"The Pepper Plant"

 

Eddi was twelve weeks into the pregnancy when she bought the pepper plant.

"I feel like I need the practice," she told the clerk at the garden center.

She actually felt that she needed some kind of distraction, something that wasn't a baby book or a question about her child-rearing plans from an eager co-worker that would leave her worrying away the rest of the afternoon. And she had always loved the taste and the color of hot peppers. She took the plant home, gave it new soil, and applied an Epsom salt solution to its leaves.

Once the plant, a cayenne, had produced several fruit, Eddi snipped one of the peppers and sliced off the tip. She was well into the second trimester by that point. She brought the piece to her mouth and began to nibble on it. Immediately she wanted to cry.

The burn of it was horrible, nothing like she remembered or had expected. Her stomach had felt like a minefield flooded with acid throughout the previous months, but she had still hoped to be able to enjoy some of what she had worked so hard to grow.

She called her mother.

"I can't do this," Eddi wailed into the phone, "I don't know what I was thinking. I can't do this."

"Do what?" her mother said. "Honey, is this about the baby?"

"I just wanted to eat a pepper," Eddi said.

She couldn't stand to look at the pepper plant the next morning, and she was hardly able to look at it the day after that. She did, however, check on it three days later. Its leaves were drooping. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she whispered as she silently urged the water to fill the watering can. It didn't matter that she couldn't eat the peppers; it was still her plant. Yet she wasn't as worried as she thought she should've been. Somewhere deep inside of her, a voice was saying, It's all right, it's all right.

"Sometimes on Those Summer Nights"

 

Sometimes on those summer nights, among all the shouts from the neighbors playing bag toss games in their driveways and the songs that fell in pitch as cars drove past the house, he would catch the sound of someone crying. He checked out the window a few times and once in the held-breath stillness of night even stepped barefoot on the lawn, but he never saw anybody. The only figure of any note was that of the tree, which stood in the middle of the yard, sticky with the sap that had built up inside it over the course of the spring and that was now escaping through cracks in the bark, unable to be contained any longer.

"What Are You Afraid Of?"

 

"It's the weirdest thing," said the oldest of the three rabbits. "They make these hard ground pathways for themselves, and they never step off of them, just follow them everywhere. When they're younger, they'll play in the grass, but the older ones--you almost never see that."

"Maybe they go blind as they grow up," said the youngest through the blades of grass that he had stuffed into his mouth. "Need the hard ground to know where to go."

"Or maybe they're afraid of what's out there," whispered the middle rabbit. The oldest turned to see him and would've sworn that he was just sitting still, listening to what the wind had to say for the evening, except that he follow the middle one's sideways stare and saw at the end of it a human, standing not five rabbits' length away, at the edge where the grass met solid ground.

"I don't like it," the middle rabbit said.

The oldest held still for a moment. Then he wrinkled his nose. "Why not?" he asked. "It's on the pavement. It won't come any closer." He lowered his head and joined the youngest in the task of eating.

"It's trying to hide its eyes now," the middle rabbit said in more urgent tones.

The oldest and the youngest glanced up. The human was holding a small rectangle in front of its face."Weird," said the youngest.

"It's still not coming any closer," the oldest said.

Later, the oldest rabbit figured that the human must have been able to hear him. That was why it put its foot on the grass.

"Run!" the oldest rabbit squeaked. The three dashed for the nearest bushes, scared to wonder what else the evening held in store.

"Snugglewood"

 

Person 1: "Hey, you want some wood?"

Person 2: "..."

1: "Look, Snugglewood's on sale."

2: "Sugar plum, it's always on sale. It's just not legal to pay for it outside of certain parts of Nevada."

1: "Why do I have the feeling that 'Snugglewood' was someone's euphemistic pet name for part of the body?"

2: "I don't know. Possibly because we already implied something like that just two seconds ago? Possibly because your mind thinks in weird euphemisms all the time? I don't know."

1: "What? Weird euphemisms?"

2: "I told you I was going to run to the corner and grab some eggs and you, like, died laughing for a half hour."

1: "I was just wondering whose you were going to grab."

[pause]

1: "I think a product name like 'Fucksticks' would help them sell a lot more firewood."

2: "Okay, going inside the store now. And I'm going to check the price of milk, too, if you think you can handle it."

1: [snicker]

2: "Yep. Definitely not getting any wood tonight, that's for sure."

"Dear as Pepper"

Today's post is based on an old Italian folktale called "Dear as Salt."

The wise woman left her cabin in the heart of the deep, living forest and traveled to the castle. There she found the prince, seated at a long table on top of a dais, celebrating his wedding feast.

