A new green mound of earth sits at the corner of 4th and Nicollet like a miniature oblong meadow. So bright against the gray expanse of the city. Ivory daisies bloom from it, begging the sun to slice through the smog.
The Minneapolis Environmental Relocation Services have already arrived. A MERS worker wearing an offensively yellow visibility vest places orange cones around the mound. Another readies a jackhammer. Passersby skirt the site without a glance. The new patch of earth only appeared this morning. Soon it will be gone.
My insides give way like a sinkhole at the thought. I push away my plate of unfinished bacon, pay for my breakfast and leave the retro-themed diner. Stepping out into the dry, dusty city, I cinch my hood tight around my face to conceal the white, feathery veins on my cheek, then I cross the street toward the mound.
“Stringy weed,” someone says as I pass.
Today, I can’t handle the mutterings about my strange appearance. The sidelong glances. It’s hard enough waking up to a body that changes daily, out of one’s control. When will they accept that this is the new normal? Babies are born with bits of the earth in their bellies even before they have suckled their mother’s colostrum.
The earth is inside us all.
The MERS workers are chatty, laughing. It’s impossible to make out what they are saying behind their particle respirators. I can guess by the way they carelessly drop the shovels on the new earth that it’s dismissive. They are young. Too young to even worry about the changes coming.
The mound is vibrant, reminiscent of the Minneapolis of my youth with tree lined streets, lush lakeshore ecosystems, ample parks and gardens. The city was nearly a forest then. However, the Minneapolis of today is stale and dark, lakes and rivers are walled-off from view. A patchwork quilt of fresh asphalt dots the streets where life used to be.
A breeze blows a swirl of dust across the coned-off area. The little daisies on the mound sway back and forth. Whissh whoosh.
Do they know this is the last time they will feel the wind?
I can’t ignore the squirreling sense of wrongness, the wood splashing around in a stomach full of coffee. All at once it is too much. The smog, the bottlenecked sidewalk, the endless grey expanse of the city streets, the shooing away of a toddler with an outstretched hand ready to pluck a daisy.
He should have left like the others, like I am about to do.
As the two MERS workers turn toward the truck, my feet pick up at a run. The white vein across my cheek throbs. Wind spits dust into my eyes. When I reach the mound, I crouch down, grab the shovels and slink back into the crowd. But I’m spotted.
“Hey! We need those,” the workers holler. I sprint down Nicollet.
This won’t stop them, I know. But at least I can stall MERS, give the green mound, the flowers, the old man a little more time in the sun.
Instead of rushing into my apartment just across the street, I round the block. My hood blows back, revealing the vein on my cheek, the tiny mushrooms rising from my hair. More dust stings my eyes, for which I’m grateful to not make out the faces of those who stop and stare. The thudding feet of my pursuers fades behind me.
“Gah! Stupid . . . earth sick,” voices drowned out by squealing car engines.
My eyes are watering as I return to the street from an alley and sneak into my apartment entryway. Something clatters on the sidewalk before me. The sinkhole inside me collapses in on itself as I realize my mistake.
Sami, my roommate, stands before me, her phone at her feet. Screen cracked. The particle respirator has slipped down her face.
There is no more ignoring it. No more hiding it as Sami’s red lipped mouth gapes at me.
At first there was only moss on my toes, easily flicked away with a fingernail, leaving nothing but granules of earth between the creases of my skin. I ignored it then. Denied it. Over the next few months worms wriggled in my gut during the stillness of sleep. Grains of sand scraped my airways every time I sneezed. A lump of wood rolled around in my stomach. Tiny luminous mushrooms sprouted from the strands of my hair (which only grew taller from the top of my head after I shaved it.)
And this morning, white veins flourish atop pink-toned skin.
The earth is germinating within.
It was easy enough to hide my transformation from Sami when the symptoms began. All I had to do was wear socks to cover up the moss, but it didn’t go unnoticed.
“What is that?” Sami asked.
“What is what?” I replied.
“That on your feet?”
