips.” She stood in the dining room and tugged at her shirt, tugged at her sleeves, tugged at the collar.

“Maybe it’s all the banana bread,” he said over the top of the newspaper. Always practical. Steam from his coffee spiraled like a question mark over his head. He never saw her metaphors.

(Although, it was true: She did like banana bread.)

But she had always liked banana bread. “It’s not the banana bread,” she said. “There’s nothing new about my banana bread habit.” She sat in the chair across the table from him, pulled on one boot and then the other. Folded in half like that, her breath caught. Air was not the only thing caught at her sternum. Nothing flowed anymore. It clustered and globbed.

“Menopause is new.” He folded the newspaper until it lay flat on the table. “Women gain weight when they reach menopause.”

She pressed her hands into her belly — soft — uncomfortably so. Her shoulders hunched.

Everything felt heavy. Everything felt full — loaded — and she was under it. It had not felt this way when she was 20. Not when she was 30. Not when she was 40. Only now. It was as if age piled weighty tomes of bullshit on a shelf, higher and higher, until the bulk tipped the whole thing over. She lay beneath the rubble: Buried.

He raised his eyebrows at her, pursed his lips. “I can see you’re being dramatic,” he said. “The face you’re making is the face you make when you are being dramatic.”

The oven timer dinged from the kitchen. The banana bread was ready.

 

 

1/26/20 – hubris 2: wreckage

[Link to hubris 1]

The boy with the feathered hair climbed into the silver truck with the maroon stripe. “Don’t fucking ask,” he said to his father.

His father said nothing.

They drove in silence out of the parking lot. Geese gathered on the pond beside the school, everything muted behind a veil of fog.

The boy reached across his father’s chest and with a clenched fist pounded the horn five staccato blasts, timed in unison with his words:

“I!

Hate!

All!

Those!

Fuckers!”

Startled, the geese ascended en masse from the pond, and beat black-tipped wings across the road.

“Put your seatbelt on,” his father said.

The boy did. He settled into his seat and watched the landscape, lined by clouds and mist, glide past the window.

At the 4-way stop, they should have turned right, but they turned left. No one spoke.

A white farmhouse, chewed by time and neglect, leaned left. It appeared to hobble and kneel on one knee, its shoulders heavy with story. The front door hung open and on one hinge. No glass panes remained whole in any window. Raccoons and coyotes left their mark.

This is where the boy with his feathered hair and his father turned in.

They came at least once each month and picked through the wreckage, looking for something to salvage.

“The ground will take it soon enough,” the boy’s father said, “but there’s always something left behind.”

1/25/20 – delete

She had a faulty shame trigger. It tripped without reason, all day. At each pull, the kickback sent her tumbling into the nearest shadow, pulling her knees to her chin, and waiting for the world to forget.

“Forget what?” he said, leaning over her shoulder.

She flinched. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.

He squinted at the computer screen. “I guarantee nobody noticed her to begin with. Nobody notices a fucking thing.”

She closed the laptop decisively. “God, you’re nosy,” she told him.

He shuffled into the kitchen with bare feet and scratched the back of his head.

She watched him pour water into a glass and chug it over the sink, pour another, and chug it again.

“I’m just saying nobody notices.” He spit into the sink.

“I don’t like it when you read my stuff before I’m ready.”

“Before you’re ready for what?”

“For it to be read.”

He opened the refrigerator, and the light turned his face merengue. “Okay.”

“I have to work it out for myself first,” she continued.

He pulled a carton of eggs from the bottom shelf. “How long have these been in here?”

“I have to have it sorted out in my head first.” She opened the laptop again.

He returned to the dining room table where she worked, motioned to the eggs.

“A week, I guess,” she said.

The cursor blinked. It winked. Her words looked childish.

“Criticism before I’ve put things in order feels like a tornado,” she mumbled. “It pulls up all the roots.”

Then she “selected all” and hit delete.

 

1/24/20 – no.

Were she a filmmaker, cameras would follow the sad heroine down the length of a long wall of windows. One at a time, the sad heroine would snap blinds closed, closed, and then closed again, the smack of aluminum, broadcasting concentric, echoing circles of emptiness.

But she was not a filmmaker.

There were no cameras, only one pencil, and so she scribbled “No. No. No.” down the white painted door frame between the kitchen and the dining room.

No.

A reminder.

No.

As if she would forget.

No.

She wasn’t sure why, except the world outside felt unsafe, unpredictable, and inhospitable. “No” felt like shelter. It had a roof and four walls, a sturdy, heavy door. “No” fit neatly in her back pocket. “No” had an airbag and a safety net. “No” left no question unanswered.

No.

She turned off the lights and closed the door.

 

1/23/20 – gravity

She would not say it drove her to drink, but the topsy-turvy, crooked-teeth manner of framed art on his walls made her question many things, not the least of which was gravity itself. If the magnetic pull of the earth’s core were even, why would they not hang in steady lines, parallel with the floor? She frowned when she looked at them.

