"The Treatment"

 

There was no building next to the parking lot. The only hint of structure came from the bushes planted in a line along each edge of the pavement, forming a perimeter. Errant branches like wires extended from the plants, tangling and knotting into each other and creating the rails of a botanical fence, a reminder to any visitors of the areas they may not visit. Something about it made a sliver at the center of Julie's core slow, just as her car slowed to take the right turn onto the driveway.

Julie urged the steering wheel around, returned the car to the mouth of the parking lot, and made another right turn, back onto the street she'd been traveling moments before. 

"What the hell?" Rachel said from the passenger's seat, pointing. "My appointment's and ten. And there's paperwork I've got to do."

"We have time," said Julie. "It's just--I want to get a cup of coffee with you before you go in. Can we do that? Do you mind?"

Rachel said, "Coffee. You really think my stomach can handle coffee right now?"

And Julie's hands, her knuckles night-white, twisted around the leather grip of te steering wheel as if she were kneading dough. "I know," she said. "I'm sorry."

The scenery outside, the trees and lampposts, old with all they'd seen, crossed Rachel's reflection in the window. "Tea," she said. "I can have some tea. Toast might be a good idea. Maybe an English muffin, I don't know." She shrugged. "I really don't knwo how this is going to go, you know?"

"I know," Julie said. "I'm sorry." No matter how many times she said them, the words never could make up for everything that was wrong.

The chairs in the diner booth had padded back and flat, hard seats--a little bit comfortable, but not entirely. Julie asked the waitress for coffee and, thinking of what Rachel had said in the car, an English muffin. Rachel ordered tea and an almond bear claw and lifted one of the short glasses of water brought for them to her cracked, grey lips.

"Why not, right?" Rachel said after the waitress departed. "I mean, I'm probably not going to be in the mood for a pastry afterward."

"It's whatever you want right now." Julie's smile was a thin film stretched across the surface of her face. "As long as it doesn't hurt you." The waitress came back with a mug of thick black coffee, topped with an iridescent sheen, for Julie and, for Rachel, a cup of tea.

They were seated at a table so wide that, if they were to try, they hardly would have been able to reach their arms across it. Except for a few stains and a chip that revealed layers of wooden pressboard, the tabletop was white, reflective despite the matte finish of its coating. It bounced cold morning light onto Rachel's skin as she rested her head atop her hand. Her skin bounced the light right back.

"You're having a pretty rough time with this," she said.

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"If you say you're sorry one more time, I swear, I'm going to tell the cancer fairy to fucking visit you next."

"I'm scared," Julie said. The waitress returned. For what felt like a long time afterward, the English muffin and the bear claw sat on their plates between Julie and Rachel like two lonely islands in a hopelessly pale sea.

Julie reached out from her continent first. "I'm a horrible friend," she said.

"You'd be a horrible friend if you weren't afraid." Rachel pulled the bear claw closer to her and broke off a piece. "If you were happy about all of this? Then you'd be a horrible friend."

"I should be happy," said Julie. "You're getting treatment," she added when Rachel's eyebrows rose. "You have a chance to get cured. Like, completely cured. And I'm just sitting here thinking, 'Oh, but I don't know, I don't really get it.'"

"It's experimental. It's weird. Like I said, I have no idea how this is going to go."

"Then why aren't you worried? Why am I the only one freaking out right now?"

"Because your freakout's big enough to cover both of us." Rachel waited until Julie smiled and began to butter her muffin before she continued. "You know I'm terrified," she said.

"I know," said Julie.

"It's just that, more than that, I'm tired. Tired of being sick, you know? Tired of being tired, that's what they say."

"I know," said Julie.

For a while, they both looked out the window and ate in silence.

"It doesn't seem fair," Julie eventually said, "that you have to go through something so strange all alone."

This time, Rachel bridged the distance across the impossible-looking Formica-top sea between them: she took Julie's hand. "How can you offer to wait for me today and say I'm all alone?" she asked. "The parking lot's right there. I'm only walking a short way off. And all my brochures are in the bag. You can read up on the treatment while you wait, maybe make it seem a little less strange."

"I'm not just talking about the treatment," said Julie.

The words hung between them, heavy and full under the daylight. Rachel blinked as she smiled. "You," she said, "are a basketcase."