I looked down to my toes and curled them, gritty with dirt, damp with sweat. “They are socks. Have you heard of them? They keep your feet warm and keep blisters from forming when wearing shoes. Great invention.”
“Eila,” she groaned.
“What?”
“You hate socks.”
She was right. Since the day we became roommates, she has been remarking on how my socks seemingly explode off my feet when I get home.
“So, now that I’m wearing them, you’re complaining about that too?”
Sami rolled her eyes. “You’re just being weird.”
“When haven’t I been weird?”
Weirdness was the thing that brought us together when we first met at summer camp years ago. In the forest, among the freshness of tall, towering pine trees, there was a giant sandstone rock, our rock. We called it, eloquently, Weird Rock. The only rule being that we couldn’t be normal in its presence. We walked on jiggly legs, sang gobbledygook, pounced and prowled on anyone who got too close. It had to be protected from the horde of boys trying to claim it as their own, who skulked away with scraped knees as battle wounds.
When I closed my eyes, I could hear the sound of Sami’s beaded braids clinking together, see a pink tongue sticking out of the corner of brown lips in concentration as she carved her name into Weird Rock for the hundredth time.
What will happen to these memories when my soft, moving insides solidify? How will Sami take this new level of weird?
A week ago, when the mushrooms first fruited on top of my head, I still couldn’t tell Sami. She knocked on my door the third night I had locked myself in my room. “Eila,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
“Uh, yeah. I just have a cold,” I said as I opened and shut my drawers frantically trying to find my hoodie, my scarf, something to cover my freshly shaved, fungal head. The whole dresser shook as I pushed shut a too full drawer. Trinkets clattered to the ground. “Shit.”
“Do you need help?”
“No, I’m good, thanks.” I picked the trinkets up, one being a large oval ring, a cheap childhood relic. The mood ring Sami gave to me at Weird Rock one summer. I slipped it on my pinky finger.
The floor creaked outside my door.
Aheeeii. I feigned a cough.
“Are you sure you are okay?”
The Sami of today doesn’t ask if I’m okay. The Sami of today is angry.
“You lied to me,” she paces around the main room of the apartment.
The words are stinging nettle. Sharp. A radiating burn. Her spouse had been the liar, not me.
“And now you’re, what, stealing from MERS?” She points to the shovels leaning against the wall.
I let out a soft chuckle, the skin at my cheek stiff and unyielding from the vein growing across it. “I’m going to give them back.”
“You’ll root down here, then?” Sami asks.
I look to the corner of the room and follow the line up to the ceiling, finding the small vaguely shaped butterfly stain above the window.
Sami stops pacing and gasps softly. She turns to face me. “You were just going to leave, weren’t you?”
I bite the inside of my lip so hard, a sticky substance oozes into my mouth.
Sami tugs at the ends of her long, purple tipped braids. “Why is everyone leaving me?”
This is what I was afraid of. Part of me knows I should have said something ages ago, but the other part of me doesn’t know why. I tongue the spot of sap hardening in my mouth.
“Sami, you have to understand. I’m gone no matter what.”
She scoffs. “Did you have to lie to me about it?”
I fidget with the ring on my pinky finger, a stone of scarlet. “I didn’t know how to tell you with your divorce and everything. It never was the right time.”
“Not the right time?” Sami eyes the mood ring, then shuffles forward a step as if wanting to close the space between us, as if wanting to pass the ring back and forth like we used to, watching the color change. “I could help you. You might even survive, someone has to.”
Survival isn’t a doomed patch of earth in the concrete city, nor a single potted plant hidden away in a room.
“What if this is how we survive?” I ask.
The whites of Sami’s eyes are red like the smog-embellished sky. Her voice quavers. “I wish you’d stay.”
I wish the others had been allowed to stay too. The maple trees sprouting out of skyscraper windows, the moss hugging the lampposts, the ferns tickling the ankles of those who walked the streets.
“And end up like him?” I gesture out the window as the intermittent chatter of the jackhammer down the street seeps in.
