“I’m making sure every plant gets their turn in the sun,” Salena had told me. “Well, at least their turn in the windows.”
“What happens if it’s cloudy on the day they’re in the best spot?” I’d asked.
“What happens then, Josh, is that my plants are provided with proof that life is unfair.”
She’d been wearing a dark white dress with lace trimmings, matched with a cooking apron because she didn’t want to get dirt on her dress while repotting a fern. She’d had her hair up. I could remember how she’d moved so silently. I always felt so plodding in her presence.
In my dream, just as in real life, she’d told me the names of each of her plants. Gershwin, and Beethoven, Mozart, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie and Agatha Harkness. I recognized all of the names except the last one. She’d told me that Harkness was a character from comic books.
Anyway, I dreamed I wanted plants, and then I woke up and agreed, so I called Binsa.
“I’m going plant shopping,” I told her. “Where’s good?”
“I’m an expert on plants, now?”
“Yes. I promoted you.”
“Fine. Try the hardware store.”
“Did you just get up? I was talking about plants. I’m going to seem like a nutjob if people come to my apartment and find a selection of potted claw hammers.”
“Actually, that would be interesting. Like an art installation. But seriously, that hardware store a couple blocks from your place? Remember when we went there to get paint? And there was that whole ‘home and garden’ section with the plants?”
“Oh. Right.”
“Oh. Duh. And the plants will be a hell of a lot cheaper than if you go to some hipster plant emporium, so that’s good, too, since we both know you’re cheap.”
“Frugal. I’m frugal.”
“That’s what I said. Cheap. You want me to come along? And, why plants?”
“No need to come along. I’m a big boy and most plants don’t bite. And I want plants because of Salena, my old babysitter. I had a dream about her.”
“Sexy?”
“Hell no. But it made me remember back when I was a kid. How my apartment always seemed barren, like I was a prisoner in some bleak Russian tv show about delusion and abandonment, but Salena’s apartment was literally a breath of fresh air because it was literally full of life. All thanks to plants. So, I’m gonna go get some.”
“Go get some,” my sister told me, adding extra emphasis, and then we said our goodbyes and I left for the hardware store. The gray cat, Charles, was out on the front lawn.
“Morning, Charlie,” I said.
The cat growled.
“Charles,” I amended. The cat seemed to accept this as an apology and fell into step beside me.
“You accompanying me on my botanical adventure?” I asked. The cat continued padding along beside me, meaning that I had a stalwart companion.
During our walk to the hardware store I explained, to Charles, one of the oddities of being human, that of systematically paving our streets with concrete while chopping down trees to make space for buildings, and then filling our homes with plants, because we like them, obviously.
By the time I was finished explaining this peculiar blend of human complexity and stupidity we’d made it to the hardware store, right past the Friendly Shore strip club. I wondered how many people popped into both of them during their daily errands.
“Sorry, “I told Charles. “But I don’t think they’re going to let you in the hardware store.” He stared at me.
“Maybe in the strip club, though?” The cat stared at me.
“Club’s not open yet, unfortunately,” I noted. The cat continued to stare at me. I gave him a skritch behind his ears and went into the hardware store, where a woman asked if I needed help and I said “Nope! Thanks!” instead of, “All the damn time, honestly, especially now that I’ve discovered another world where my babysitter lived before she was murdered.”
The home and garden section did have, as Binsa had remembered, a wide selection of plants. I stared at them for only two or three seconds before I realized I had no way to get them home. I could easily carry one or two, but anything past that, and I was out of luck. Charles probably couldn’t carry even one, if he was even still waiting for me outside.
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In the end, I chose several things with leaves and a selection of ferns, picking all of the plants because of how big they were, meaning how impressive they would look. I also picked three small trees in big pots, because I wanted to truly transform my apartment. I’d gone to sleep in an apartment that had felt normal, but woke to the realization that it was dead. It needed life.
I spent almost three hundred dollars buying that life, along with some plant food and a spritzer bottle for fooling the plants into thinking it was raining.
Charles was still outside when I left the store, emerging along with an employee named Stasia, who rolled all of my purchases to the curb on a wheeled cart sturdy enough for a side gig as an aircraft carrier. She gave me a fist bump after we had all the plants on the sidewalk, told me “Good luck with your apartment!” and then left me and Charles alone. With the plants.
“So, you’re a witch’s familiar, is what I’m hearing?” I told Charles. He batted at a fern’s leaf. I nudged him away from my newly acquired greenery. I hadn’t spent almost three hundred dollars on cat toys.
“What I’m thinking is that you could magic these plants back to my apartment.” The cat yawned. My plan was falling apart. So I brought up a ride share app and it wasn’t long before a woman named Elsa arrived in a Subaru, and we loaded all my plants into her car for the epic journey of two blocks back to my apartment. I asked Elsa if it was the shortest route she’d ever driven someone, and she told me that she’d once picked up a drunken girl at her apartment, for a ride to her apartment.