She gave him a cloth bag full of black and red peppercorns.

"Pepper?" the prince asked, holding the bag open, sniffing. He tugged the bag's drawstrings and gave woman the most graceful smile that his confusion would let him manage. "To be honest, I would have expected mushrooms, or some other forest delicacy. Or at least salt. That has some value. We use that in everything."

The wise woman nodded. "Salt is simple and practical, a good foundation," she said. "But pepper. Pepper adds depth. Bite. Salt stands in agreement with each ingredient and makes each dish what it's meant to be. Pepper makes the whole dish something more." The wise woman bowed and turned to take her leave; the party was no place for her. "Go a year without pepper, and your bride there will say everything is seasoned pleasantly enough," she called out as she walked through the long hall. "But how long can a person look forward to dining on food that's merely pleasant?"

She didn't have to turn around to know that the prince's young bride was watching her leave, and that both her meal and the prince's remained untouched.

"The Pursuit of Happiness"

An open condom box, discarded in the grass near the sidewalk.

In my pocket, along with all of the other junk I carry with me daily, I have a fortune from a fortune cookie. It reads, "Happiness is not a reward; it is a consequence." There are consequences for your actions. I like this fortune. According to its wisdom, happiness can result from any action undertaken, no matter where on the moral scale, the line between good and bad, that action falls.

In theory, even littering can lead to happiness.

"5:21"

 

There was an old woman in the back of the electronics department, moving along the shelves of clock radios like a cursor moving along lines of text. When Frank got there, he saw that she was changing the time on all the clocks to 5:21 p.m.

He brought his careful shuffle to a standstill a few feet away from her and cleared his throat. "Ma'am?" he asked. "Can I help you with anything?"

"No," she said with a quick smile before continuing to the next clock, "I'm quite fine, thanks."

Frank nodded. He started to turn away but then swiveled back around on his heels. "If I can ask," he began.

"I'm dealing with something," the old woman told him. This time she didn't look up.

"Right," said Frank. He watched her work at her task. The finger that held down each clock's buttons seemed to tremble under the weight of whatever was motivating her to do this. 

"Ten-ten," he murmured to her when she was at the last clock on the wall. That made her stop. "That's the magic time," he said while she stared at him. "Whenever you see clocks in a store or in a catalog or whatever, they're usually going to be set to ten-ten. I guess it looks more natural or something, I don't know."

"Well. Never noticed that," the woman said. She returned her attention to the clock and pressed one of its buttons until its glowing red lines aligned in the shapes of the digits 5, 2, and 1.

"My manager's probably going to make me change that," Frank said, even though he doubted Shawn would notice.

"Probably," the woman said. Her task complete, she faced Frank with her hands folded in front of her belly and a smile fighting to take hold on her lips, which confused Frank, as the tears swelling in her eyes suggested that that smile had no business even trying. "Still," she said. "I'd like to see how long we can keep these like this, if that's all right."

"Doesn't bother me any," said Frank.

The old woman nodded and patted Frank on the shoulder as she moved to walk past him. "Maybe I'll go home and set my clocks to ten-ten," she told him. "See if there's any magic in that magic time of yours after all." She left Frank lingering in that instant. Even years later, Frank thought back to that night at the store when an old woman came in and locked the clocks on the shelves at 5:21 p.m. The moment seemed, at least in memory, to last forever.

"The Wind"

 

I heard kids' voices come through the window on the back of the summer-day wind. When I got up, though, and pushed back the curtain, I saw no one outside.

Then I heard one of the voices again. "Shit," a boy said, "did you see that?"

"See what?" asked another boy. Still no faces appeared.

There was a pause before the first boy's voice returned with an answer. "Nothing," he said. "I swear I saw the old man's ghost," he added, speaking more quietly.

"You saw the wind move the curtain," said yet another boy I wasn't able to see. "Come on. I hate this place." The voices disappeared then as they always did, cut away by the wind that moved between us, as thin as a razor, separating the world into two.

"Blueberries"

 

[A double post for the day--making up for missing Wednesday's entry.]

After sweeping all the shards and dust from the floor, Ian hurried the ceramic angel and the wing he had broken off of its back into the forest behind the house, where the dirt near a low-growing cluster of blueberry bushes was still soft and bare, untouched by moss or grass. With the wing as his shovel, Ian dug a hole. The pale cast of the figure's material clawed like a scream, a sharp white next to the dirt's darkness when he laid the angel down, but he didn't know what else to do.

When he finished, he looked at the blueberries. Handful by small handful, he filled the pockets of his jackets. He didn't want any; he just needed the excuse. One of the blueberries burst. He glanced at the crevice between his forefinger and his thumb, at the skin where the purple mark was beginning to spread.