“But they relocate—”
“Do you really believe that somewhere out there is some garden of everyone who’s sprouted? None of you want to even think about what’s happening, I mean, people can’t even look at me.”
Sami grunts. “This is a mistake.”
She’s never going to understand. There’s a reason why those like me often leave in the middle of the night.
“Maybe it is. But it’s my mistake to make. And I’ll be fine.”
Sami turns and walks away toward her bedroom, muttering to herself, “She’ll be fine, but what about me? How am I supposed to pay the rent?”
I sigh and go to the window, tugging at the ring on my pinky as I watch MERS finish their job down the street. They lift the mound of earth and slide it into the back of their truck. The asphalt crew stands by to patch the sidewalk.
Before sunrise, I had seen the man at the corner under the streetlamp, old, frail, the earth flourishing over his body. He stopped as if to tie a shoe, collapsing down as the green consumed him. It lasted only a few minutes in the dim morning light. And it was beautiful, a comfort knowing I too will meet a graceful end. I too will change the landscape.
But I know my place is not here.
Instinctually, I drive north from Minneapolis where the sprawling suburbs turn to abandoned small towns and drought stricken countryside.
Maybe it was bit cold of me to leave while Sami was at work. There would have been tears and the long Minnesotan goodbye that would somehow extend until midnight. But something inside me, that deepening, internal erosion, told me I had to leave at my first opportunity, that staying would only hurt Sami more.
The last thing I want is for her to waste any more of her youth worrying about me. The sham marriage already took away a few years, and who even knows how much any one has left? It’s still a mystery why some change and others don’t. Maybe Sami will be one of the lucky ones. But I can’t help but wonder, is this really how friendships end? Can we really just walk away from it all?
The countryside turns to a skeletal forest, burned down a year prior as the highway dips down into Duluth. A fine haze hangs over the city, blurring the waters of Lake Superior, sending the tall buildings into hiding. I stop at a 24-hour diner north of downtown and order a vegetable hash with two poached eggs. No matter how much I salt it, it tastes bland, or maybe I’m just not that hungry. Food hasn’t had much taste lately.
After I pay, I continue my drive until I reach a wayside just out of the city. In the twilight, I fold down the back seats in my car and make a bed with blankets. The lapping waves of the lake remind me of how Sami and I used to sneak out of the bunkhouse at camp to lay under the stars, lulled to sleep by a gentle schwip, schwip.
I wake to calm waters and a haze that lingers on the lake. After packing my things, I continue north along Highway 61, the air clearing the further I drive from the city. Surprisingly, there is an open coffee shop in a nearly abandoned town. I freshen up in the bathroom, discovering that the white veins now extended down my arms, but I don’t cover them up with my hoodie. It’s too suffocating. I slip on a loose tank top and shorts, pulling out the string on which I stung the mood ring. No one gapes at me when I order a large americano and a chocolate croissant like they do in the city.
At the next wayside, just over a river feeding into the lake, I stop. With my backpack and breakfast in hand, I follow a path from the parking lot, through tall grasses, and down to the pebbled beach. A large piece of driftwood makes a bench. The coffee is good. The croissant stiff and flat. However, when the sun warms my face, I set the croissant on the log, let the coffee turn cold, let the sun nourish me.
My phone buzzes. Texts flash across the screen.
SAMI: Don’t do this alone.
I read the stream of her texts I’ve been ignoring since the night before. Messages like: I can’t believe you left without saying goodbye! And I won’t accept the money you left. And Where are you?
I start to type: It’s better this way.
SAMI: I’ll come with you.
I delete my text.
SAMI: Please. I don’t want you to die.
I type: Who says I’m going to die?
My finger hovers over send. I grip the phone, slip off my shoes and step across the rocky beach to let the icy water shock my feet.
SAMI: Please don’t leave me.
If I turn back home, would I even be me when I arrive?
