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Authors: Tod Wodicka
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She watered a palm that reminded her of a blind hunting dog.
Emily’s old professor reprimanding her again: enough with the animism, Ms. Phane!
Was that all she was doing?
Back before all this, at Boston University, she’d made motions toward a study of botany, plant biology, environmental science. That kind of thing. In the end, she’d felt too drowsily bemused to adapt herself to another view of reality. Science seemed fussy, insincere. Biometrics had made her sad. She had, however, become loosely interested in the more esoteric end of so-called plant neurobiology, specifically in long-dismissed studies of CIA agents who’d hooked up houseplants to galvanometers. It made sense to her that lie detector machines could pick up the electrical stress of plants when you thought about eating them or setting them ablaze. Emily couldn’t quite believe in the line that separated plants from animals, or, for that matter, sleep from the waking world. Plants dominated the world. That was a fact. They ate light and invented aspirin and talked to one another via chemical signaling. They learned. They gossiped with one another over great distances. In a sense, they were time machines. Plants existed in a different, slower dimension.
They were kind of terrifying, actually.
Look at one under a microscope and try not to freak out.
Start small. Baby steps. Snap out of it. Emily could still maybe go back to before all this, couldn’t she? She could! She wasn’t one of those women who later found themselves half eaten by cats, ormummified in a room wallpapered in aluminum foil. No way. She’d always been the cutup, the class clown. This was like that. This was
quirky
. Seriously, what could be funnier than a room full of sentient, stolen plants?
Tomorrow she could jump in her Mazda and drive down to the Aviation Road mall. Buy a new smartphone. Clothes, shoes: new things for a brand-new you. She could even hit up Burger King and buy back some of the weight she’d lost.
The mouth of the fireplace was fanged with cacti. Urgh. You guys. Emily did not like them one bit. She poured water over their heads.
You’re quirky, all right, she thought.
She laughed.
Quirky as a crippling bone disease.
They were zombies, these cacti. Part here, part irretrievably elsewhere. They reminded Emily of Peppy’s last months on the sofa. The hospice nurses in their Honda Civics coming by to water him. The way his beard continued to grow, eyes bald and calked over. How inappropriate TV was, but how terrified Emily’d been to click it off. The glaucoma of TV light further draining her grandfather’s face of color, as if he were entering a horrific version of one of those Turner Classic Movies he so loved. Caterpillar whorls of hair growing from his ears, and oh my God did that mean he’d always trimmed his ear hair before? Should Emily have? How? With what? She wished she could have joked with him about that too, about all that fuzziness filling up his ear—Can you hear it growing, Peppy?
There’s more hair inside your ear now than on the top of your head!
The two of them laughing instead of sitting there watching those plastic tubes pump him full of absence.
She’d plugged the cacti into the fireplace partly as a warning and partly as proof that her sense of humor was intact. Best of both worlds. She’d gotten to threaten houseplants with fiery death, safe in the knowledge that threatening houseplants was also, obviously, kind of hilarious. Oh it was satisfying. The only questionbeing, at what point does having a sense of humor about your own eccentricities cross over into the lane with the people who wander around laughing at everything for no apparent reason? Because maybe insane laughing people are only laughing in order to prove to themselves that they are self-aware and not, in fact, insane. They get it; they’re totally in on the joke. They’re still fucking insane.
6
S he was everybody’s second-best friend. Growing up, Emily
Emily’s old professor reprimanding her again: enough with the animism, Ms. Phane!
Was that all she was doing?
Back before all this, at Boston University, she’d made motions toward a study of botany, plant biology, environmental science. That kind of thing. In the end, she’d felt too drowsily bemused to adapt herself to another view of reality. Science seemed fussy, insincere. Biometrics had made her sad. She had, however, become loosely interested in the more esoteric end of so-called plant neurobiology, specifically in long-dismissed studies of CIA agents who’d hooked up houseplants to galvanometers. It made sense to her that lie detector machines could pick up the electrical stress of plants when you thought about eating them or setting them ablaze. Emily couldn’t quite believe in the line that separated plants from animals, or, for that matter, sleep from the waking world. Plants dominated the world. That was a fact. They ate light and invented aspirin and talked to one another via chemical signaling. They learned. They gossiped with one another over great distances. In a sense, they were time machines. Plants existed in a different, slower dimension.
They were kind of terrifying, actually.
Look at one under a microscope and try not to freak out.
Start small. Baby steps. Snap out of it. Emily could still maybe go back to before all this, couldn’t she? She could! She wasn’t one of those women who later found themselves half eaten by cats, ormummified in a room wallpapered in aluminum foil. No way. She’d always been the cutup, the class clown. This was like that. This was
quirky
. Seriously, what could be funnier than a room full of sentient, stolen plants?
Tomorrow she could jump in her Mazda and drive down to the Aviation Road mall. Buy a new smartphone. Clothes, shoes: new things for a brand-new you. She could even hit up Burger King and buy back some of the weight she’d lost.
The mouth of the fireplace was fanged with cacti. Urgh. You guys. Emily did not like them one bit. She poured water over their heads.
You’re quirky, all right, she thought.
She laughed.
Quirky as a crippling bone disease.
They were zombies, these cacti. Part here, part irretrievably elsewhere. They reminded Emily of Peppy’s last months on the sofa. The hospice nurses in their Honda Civics coming by to water him. The way his beard continued to grow, eyes bald and calked over. How inappropriate TV was, but how terrified Emily’d been to click it off. The glaucoma of TV light further draining her grandfather’s face of color, as if he were entering a horrific version of one of those Turner Classic Movies he so loved. Caterpillar whorls of hair growing from his ears, and oh my God did that mean he’d always trimmed his ear hair before? Should Emily have? How? With what? She wished she could have joked with him about that too, about all that fuzziness filling up his ear—Can you hear it growing, Peppy?
There’s more hair inside your ear now than on the top of your head!
The two of them laughing instead of sitting there watching those plastic tubes pump him full of absence.
She’d plugged the cacti into the fireplace partly as a warning and partly as proof that her sense of humor was intact. Best of both worlds. She’d gotten to threaten houseplants with fiery death, safe in the knowledge that threatening houseplants was also, obviously, kind of hilarious. Oh it was satisfying. The only questionbeing, at what point does having a sense of humor about your own eccentricities cross over into the lane with the people who wander around laughing at everything for no apparent reason? Because maybe insane laughing people are only laughing in order to prove to themselves that they are self-aware and not, in fact, insane. They get it; they’re totally in on the joke. They’re still fucking insane.
6
S he was everybody’s second-best friend. Growing up, Emily
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