Leonard lies with the carpet bristles pixelating his cheek. The air’s rich with reprobate perfume, alcoholic vomit, and the chemical taint of crack cocaine. He bears his weight against the carpet with one hand and his shoulder pops. It’s loud, like when he would pop empty Lay’s bags in the school cafeteria. His body lags behind itself as he rises to his knees. He’s become his own shadow. The milky taste of whiskey upchuck burns a hole in his throat (made it count last night, didn’t he?)
His memories are wet and dark. Until napalm carpet-bombs his brain. The world teeters. Disequilibrium splits open his skull so he can’t think to plant his feet. Catches his ankle on the leg of Bala’s coffee table, the other bare foot squishing wet carpet, sliding doors still open to the rain. He falls headlong, palms out to try catching himself on the patio’s fractured concrete.
Bala was nothing like any of the other women Leonard had been with before. And it was just this dumb luck thing, how they met. Seated side-by-side at Miguel’s Thanksgiving dinner for, call it what it was, people in the apartment complex who didn’t have friends.
Leonard mentioned he’d worked at the Avara Institute.
“Oh, I know Avara,” Bala said. Her voice, deep for a woman, delightfully musical. “We hosted one of their entomologists here on a fellowship to study Euglossini bees’ effect on perennials.” Stowed away in the extra-long folding table’s corner, the two unwittingly hatched a conspiracy to enjoy each other’s company. Bala asked, “Do you do research in plant botany? Or floriculture? Avara’s known for flowers, right?”
Leonard pig-chuckled before clapping his mouth shut with his hand. Bala laughed at his laugh. Soon they were both laughing so hard that the whole table went from spying on them to staring at them. That was the beginning, Leonard would’ve said, looking back. When they finally stopped laughing, Bala asked, “What are we laughing about?”
“I’m not a scientist,” Leonard said.
“No?”He shook his head.
“I was doing landscaping.”
* * * *
He screams, his body hitting concrete perfectly to cut off half an F-bomb’s hard K. His knuckles roll in too far towards his wrists. Concrete scrapes skin, the sound of sandpaper shucking waterlogged wood. His hand’s sticky where the skin’s come off. Leonard screams as his wrist bends so far it pops. It’s the sound of the meat from a ribeye steak being wrenched off the bone. He rolls onto his back, eyes closed against his tears. There’s a chill in the air. There’s a misty drizzle. The cold water kisses Leonard. It feels so good, that cold kiss, reaching through his pain. He opens his eyes to a wrinkled iron-gray sky with blue light soaking through.
The air smells of petrichor and turned soil, of the interstate’s diesel fumes and oil slicks. He feels an eighteen-wheeler touch the interstate shoulder’s rumble strips, smells a Peterbilt belching black smoke as he lies on his back. Leonard opens his eyes. He can’t make sense of what he sees. A spiky globe hangs off a single, leafless stem, like a golfball-sized seed pod from a sweetgum tree. But bigger. The size of a tangerine. Leonard’s vision clicks optometristically into place: which is clearer, one or two? Details fall into focus. The pod itself is the color and texture of human skin. The spikes are the translucent bone-white of a fingernail’s edge, their shape closer to cactus spines than sweetgum prickers.
The pod throbs, has a pulse. It’s a heart in the shape of a morning star mace. Its heartbeat gushes through each spine’s needled tip. Another long-hauler on the interstate blasts his truck’s pneumatic air horn. Leonard flinches at the sound. A droplet beads off a single spine. Plops right into his eye. At first, there’s nothing. Then, a dull ache. Leonard groans. Then pain. Then sharp pain, pain with urgency, like he’s been pepper-sprayed. Leonard starts yelling. Then he screams, running inside to flush out his eyes.
* * * *
Leonard promised Bala he would look for a job. And he meant to. He did. But he got caught up playing The Flame in the Flood. In a way, it was Bala’s fault. She was the one who bought him the Nintendo Switch. If she wanted him to concentrate, she shouldn’t have given him such a distracting gift. Sometimes he sat on the shitter and played till his legs fell asleep. Sometimes he took a break from the Switch and sprawled on the leather sectional to play The Flame in the Flood on his PlayStation 4 instead. Bala’s PlayStation 4, technically speaking.