“That’s a serious drunk story,” I told Elsa. She was helping me move my plants onto the sidewalk.
“Want help carrying these inside?” she asked. She was playing with one of the leaves of my ferns. I just let it happen. It would’ve been rude to nudge her away with my foot, the way I’d done with the cat.
“I’m good,” I said. “It’ll take me a few trips but I’ve got a helper.” I gestured to Charles.
“Cats don’t help,” Elsa said, getting back in her car. She waved and drove away. I began systematically carrying my purchases upstairs, moving them first into the lobby, lined up against a wall near the elevator. Every time I came back outside, Charles was the picture of innocence, curled up against one of the potted trees. I tried not to wonder what he was doing to my plants when I was out of sight.
I hit the stop button on the elevator and loaded it full of plants, then rode the newly tropical elevator up two stories, pulled the stop button again, and moved all the plants into my hallway. From there I ferried them one by one into my apartment, grouping them together in my living room with some boxes I still hadn’t gotten around to unpacking.
The plants barely made a dent in the room. I realized that what I’d thought was an amazing array of plants was really only the beginning of what I needed. I decided that I’d arrange them all in my old bedroom, making that room a bastion of life that I would slowly extend outward until all my rooms had a wide variety of plants.
Did plants do well in the bathroom, though? I went online to search for the answer and found that there were all sorts of plants that would thrive in my bathroom. Ferns. Gardenias. Aloe Vera. Begonias. Even bamboo.
I decided that my bathroom would be more interesting with a wall of bamboo, and during my moments of thinking about my bathroom I remembered the sight of Molly naked in my bathtub, and since I was already online that led to an hour of looking at internet porn, followed by a shower, followed by lunch, so that by the time I was ready to start arranging my plants in my old bedroom it was already the early afternoon.
The first thing I had to do was move a collection of packing boxes from in front of my old bedroom door. I’d built a barricade there to give me some measure of notice in case anything or anyone snuck in through the door to Goncourt.
I took a deep breath before opening the bedroom door, but there wasn’t anybody or anything lurking inside. I began arranging the plants as best as possible, and even though I consider myself as a private person I opened all the window curtains because plants love sunlight, and not everything is about me.
I was standing in my living room, holding a fern and considering breaking my “all the plants go in my old bedroom” rule by putting the fern in the bathroom, listening to “Ballroom Blitz” by the band Sweet, when I was nearly bowled off my feet by a memory.
Salena.
Salena and me.
Standing in this very room and listening to this very song. My dad was over at the Friendly Shore strip club spending dollars we didn’t have. Salena had made us sandwiches and we’d marched to the convenience store to buy potato chips, pretending the whole way that we were Neanderthals on the hunt.
We’d eaten while Salena had told me a story about a hollowed-out giant with a bird’s nest where his heart should be. She’d described the giant in detail, her voice like a song, and when that hadn’t been enough for her she’d conjured up an actual image of the giant, a thick man so tall that he’d had to hunch over to fit into the room, even though he was down on one knee. It was true magic.
Salena had done real magic.
I almost dropped the fern as the memory flooded into my head, remembering the giant’s gray flesh, the expanse of his muscles, the dullness of his features, the way that his hair kept getting batted by the ceiling fan, the tremor of his breath in the room, the flex of his fingers and how Salena had opened a door in his chest to show me the bird’s nest, which smelled faintly of cold iron and driftwood.
With the giant seeming barely aware of his surroundings, Salena had taken my hands and we’d danced to Ballroom Blitz, a ragged bedlam of a dance, nothing planned, pure musical abandon, a frenetic dance that continued even as our feet lifted off the floor and we were dancing in midair.
I could remember Salena whispering words of power as we danced, and then strange musicians with bizarre instruments began appearing all around us. The music was unearthly. Supernatural. Primal. Salena and I continued dancing, and in the end she fell over laughing, bursting with life and joy, tumbling onto her back in mid-air. I could smell the cinnamon of her breath as she took my shoulders and said, “That was wonderful! It feels so good to dance! But, I’m sorry, Josh. I shouldn’t do magic in front of you. I’m afraid you’ll have to forget.”
She’d touched my forehead with a finger.
And I forgot everything. The music. The giant. The dance.
But now, standing in my apartment with a fern trembling in my hands, I remembered forgetting. I found myself staring at the space where the giant had stood. I found myself moving my hands through the air where a witch had danced. I found myself putting the fern in my bathroom, on the counter next to the sink, moving aside my toothbrush and my razor to make room.
And I found myself looking into the mirror, looking into my own eyes, trying to look beyond them, deeper into my mind, wondering what else was hiding in my past, and what other magic I’d forgotten.
How bright your light shined, to take a sword into the very heavens! Rest now, warrior. Be at peace. Drink the mead at Valhalla's table. Also if you want, valiant one, you could read 12 chapters ahead on my Patreon. That'd be cool.