The wind picks up. Water rushes around my ankles. From behind there is a shushing, like a mother comforting a child. I turn. The shallow river trickles into the lake through a curtain of brown, dried reeds. A red shoe is near the water. Next to it, fresh green cattails sprout from a long lump of earth. Something moves within it. Fingers elongated with grasses lift from the ground as if to wave, an eye bright and blue watches me. I wave back. It blinks a few times.
Perhaps I am not so alone.
SAMI: Please lmk you are okay?
Three dots blink on the screen.
I delete the last line, then type: I’m okay. Goodbye, Sami.
I hit send and drop my phone onto the rocky beach. A wave rushes forward, settling it upright—a tombstone to a past life.
As the eye within the reeds closes, the shushing rushes to the treetops in the forest beyond. With it my breath bottles up inside, releasing as I step along the shore of the river, barefooted, and into the forest.
The sun moves high overhead as I walk, then dips low behind the trees. The deep, cavernous guilt of my stomach healing with the fading of the light. By way of a deer trail, I find a grassy meadow by nightfall. I unroll my sleeping bag and open a granola bar out of habit, but the chocolate just melts in my hand.
At dawn, the sun cuts through the quaking aspens, crisply glinting on the dew like twinkling stars. The air is clear and refreshing, unlike in the city. I sit down in the middle of the clearing and grip the wet grass between my fingers, cool and silky. Chickadees titter in the trees. There is a slight vibration within the earth, one that reaches inside me. With it are voices, feelings, comfort. I try to pick out the words I sense but there are none, until bright as a bell in the stillness of the morning, a voice rings out through the clearing, “Hello?”
Startled, I stand and whip around.
A round figure emerges from the line of young white spruce.
At first, Lela and I walk together in near silence. It is far from the silence earned between lifelong friends. The type Sami and I had when we’d spend lazy weekend afternoons sipping coffee. Something else is shared between us, something felt through our steps across the earth. A sort of hum I sensed the moment she walked into the meadow.
That hum fades when we hike through a withering forest, an expanse of toppled trees where the silence is so eerie, the sky so vast, Lela starts to run.
There’s an urge to chase after her swishing, vine-entangled braids, as I used to chase after Sami’s beaded ones. But the glimpses of Lela’s aged skin, the shock of her close set eyes, the dots of lively green lichen across a brown face, takes the breath from me and the memory with it.
I have begun to stumble on joints that grow unstable by the hour, so I cannot run after her. Instead, I trip over a raised lump of earth. Struggling, I roll onto my back and see a tangle of roots, stems and leaves, the shape of someone hunched over it.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, finally sitting up, “I didn’t see you.”
“No worries, noo woorrriieesss at all.” They speak slowly, a pale face is framed with pink petal eyelashes looking up to the sun.
I push myself to my feet with a grunt, spotting Lela as she bounds ahead. Sami would have stopped. She would have turned around and helped me to my feet.
It feels as if my chest fills with mud, leaving me with echoes of a full breath, a beating heart, regret, what I once was. It lingers in my hardening insides. Or maybe, now I just need less air.
“It helps if you just let go.” Petals open and close. The earth thrums rhythmically.
The worms wriggle down in my legs now, urging me to go.
Lela stops when I call and watches as I stagger toward her. “Why did you just leave me there?” I ask.
“I thought you were rooting down.”
“No, I tripped.”
She shrugs. “I guess it’s hard to sense you when there aren’t as many trees.”
I know she saw me. I know she sees me struggle. Sami would have rummaged through her backpack and made Goodleygob, a snack we invented at camp to be eaten at Weird Rock. Basically, it was combination of dry snack foods with secret sauce stolen from the camp cafeteria drizzled over it. Mostly the results were pretty weird. Eating it always meant laughter. The best we ever had at camp was graham crackers, chocolate sauce and whipped cream. I’m still not sure how Sami managed that one.
Later, it became a tradition to exchange bags of the snack when we met. I last made it for Sami when she moved in with me five months ago, thinking it would take the edge off her pending divorce to celebrate our childhood dream of living together finally coming true. We ate until our bellies ached.