A shout split the air like a crack of thunder. Ian turned around. His father was home.

"Flashlight"

 

When the storm knocked out the power, Edna found herself thinking how glad she was that she had remembered to place the flashlight on the side table, which she happened to be sitting by at the time. Then, as soon she turned the flashlight on, she heard the tapping start inside the wall at her back. She was suddenly less glad. 

She swung the beam around until it landed on the wall. "Hey! Turn that thing off!" squeaked a voice somewhere behind the plaster.

Edna panicked and did what she was told.

"Seriously, what's the point of us fixing the lights, now, if you've already got a light to shine?" The voice was so small and light that Edna thought it would echo inside a teacup.

"Who's there?" she whispered.

"Oh, no one," came the voice. "Just give us a second, and..." Instantly, the power returned; the room was flooded with lamplight that drowned the flashlight's beam. 

"Hello?" Edna called, her own voice trembling. But no one replied. She turned in her chair and knocked on the wall, but no answer came. She sat for a bit after that, pondering what to do.

And then she unplugged the lamp.

"The Nut House"

 

He came into the kitchen while she was seated at the table and said, "I've got to know."

She closed her book on her lap. "Are you sure?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I've just--I want us to be excited about this together."

"You're sure?"

He nodded again.

"Okay," she said, letting her smile come out of hiding. She eased herself up from the chair. "I got you something that I actually bought to give you whenever you asked. Or, if you didn't ask," she added, tiptoeing toward the closet, "I was just going to give it to you after." She took a bag from the lowest shelf, reached inside for its contents, and passed him his gift.

He studied the antique metal sign.

"I don't get it," he eventually admitted. "Are you telling me it's furry? Or crazy? Or..."

"Use your sense of humor," she told him.

He looked at the sign a while longer, until she finally saw the light break across his face. "Oh," he said, and then, "Oh," with a smile. "A boy," he whispered. "It's a boy."

"Sour Times"

 

"I often wonder," he said to the bartender, who looked young, even in the bar light, "who it was that first came up with the idea to put lemons in water."

"Really? Do you really often wonder that?" she asked. Her eyebrows were doing as much of the asking as her voice and her words were.

"I'm very drunk," he said, sipping the water. 

"I know," she said. She smiled at him. "What I like to think," she said, tapping the bar counter, "and this is by no means historically true, but what I like to think is that someone decided to take all the goodness of water and add something sour to it, so that whenever someone drank it, the water tasted so much better whenever you got a taste of it through all that sourness." She dropped her bar rag onto the counter with a sodden slap and wiped away a pool of nearly melted ice. "Sounds like I'm a romantic or something, huh," she said. "But I think that sounds better than saying people did it so they wouldn't get scurvy, don't you think?"

He looked down at his glass. He wanted to ask what she could possibly know. But by the time he looked up again, she was at the other end of the bar, pouring whiskey for someone with a face even older than his.

"Circular"

 

[Two other influences on today's post: 1) an image I saw, very similar to this photomicrograph, of bone tissue; and 2) Inger Christensen's incredible poem "alphabet," which I've checked out from the library.]

bones and branches, they both exist

with their circles of cells swirling

whirling in a time-wrought wind

round go the centuries of record

softly the days play a song

"Discovery"

 

I sat next to an old woman at the bus stop. She had a book in her lap but was holding it there with the back cover facing up and the spine turned toward the street, so I couldn't see what she was reading. A bookmark was keeping its vigil about two-thirds of the way through.

"Must be a good book," I said to her, pointing. "Looks like you're almost done with it."

The woman smiled and said, "Oh, it's unbelievable. Very informative. Some books just, I don't know, wake you up, make you realize how much more you have to learn about the world, you know?" She turned her book over and showed me a dictionary's front cover. When the bus finally came, I let her board first.

"The Echo Tree"

 

[A note about this post: When I began writing it, I had an idea of how the story would end. As I continued writing, I liked that ending less. I might be able to fix this, but I couldn't in the time I had today. So below is what I was able to get down of this story.]

The Saturday night before classes were set to start, everyone else on our floor left for a party at one of the nearby apartments, which meant that it was just Lori and I who went out to see the echo tree.

The echo tree was on the west side of campus, near the intersection of Howard and Taylor. It looked like an ordinary tree, except for one abruptly terminated growth about five feet up the trunk. That looked like the remaining nub of a severed branch, except that it was hollow at its core, leading a cavity within the trunk and giving the impression that the tree was whistling, or puckering up for a kiss.