Bala came home to find Leonard a slackened couch potato, his face bathed in television’s blue glow, thumbs glued to his controller. Spent Silver Bullets were scattered on the table, cans pancaked into coasters. A fresh tallboy was pinched between his knees. Ashtray overflowing, the room smelled like yeast, weed, body odor, and stale cigarettes. He’d thrown one of Bala’s expensive bath linens on the carpet; a coal-black corner of the hand towel hardened the shape of a human finger. A brand-new galaxy-purple bong sat on the table, a balled-up receipt beside it.
“Hey babe, how was work?” Leonard’s eyes stayed glued to the Samsung while he busied himself trying to kill the King Boar. Bala blocked the TV as she approached the table. She unballed the receipt and looked at it, then looked at the bong. Then at the receipt again. Then back at the bong.
“You’re blocking the TV, babe,” Leonard said, leaning sideways to look around her. The Coors can slipped between his knees and splashed all over his crotch. “Fuck. Bala, shit—look what you made me do!”
“Did you use the emergency credit card…to buy a new bong?” Leonard picked up Bala’s sullied Yves Delorme hand towel to clean the beer off his genitals.
“Jesus, Bala. Be careful. Beer’s not free, you know.”
“Did you buy this bong,” Bala said, nodding toward the glass bubbler, “using the card I gave you for medical emergencies? Yes or no.”
“It’s not just a bong, Bala.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s an unbreakable bong. I’ll never have to buy another one again. Babe, try and understand. That ‘bong’ is an investment.”
Leonard looks in the mirror. The white of one whole eye is the color of a bruise. His eyeball is an inflamed Concord grape. His pupil wiggles. He leans closer to the mirror to see what moves inside his eye.
* * * *
Leonard thought it looked like a purple toothpick. It didn’t even have petals or leaves.
It wasn’t really a flower, though. He knew that. It was a test.
“This flower is very special,” Bala said. “It’s a meconitum. Or a Sister’s Switch. I want you to take care of this flower while I’m gone. If you can take care of this flower—well, maybe you can take care of me.”
Leonard’s first thought was that a real feminist wouldn’t ask to be taken care of. But he found it advisable to limit his snark while standing so far out on thin ice. “I’ll be at the conference for five days. When I come back, maybe I’ll see you’ve both bloomed.” Leonard threw a Hail Mary.
“You know, I’d be happy to come with you.”
“Lenny,” Bala said, frowning, “I’d sooner trust you with a newborn baby than trust you in Amsterdam. No, I won’t let you embarrass me.”
She gave him a very cold kiss. Then pressed the button to extend her roller bag’s handle before opening the door. Bala stopped at the threshold. “I left you two hundred dollars on the counter. Make it last. If the Sister’s Switch is dead when I get back, one of us is moving out.” The door slammed behind her.
* * * *
Bala returned to their apartment to find an exploded trap house. An assortment of drugs and paraphernalia, the better part of a DEA evidence locker. She saw the grimy, beer-soaked pile of twenties on the floor. He’d broken into her safe. The patio doors were open. Outside, just past the concrete, was the tiny terra cotta pot with the Sister’s Switch. It was shattered.
Leonard begged her to stay.
“But it’ll grow, Bala, I promise. You’ll see, I can make it grow again. It’ll still grow. It’ll still grow,” he kept saying.
* * * *
His eyeball explodes.
A fishhooked vine shoots out of Leonard’s eye, harpooning through the wall to the right of the mirror, anchoring him to it. Leonard tries to scream, but his vocal cords won’t work. Another vine shoots out of his throat, lodging in the wall to the left of the mirror.
Leonard can’t move. His veins are pumping with paralytic venom, vines dragging him towards the mirror. Forced to look at himself, seeing his exploded eye socket, Leonard would’ve cried if he could. Drawing closer, vines bursting from his body, he watches his reflection as his body is torn apart.
Leonard realizes something. He was right. The flower had grown.
Featured Image Credit: Flor Saurina / Unsplash
