"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 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.

"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.

"Water Carries It All Away"

 

[Making up for yesterday's missed story...]

Mae sat on the edge of her bed as lightly as her weight would allow and began loosening and peeling back the fraying leathers she wore over her arms, as carefully as if she were peeling away a layer of skin. The practician's orders sang in her mind like a hymn of absolution: "The healing pools are yours tonight, girl. Use the mineral salts."

Her skin exposed, Mae started to study the cuts that the practician had rubbed clean, the joints that she had shifted and worked as close as possible back to normal. "Got you good today, didn't they?" the practician had said to Mae, not needing to hear the answer. "Well, go, get yourself changed, and go sit in the water, then. Water carries away all that pain."

It was a saying in these green hills--water carries it all away--yet as Mae approached one of the pools and began to scoop salt from a nearby barrel into the water, she found herself angry at the practician for offering it. She was divided; her body ached for relief and responded to the hot water with what felt to Mae like its own wave, a wave of release; yet her mind wanted to hold on to the image of each wound that marked her, to examine it like a map, so that she would never again lose her way on the practice field. Sinking into the pool up to her chin, Mae turned so that she could see the barrel of salt. She thought about what she knew of the way that rocks and minerals formed: layers of earthen material, becoming hard under thousands of years of pressure. Inside, she willed herself to turn to stone. Water carries it all away, she told herself, but rock remembers.

"Swarm"

 

[While I'm writing about ants, might as well include a link to an article about ant behavior that I thought was a good read: "7 Reasons Ants Will Inherit the Earth"]

Lina had been at the window for a few minutes when Kristin came up behind her. Together they stood and watched a mad cluster of ants, thick as a cloud, swarm their front porch.

"I heard that ants go crazy like that right before a storm comes," Lina said, her eyes focused outside.

"Really?" Kristin murmured. "I heard that when they pile on each other like that, they're basically two colonies at war, fighting each other."

Lina turned. "Just have to disagree with me on everything, don't you?" Her smile was little more than a twist of her lips, as if she had swallowed something sour. 

Kristin sighed and pressed closer, placing her hand on Lina's arm, her chin on Lina's shoulder. "I'm sorry," she told her. "I didn't mean it like that. Look, can we, I don't know, just press 'rewind' and go back fifteen minutes or something? Try that again?" Outside, the sound of thunder rolled toward them like an army.

"The Bag Lady"

 

I saw her every day, wearing the same dirt-faded clothes but carrying a different bag each time. On some days the bag was made of linen or some other cloth; on others, plastic, and it obviously had been found alongside the rest of the scraps she carried.

She collected what people in the neighborhood threw out or abandoned. I saw her pick up someone's potential once, right off the curb. It looked like an orange rind. Another time she tried to pick up an old woman's true love from where the woman had dumped him. The bag lady had had trouble fitting him into her sack, for a while.

I went to her once with a cheese sandwich in hand, in case she was hungry. She smiled a refined smile, the kind offered by old ladies who like to work in gardens, and told me thank you, but she was doing quite well with what she had.

"Do you have a place to stay?" I asked her tentatively.

"Oh, I've made a very nice home for myself," she said. "Would you like to see it?" I hesitated before even trying to give her an answer, but it didn't matter: she placed her hand on my shoulder and pushed me into the bag anyway.

"Salt the Earth"

 

From the corner of the room, across from where their foreign guests stood, Lot's wife heard what her husband offered the mob when it demanded that the strangers come outside: "I have daughters, virgins both. I will bring them out here, and  do what you will with them, but do not touch these men who have taken shelter beneath my roof."

Every tear that Lot's wife then would have cried instead hardened inside her, becoming a lump in her throat, a knot in her bowels, a clenched fist that she felt in all the other muscles of her body; and every tear traveled to the field within her that had been given to Lot to grow his nation, until the field was dead and dry, just as her heart for him now lay fallow. Never again would she bear his child. She would find a way to make certain of that.