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"--a very good, very neurotic friend who's going to pay for my breakfast and drive me to therapy," Rachel finished for her. Julie squeezed her fingers and felt her bones. "Come on, before I'm way the hell late," said Rachel. They stood up from the booth together and walked to the cash register arm in arm.

Julie parked the car two spaces to the right of the path that began at the east end of the parking lot. Rachel hugged her and set off on the path, which, Julie remembered from her reading, would lead Rachel to a glade a short way into the forest. The other details of the treatment Julie couldn't recall. Nor had she understood them when Rachel had tried to explain. On the other side of the lot's perimeter, the birch trees guarding the deepening path were slowly going white, their bark becoming a silvery skin starting at the branches' crowns. Julie didn't understand how birch trees did that, either. There was so much it seemed that she didn't understand.

At the edge of the lot, separating the world Julie knew from one she could barely imagine, a row of bushes sat with their branches entwined, as if they were holding hands.

"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.

"The Muffin Man"

 

[According to Wikipedia, there really isn't much to the lyrics of "The Muffin Man."]

When I pulled up in Janelle's driveway, I saw that she was sitting on the step leading up to her front door. She was frowning and had her chin resting on her hands; she was sitting like a little girl who had gone outside to nurse a broken heart. Because she had invited me over for margaritas, this confused me.

"Hey," she said after I had gotten out of the car. "You know the Muffin Man?"

"Yeah, why? What's up?" I really didn't know him any better than Janelle did, but I had seen him walking through the neighborhood enough times, taking on that big, doughy middle of his through daily bouts of exercise, that I knew who she was talking about.

"He died," Janelle told me. "I saw his picture in the obituaries today."

"Oh," I said. I didn't know what else to say after that. I didn't know anything else about him, except that I thought he lived on Drury Lane--I saw him go into a house there once. So I told her that.

She looked at me and nodded. "His name was James Obryzewski. Fifty-three years old, no kids, volunteered twice a week at Prairie Food Bank," she said. "Listen, I think I want to take a walk." She placed her hands on her knees and stood, wearily, no longer looking young with her heart in pieces but older, the age she truly was, with her heart showing all the little cracks that come with living and never fully heal. "You want to come with? Or maybe we can go later, I don't know."

"No, now's good," I said, "margaritas can wait."  Janelle took me by the arm and smiled. It was a simple thing, what I said to her, but I had the feeling that to her, like a child's nursery rhyme, it meant so much more.

"Food for Thought"

 

"So they call it pot," said the first girl.

"Yes," said the second.

"And when you do it, you get baked."

"Yes."

The first girl rolled onto her side. "I don't know about you, but I am so friggin' hungry right now."

The second girl responded by shoving most of her left hand into her own mouth and saying, "Problem solved," except that it came out sounding like pwobwob solb, and after they had laughed for a while about that and about how stupidly enormous their heads were, they went to the hot dog stand at the end of the street and got the largest bag of fries on the menu.

"Keep Me Warm"

 

We sat on the porch under a red, fading sky, with a blanket drawn over our shoulders. I felt the heat spill out from the cracks that split the pavement like open sores.

"It feels so fucking stupid to be cold right now," she whispered. "Keep me warm. Please."

I pulled the edges of the blanket together, over her arms, over the spots where she no longer had skin to cover her.

"Let's Be Friends Instead"

Disclaimer: These aren't really called red-spider flowers, nor do they "behave" the way the flowers in this piece do, nor were spiders even the first thing I thought of when I saw them the other day.

Every spring, the red-spider flowers climbed over each other for the privilege of falling. It was an honor to be the one to initiate that sense of wonder in people by falling down first or, failing that, to later catch someone's eye by falling down alone, poetically. The red-spider flowers were always quite vicious to each other, trying to crowd one another out even as buds, except for a day one April when two blossoms growing next to each other in a cluster decided that enough was enough; life was too short, especially for something as beautiful as a flower. And so, unnoticed among the red petal rain falling in the park that day, two flowers tangled their stems together and took a plunge in the name of friendship.

"Breaking the Rules"

I'll have to go back to get a better picture of this. But this is where a nearby creek continues into the rest of the town's drainage system. The cement walls at the entrance to the tunnel are covered with graffiti.