She left a bag outside my door when she thought I locked myself in my room with a cold.
Lela continues on, not waiting a moment longer. I follow, rubbing the smooth stone of the mood ring on my palm.
It helps if you just let go.
I lift the string off my neck, ready to toss it all into a decaying log. A faint thump in my chest pushes through the mud like a gas bubble breaching the surface of a bog. My breath catches. Instead, I ditch the string and slide the ring back on my pinky finger as I try to keep pace with Lela.
We find raspberry bushes at the edge of a thriving grove and stop to pick them. They are tart and juicy, the first thing I’ve eaten in awhile that holds any flavor. A gift from the earth. I gather the berries in the hem of my shirt.
The usual hum at my feet is boisterous, but I have gotten used to the chatter, to tuning into only what I want or need to understand, letting the sensation fade to just vibration, when in my ear is a whisper, a mumbling.
I pause, listen, feel for it at my feet.
“One, all are one, one is all, we are all . . . ”
The bush wriggles to my right. I wave Lela over. She glances at me, then continues picking the berries.
“All dust, all earth, all stars . . . ”
Pushing aside the branches, I find thorny, coppery arms twisted in the bush. A face nestled between them, eyebrows thick with prickles. Raspberries grow where the eyes should be. I drop the berries from my shirt, spit out the one I am chewing.
“Now we return, return, return to home, return to earth . . . ”
I call to Lela, wave her over again. With an eye roll, she comes. She looks at me like the kid who was forced to play with me during a dinner party. All I wanted to do was be a feral, snarling beast, and she wanted to play with dolls. She tried to avoid me as I tried to make my mouth foam, but her mother sent her back to keep me company. The girl obeyed and sat in the room with me, failing to conceal a snarl.
The only time Sami ever gave me that look, was the last time I talked to her, when she was angry and pacing the apartment.
“Let it become you, let it devour you, let it free you . . . ” the voice from the bush drones on.
Lela stands close. For how much she seems to dislike me, she has no sense of personal space.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“Why should we do anything?” She says.
“Hello.” I peek my head in the bush.
The face is unmoving, the raspberry eyes fixed, except for leafy lips that flutter. “One dust, one earth, one star returning . . . ”
As the words race, so does the thrum at our feet. An almost erratic pulse that disorients with its waves of rushing blood, slow breaths, tingling fingers, stiffening limbs. The sensation teetering back and forth from intense to tranquil.
Lela lets out a slow breath, eyes soft with sympathy and takes my hand, stiffly at first. It makes me feel awkward and itchy. As she squeezes my hand, that connection, that hum between us is stronger. And I realize I have misread her; I feel foolish and immature. She had to lose someone too.
Together we push down a calm, a stillness, a comfort into the earth.
It helps if you just let go.
Before our eyes, the face flourishes in green, leafy lips stilling as they breathe, “bloom, bloom, bloom.”
Lela continues to squeeze my hand as the leaves and berries settle with a quiver, as the thrum calms.
She lets go, turns to me. “Eila, your skin.”
I touch my cheek. The skin is rough and stiff, the same with my arms. A scaly, grayish growth covers the once white veins. Bark.
On the breeze, the sharp, minty scent of pine trees tickles my nose. I clutch the ring-clad-hand to my chest, then lead Lela through the forest.
The bark spreads rapidly through the night and into the next morning, causing me to wake even more stiff and clumsy than before. After packing our belongings, Lela doing most of it, we descend a piney hillside, reaching an abrupt clearing with thousands of freshly felled trees at the bottom. Lela pauses at the edge of the forest covering her mouth with her hand, but I can’t stop. She keeps pace.
At the far end of the clearing are tipped over tree harvesters, pinned down with long, finger-like vines. A dirt road is blocked with a wall of green. A few mossy cabins remain in the lowest part of the valley with a large mountainous boulder in the center. Goosebumps flutter over what skin I have left.
It can’t be. I totter on my rigid legs.