Lori tilted her head as she examined it. "'I'm a little teapot, short and stout,'" she sang.

"Oh, please don't let this tip over and-or pour anything out," I said. "I don't care if it really is empty inside. It's still pretty big."

Lori snickered. "Hey, thanks again for coming out to see this with me."

"No problem. Like I said, I was curious, too. And parties--not so much my thing." Which was true, and which made my assignment to a roommate like Lori, a stranger until yesterday who seemed to feel the same way that I did about what the resident director had labeled "social endeavors," all the more surprising.

"I know," she told me. "I mean, I know shouldn't be shocked, but I am, I can't believe how many people are spending their first weekend at school doing who knows what stupid things that they won't even remember. I mean, new-found freedom and all, I guess, but...."

"Freedom, and learning who you are," I said, "not to mention the fact that we're about to spend our Saturday night talking to a tree, so if anyone's wandering the realm of stupid...."

The story behind the echo tree was that whenever someone spoke into its hollow branch, the tree spoke back--made sense, given the tree's name. The thing about the echo tree, though, was that what it said back was never the same as what had been said to it moments before. There were all sorts of theories as to what was actually happening: that there were pipes that ran underground between the tree and apartments across the street; that one of the frat delegations had slipped some kind of device inside and passed down the secret from one batch of conscripts to the next; that some of the city's homeless, known to shelter in the underpasses, were having some fun at the students' expense. The only one with any answers to share was the tree, and the tree offered only what it had been given to say.

"When Your Petals Fall Away"

 

[Finally started reading A Game of Thrones not too long ago, and was reading it before making tonight's post. I think it put me in a certain mindset...] 

The girl behind the flower stall, who smelled as sweet as honey and smiled like a summer day, watched the old woman in the brown robe edge through the crowd, basket swinging from her arm like a chain, and head straight for the dark-haired man in velvet, the one the flower girl had thought was walking toward the tulips. "Care for something exotic for your kitchen, good sir?" the woman asked when she was in front of him.

The flower girl watched as the man peered first into the basket and then at the crone, his smile thin, his eyes narrowed in confusion. "Good woman," he said, "forgive me for being so frank, but those are the ugliest old roots I've ever seen."

"Not the first time I've heard that," said the crone, smiling, "but if you'll allow me a second, you'll see that those ugly old outsides hide a lovely inside." While the man looked on, she reached for a root and broke off one of its swollen branches. From behind her baskets, the flower girl saw the color of the root's flesh--a keen yellow, like that of autumn leaves--and caught its peppery scent. "A lovely inside," the woman repeated, "not to mention--absolutely delicious." She angled her smile at the man with a knowing nod. "If I may be so frank."

The man offered a chuckle and a large brass coin in exchange for one of the roots and departed without a second glance at the flower stall. "You must do well at the market with your wares," the flower girl said curtly to the old woman once the man was gone.

The woman turned to her with a smile so toothy that the plainness of it was hard to behold. "I do fair at market, yes," said the crone with a shrug. "But I do better afterward, with the men who want to know what else those ugly old outsides are hiding." She tossed the broken root at the flower girl, who caught it just before it struck her face. "Something to remember later, child, when your petals there all fall away." And with that, the old woman left, calling out to another man, "Care for something exotic, good sir?" while the flower girl cast her eyes downward and studied her roses.

"Less than Nothing"

 

It was another morning in the hospital, and thoughts were coming and going through April's mind like insects flitting around a leaf, or nervous little birds hopping along branches. Some she understood why she had them. Like the one about the day she learned about mass versus weight in one of her early science classes. She could see the old memory play on a screen somewhere inside her head, see the pug-nosed boy sitting next to her--was his name Roger? or maybe Greg?--punch her arm and declare for all the students to hear that there was no difference between mass and weight when it came to April; she had a lot of both. And then she could follow the thought back around and recall what had brought it to mind in the first place. In this case, it was because she had glanced at her wrist. It was so thin now that her plastic ID bracelet, fastened on the last hole as it was, kept sliding down onto her hand.

Moments like those were becoming rarer, April could tell. Most of her thoughts arrived and left without giving any indication why they came. There were holes in her memory that she wished she could avoid. Inevitably, needing to know why her mind had chosen to drift this way or that, she would go a few steps backward along the path that her thoughts had taken and stumble. It was almost too much. At times, when she was aware that something was missing but couldn't say what, she imagined herself losing her mind at the same rate she was losing fat tissue and bone mass, imagined the subtraction of her memories from the world occurring alongside the depletion of substance from her body. In those moments, she saw herself at the end shrinking and shriveling beneath her blankets until she weighed nothing and then, as her last thought dissipated, shrinking even further until she weighed less than nothing, becoming a tiny disruption in the air, a bit of negative space that tugged at the people who passed the hospital bed and made them pause for a second, wondering if there was anything there that should have mattered.