What makes me nervous isn't the idea that Leese has brought me down here only two days after we met; it isn't even the sound of the cans rattling against each other in her backpack. It's the sight of her littering. Two bags of chips and a package of trail mix have already been emptied into her stomach; the wrappers have fluttered to the ground like dead leaves; and I see them and wonder what kind of person I've cast my dice with. I bend and swing around her, holding on to the trees that line the creekside slope as if I'm looking for support up a mountain instead of picking up trash. When we get close, though, I feel those strange channels open up between us, and I remember why we were pulled toward each other, and what made us decide to try this.

"Aimee. Don't worry about those yet," she says, tapping my shoulder. "You should be eating something. I don't want you to get sick."

"I don't think I can eat." I tilt my head to try to see her watch. It's neon pink plastic, a fine accessory for someone trying to avoid being noticed. Again, I wonder. "How much longer until sunset?"

She brings her wrist close to her face. "Just a few minutes more."

"Stupid rules," I say.

Leese shrugs. "Some rules are better than others. Some are okay to break." I turn my body toward her, and it's like all of a sudden I've made a discovery, because she's kissing me, and it makes complete sense. It's as if I'm a scientist (oh my god did I really just think that how am I getting kissed) and I've just discovered some concept essential to how the world works, like photosynthesis. We're so bright that I imagine everybody on the planet is going to see us. I can't tell how much of this is something I feel because this is the first time I've been kissed.

"You really think there's a rule against us kissing?" I ask when we break away. "Or was that just your bad pick-up line?"

Leese smiles. "It's that I'm sure there's some rule against kissing next to a drainage pipe." She winks at me and reaches up for a nearby branch, which she grasps as if she's swinging from monkey bars as she begins to walk toward the tunnel. "Sunset," she says over her shoulder. "Start picking up the wrappers."

I stare at her. "Wait, all of that, and now you're going to leave me on garbage detail?"

"You're the decoy. If anyone comes looking. You're the concerned teenager doing her part for the environment." Leese has made it to the mouth of the runoff pipe and is pressing herself against the cement walls of its exterior, making sure she's hard to see from the road above, not that anyone has turned this way in a while. "Beats what I have to do," she says, taking a can of spray paint out of her bag.

It's a lazy Sunday evening, and most of the people who live in this subdivision are at home, preparing for dinner and contemplating the week ahead, except that I'm here, collecting junk from the undergrowth near the creek, and Leese is a few feet away, doing some graffiti work on an entrance to the town's sewer system. I try not to look at her, try to pretend she's not there, but it's hard. I keep catching sight of her twirling the cans, and I imagine her in the Old West with a pair of revolvers she keeps holstered on her hips.

"How's it going?" I ask after I pick up the last wrapper I see.

Two short blasts of air, and then I hear her laugh. "It's good," she says. "Quick."

I stuff the wrappers in my pocket and run to her across the low part of the slope, over twigs and shallow water. I arrive at her side and see adorning the cement the symbol we've spent the past two days studying. I take her hand.

"You ready?" Leese asks.

I give her hand a squeeze. "Probably not," I say, grabbing hold of a tree.

We recite the words we learned, the language scratching our throats as it climbs its way out of us. We each place a palm on the wet paint. A light appears in the drainage pipe as if from a door that just opened. Faster than anything, all the rules to explain the world that I thought I learned when Leese kissed me suddenly break and give way, just like the branches to which we've been clinging.

"Bright Little Blossoms"

 

I think I noticed Dorelle and Keith at the reunion the same moment they noticed each other. Ten years after the last time we'd all been together in that gym, and there they were, looking at each other with new eyes and offering each other smiles that neither one would have had the chance to see the other wear before, given how things had gone in junior high.

It was like this: some trees start out in spring with a show of bright little blossoms, the kind with petals that curl under perfectly, the kind that make everyone who sees them feel lighter and happier. That was Dorelle. Then there are the trees that, instead of flowers, present buds at the tips of their branches, dull, difficult things all covered with scales. That was Keith, and he'd had terrible acne. Yet none of that mattered, not ten years later, when they both had had time to grow and flourish. You doing okay? I saw Dorelle mouth to Keith. I am, I really am. You? Keith said to her. And suddenly it felt like the end of summer, when no sounds were greater than the whispers between tree leaves, and everything was about to happen.