“Woah,” Lela steadies me with an arm,“you okay?”
“I-I’ve been here before.” I’m breathless, unable to stand still.
“You have?” Lela walks with her arm outstretched. I lean on it.
“It’s Weird Rock.”
“Weird what?”
“A place once special to a friend and I.” The ring sits heavy on my finger.
“Oh, look!” She points to the edges of the trees. From all directions there is movement, people in various stages of growth dot the clearing. Some cross it methodically, others stilling, blooming. We continue down the hill.
My pace slows more and more until I can no longer move. I’m not sure how long it’s taken us to reach Weird Rock, on the sunny side of it, where I stand with my feet sunken into the mud. I’ve been thinking of the man who transformed in the city. Lela is beside me, the lichen engulfing her face. She looks to me with compassion as I cry.
“What’s wrong?” She asks.
My voice a mere whisper, “I thought I would be alone. I didn’t know it would be so . . . ”
“Comforting?”
“You feel it too?”
Her eyes twinkle. I know the answer. I know she feels it the same as me, even though she’s never been here before. We are to be devoured, to become part of a whole. We are home.
The worms escape to the earth at my feet. The growing stillness inside is foreign at first. I’m not sure when I stopped breathing, yet I don’t feel deprived of air. Lela comes and goes, never straying too far. She rests at my roots at night. Her movements across the ground change and slow, the bounciness turning to a limp. Eventually she settles at my roots, her body slowly curling down.
As my arms become branches, fingers twigs, frilled with green needles, more stretching and growing from my crown, it is strange to not feel the cold of winter. The wind makes my needles shiver. There is no longing for warmth or food. There’s only a stillness, a quiet. As my growth slows, so do my thoughts, lingering on why I pushed Sami away, if I had done it more for me than her.
Was I selfish?
Through my roots Lela offers comfort. Maybe, by now Sami understands why I did it.
In the spring Lela’s vines wrap around me. My growth and change come rapidly. Little cone nobs form. I can no longer see the growing forest around me, but only sense those roots that emerge below ground, connecting into the fungal web of the forest. But I imagine there is little evidence left that this was once a campsite. All that’s left are the memories, etched in lignin, I still hold of it.
I’m always searching for Sami through my roots. If I somehow found my way here, perhaps she will too. Or maybe there will be a fluttering across the earth one day. A child will climb Lela’s vines up to my branches. I will feel a familiar step on the earth. A springiness interspersed with a cane.
“It’s still here!” The old woman will say.
“What is Grammy?” The child will ask.
“This rock. It used to belong to me and my best friend.”
“You owned a rock?”
“It was our favorite place.”
I’ll feel the weight of the old woman as she leans against me. The gentle shake releasing something from my branches.
“What’s that?” The child will ask, climbing down and pattering on the grass below.
“Give it here.” The woman will gasp. “Where did you get this?”
“It fell from the tree Grammy.”
“Is it . . . ” She’ll run a hand over my bark, the ring on her finger. “Eila! I’ve finally found you!”
My branches will quiver.
Over the passing seasons, she’ll rest her weight against me, frequently, and share stories of how the cities are unrecognizable, how so many people have blossomed all at once that there is no one left to work for MERS, that the growths of loved ones scattered all over the city are now sacred. She will tell me there is in fact a garden of all those who bloomed before, that I needn’t think the old man is alone. She will tell me how a small percentage of people are unaffected by the earth inside them, a genetic predisposition. Her family will be lucky.
Overtime, Sami will come and stay with me every day until the day her weight doesn’t lift. Gradually she’ll became lighter and lighter until I hardly feel anything at all, not even a thrum at my roots. Instead, she’ll nourish the soil beneath me. In the seasons that follow the forest will thrive. And even though she will never sense the message, I will shake the earth regularly, telling her how I am the lucky one to be with her forever at our rock.
Originally published in Extrasensory Overload: An Anthology of Speculative Excess, edited by Naomi Simone Borwein and Chun Hyon Lee.