Socks scattered across hardwood in the living room. Shirts hung, defeated, over the couch and two kitchen chairs. Papers with crumpled edges leaned like towers on the piano top. Dishes — she would not speak of them — wore their shame on their proverbial sleeves. The countertops were absolutely sick with them.

Even the dog seemed disheveled, lopsided, his ears not quite right.

The entire house, she imagined, had settled atop an indecisive sinkhole. The shifting ground beneath could not figure quite yet whether or not it was hungry, but something rumbled nevertheless.

The jigsaw puzzle on the table lay unfinished. “You know,” she began, “a thing like that cannot be finished in a place like this.”

He grunted. His mouth pulled into a firm, upside down U as he leaned over the table sorting puzzle pieces in a cardboard box.

“Here,” she said, reaching over his shoulder. Her long, shiny black hair (so thin and straight) fell like a curtain over his left cheek. She pulled a piece with three prongs and a peculiar corner out of a shallow pile and snapped it confidently into place. “There.”

He grunted again, pulled the piece out, and returned it to the pile. A long, thin strand of black hair stuck in his eyebrow and hung to his shoulder.

She clucked her tongue. “Impossible,” she said.

1/22/20 – cleopatra 3: wild goats

[link to cleopatra 1] [link to cleopatra 2]

Grandmother wore a straw hat — extra large and with a floppy brim — when working in the garden. She knelt in the dirt with her rump — also extra large — in the air and picked at the weeds beneath the beans.

“Girls!” she called, her voice muffled by effort and the handkerchief around her neck, “Come get these weeds!”

Olivia stopped at a cluster of tomato plants, bent low until the leaves tickled her nose, and inhaled deeply.

With the girls on either side of her, Grandmother instructed, “Make sure you get the root.” She jammed her thumb and two fingers into the dirt at the base of a green shoot, then wiggled it back and forth until it slid free, its long white root exposed and caked with soil. “That’s lambsquarters,” she said. “Throw these in the bucket.” She nodded to a 1-gallon ice cream bucket between two rows of beans. “We’ll eat them.”

A boy’s voice carried from across the street. “Buttmunch!” A door slammed shut. A second boy spilled out of the door holding a large stick over his head. The door slammed again behind him.

Lynn scowled at Olivia and nodded toward the uprising.

“Don’t give those boys none of your mind,” Grandmother said, calmly.

The boys, brothers Carlyle and Will Derick, banged sticks against tree trunks to pass the time. Their faces were dirty and their clothes ripped. They were quick with the middle finger, and their backyard, as many guessed, was likely filled with all the things in the neighborhood that went missing, including, most recently, Olivia and Lynn’s cat.

“I hate them,” Olivia muttered into the dirt.

“‘Nobody’s got a thumb on those boys.” Grandmother shook her head and adjusted her hat. “They run like wild goats.”

Lynn sat back on her haunches and wiped her face. “They have Lola. I know they do.”

“We don’t know that,” Grandmother said. She sat back, too, and grunted with the effort. “That Lola always had a mind to run. She’ll be back.” She patted Lynn’s knee. “Now come on. Yank at the roots. A little work makes you forget.”

Olivia narrowed her eyes and peered across the street. The boys peered back. She tossed one lambsquarter into the ice cream bucket and raised her middle finger high over her head.

The boys raised theirs in return.

1/21/20 – camouflage

One – One thousand – Two – One thousand – Three – One thousand – Four – One thousand

The clock etched invisible lines above the boy’s head. It was a gamble to wait him out. An appointment reminder dinged on her laptop — one hour. She timed her prompts by five minutes.

Wild animals only attack when cornered, her supervisor had said. It was an insensitive comparison.

The boy filled his chair. He was nearly twice her size. He stared at his shoes: A protest — a peaceful one for now. She opened the classroom door before the next prompt. An open door says: You are not trapped.

He wore a green camouflage hunting jacket. The room had light blue walls, and they sat at a dark brown table. I can see you, she thought.

Five minutes: “Once you’ve completed problems 1 through 5, we’ll be done”

His shoulders tensed. His ears grew red.

She typed the alphabet on her laptop, over and over, staring at long, connected lines of nonsense. She kept him in her peripheral vision along with the white board behind him and the clock. Its hands pushed time without pause. In the quiet, she heard the tick.

The ones who are hardest to love are the ones who need it the most. She’d read that in a meme at least once every three months for the last ten years. She tried to imagine him smaller, younger, with a lisp perhaps. She imagined him at age 6 in a dinosaur turtleneck and two missing front teeth. He held something small — a matchbox car — in his hand.

She imagined him waiting by a window with a packed bag for a father who forgot again and again.

Eight – One thousand – Nine – One thousand – Ten – One thousand – Eleven – One thousand.