"In Need of a Dragon"

 

Not two minutes after Ms. Wright had finished speaking with the owner of the appliance store and hung up her phone did her doorbell ring. It was not the delivery person ringing but instead a dragon, ten feet tall and shimmering in its blue scales, its neck bent low under the porch roof and its wings folded like fans. It wore a grey fedora.

"Hello," it said. "Pardon me for intruding, but I got wind of your neighbors' chatter and heard your furnace is on its way out. Might you be in need of a dragon?"

Ms. Wright, of 142 Oak Terrance #3, merely stood there.

"My card," said the dragon. It pinched a thin card between two knife-sharp claws and passed it toward Ms. Wright, who opened her screen door just wide enough for her hand to fit. The dragon, in addition to being a home heating specialist, was also a supply logistics manager. Its name was an illegible scroll.

"I just ordered a new furnace yesterday," Ms. Wright whispered, barely able to meet her visitor's gaze.

The dragon clicked its tongue. A curl of smoke escaped from between its jagged mountainpeak teeth. "I'm always just a little too late on these house calls," it said with a sigh. "I was on my way over much earlier in the week, but I caught the scent of the earth turning over far below the grass, because, as you know, spring starts next week, and the smell was just so...."

The dragon sighed again and shook its head. 

"Forgive me. I'm easily distracted in my old age," it said. "If I may ask, the warranty on your purchase...?"

"Ten years," said Ms. Wright.

"Well, that's good, that's quite standard. I'd like to point out, however, that dragons are rather long-lived, and incredibly efficient to boot, the source of our flames being nothing more than a slight twist in our anatomy."

"Of course, of course." Ms. Wright's eyes had not grown any less saucer-shaped since she answered the door.

"And," the dragon added, removing his fedora, "we've also been known to make excellent companions on rare occasions, particularly for those among your kind who--and please consider this a term of respect, as you'll imagine it must be for my ilk--who are more advanced in years." Here Ms. Wright touched her grey curls and finally looked straight at the dragon, who seemed to understand her in a way no other salesperson ever had. "While I understand you have a commitment with another seller and have no wish to pressure you out of it," the dragon said, "I do hope that, once your warranty's over, you'll keep me in mind. For as I suspect you may know, there are some chills that come with age that won't go away no matter how high you set your heater."

The dragon cleared its throat and blinked, and then smiled before placing its fedora on its head. "Ms. Wright, thank you so much for your time," it said. "I hope you have a wonderful day."

The dragon lifted itself into the air on its mighty wings, stirring the scent of springtime with each beat. Ms. Wright remained at her door, her eyes swimming in tears, her mouth ajar, and her fingers fumbling for her phone as she tried to recall the appliance store's cancellation policy.

"Stuffed"

 

I sat with Bear in her cave, because there wasn't much else either one of us could do at the moment.

"Sometimes," I said, taking a sixth slice of pizza from the box, "when I do stuff like this, I imagine that my stomach's full of rocks. Like I'm just swallowing rocks and sinking them down in my belly. Because that's how I'm going to get myself to stay in my chair and get everything that I need and want to get done done. I am weighing myself down so that I have no choice but to sit and work."

"I think that's just all the cheese you're feeling," said Bear. I looked at her and chuckled. "Seriously," she continued, "you should try some protein next time. Fills you up longer." She herself was enjoying one of several fish that her mighty claws had snatched from the river, with a complement of berries that she had shaken free from a nearby bush.

"Well, aren't you the healthiest bulk eater in all the land," I said. "Next I know, you'll be telling me about the virtues of eating several small meals throughout the day."

"That 'grazing' bullshit? Hah, what do I look like, a deer? I am not a fucking deer," said Bear. "I have things to do."

"Me, too. In fact, I should probably get going soon."

Bear extended an open paw toward me. Several round, red fruit rolled around on the pad. "Take some berries?" she asked.

"Nah, I'm stuffed," I said. "Plus, I think for humans, those might be psychotropic."

She raised her eyebrows and pushed her paw closer.

"I write better with a clearer head," I insisted. Standing, I pointed to my box of pizza. "You want the rest of my cheese-flavored granite?"

Bear sniffed. "Yeah, leave it," she said, "I might be hungry when I get up."

"I'll call you later," I told her.

"Much later," she agreed. "Hate being woken up early. This body does not do Januaries."

I gave her a hug before I left her cave; already she was round with everything she would need for the winter. I saw her roll onto her great side as I walked away, preparing herself for the long work of dreaming.