An image of a bird flickered across the television screen. It sang its song and darted away, the camera following its flight. April had known once what kind of bird it was by that song. She would have sworn on it.

"Runaways"

 

Moira swore that no one could have heard her crawl out her bedroom window. Her parents certainly wouldn't have. They never listened, just called instructions to her while they balanced their checkbooks or filled out forms for work, telling her to clean her room, or do her homework, or change bratty little Liam's diaper, though at least they never told her to change Grandma's. But it was just an endless sea of chores with them. When she sneaked through her window that night, it was as if she broke through the surface of the ocean, although she made her escape very quietly, taking care to avoid even breathing too heavily.

Which was one reason she was so surprised to find the ash tree from her front yard, labeled by the people from Public Works with a tag that read "65," following her down the sidewalk.

Moira had sat in Sixty-Five's shade enough times to feel certain that the tree meant her no harm. It was the only fact that she felt certain of when, hearing its roots tap their way over the cement like the feet of a thousand tiny insects, she turned around. She made a few stuttering attempts at a sentence before whispering, "You're not supposed to be here," thinking both of her belief that she had left the house in secret and of the tendency of trees to remain in fixed locations.

Sixty-Five remained a few feet away. It tipped the uppermost part of its trunk to the right as if asking a question.

"Trees don't move!" Moira hissed. Sixty-Five replied by slowly waving its branches, giving the impression that a small wind was stirring them.

"You know what I mean," Moira said. "Trees don't get up and walk. They have roots."

A larger branch swung around until it was pointing at her chest.

"Me? I don't have roots. I have my family. Not like they're going to notice I'm gone or anything. Not till they need the toilet cleaned or whatever."

Somehow the branch curved inward so that Sixty-Five appeared to be pointing at itself.

"Trust me, they'll see you're missing," said Moira. "But I'm not as big as you are. And no one there cares about me."

As soon as the words left her mouth, Moira saw Sixty-Five's leaves droop. At first she thought that the tree was tired of arguing, which was confusing, as she always imagined that a good shade tree was nothing if not patient. Then Sixty-Five began to back away, and she realized the weight of what she had said. All those days before, with Sixty-Five looming high above her while she sat in the yard, Moira had assumed not that the tree cared about her, but that the tree was just being a tree, indifferent to anything she did or wanted.

She had made similar assumptions about her parents.

Once she and Sixty-Five were back in the yard, Moira dropped to her knees and patted the dirt back in place over its roots. It turned out, as she saw the tree's wings unfold like moth wings in the moonlight, that the work wasn't so bad after all.

"You and I"

 

If you're reading this, I'm sorry to scare you, though chances are that if your day has been anything like mine--let's be honest, you've probably pissed your pants at least once. At this point, I'm not ashamed. Because if you're reading this, there's a small chance that you and I are the last two people alive in the world.

There's nobody else here. No one is answering the phone, and the websites I visit haven't changed since yesterday. I have a pedometer. It tells me that I walked eight miles through my town today. Eight empty miles, covered without anyone else coming outside to answer the door or silence the car alarms that I kept setting off or see why there was some crazy girl walking down the middle of the street with a baseball bat and a chef's knife, crying until her lungs were in shreds.

What you see above is the one thing I've found that might be a clue. Someone left that camera there in the middle of the sidewalk. The view screen or whatever it's called was open on the other side. I think someone recorded video.

I have the camera with me. For what it's worth, I left a note on the door of the house next to where I found it. I'm not a total savage--not yet, anyway. But if you're out there, please let me know. I don't care where in the world you are; when I take a look at whatever's on the memory card, I don't want to be alone.  

"Pick-It Fences"

 

"See, there's that whole saying about how good fences make good neighbors. The thing is, though," John said to the giantess with a nervous cough of a laugh, "that you've gone and, well. You've decided to use our fence to make your toothpicks."

John looked at his new neighbor, all the way up at her, twenty feet above him as she stood. She had been using what was once the corner fence post to work either a large head of broccoli or a small tree free from the space between two incisors. "Seems that I have," she said. "Does that bother you?" she asked, leaning forward and blocking out a small part of the sun. Her shadow easily crossed the space that the fence had previously divided. All along his back, the summer heat pressed against him and pounded on his skin like boulders unleashed in an avalanche, but in front of him, her shadow and his forearm were nearly touching.

Yes, he wanted to say, it bothered him, very much.