Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“Give me back my necklace,” she gurgled.

I went and got it from the bathroom and clasped it around her neck, gently as I could. She didn’t thank me. She fingered the necklace as if she knew each bead from memory but didn’t look down at it. She didn’t speak again either. Mainly she dripped and dribbled.

After a couple of days I got tired of all the mopping. I put her back in the wheelbarrow and took her to the barn. She had drained so much water I could push her on my own now. Even in the barn she was still spitting water. Finally I hung her up, thinking it might help. Thin rivulets streamed out of her fingers and her feet. I began to realize she had probably been drowned all this time, after all. While our resuscitative methods seemed to have worked, her breathing and even her speech weren’t breathing and speech per se, so much as some kind of enteric nervous system response.

Blue has been scarce. Maybe getting mothers out of wells is more exhausting than he makes it look. No one calls anymore except the telemarketers. I keep making lists and forgetting them. I make tea and forget to drink it. I stay up late worrying about my brother. I wear my grandmother’s and my aunt’s necklaces, but I don’t think they’re helping.

When I go down to check on Ma she blinks at me, or maybe I just think she is. She fingers her own necklace almost constantly, wearing away the filigree. Georgia O’Keefe’s skin is nailed to the wall beside her. I think one day I will use it to make a coat for my mother. She would like a deerskin coat I think, after having spent decades down a well. The damp must have seeped into her bones something fierce.

RACHEL CLIMBED THE SECOND HALF of the dirty stairs to the upstairs hall, half-empty Tiger beer in hand. The Red Arcade Hotel, she suddenly felt, existed in another dimension. Although it didn’t, not really, of course not. But it felt out of time or out of place or both, as if it was all there was to the universe and her life. No past, no future, no world at all, just this hotel and time to write. The hotelier, a young queer songwriter from Toronto called Berndt, was a big supporter of the arts. Maybe he had bought the hotel because he too, could intimate the presence of the portal even if, unlike Rachel, he didn’t have the word for what it was.

Although you never knew.

Rachel knew about the portal because her fingers were tingling. She loved portals even though like menopause they caused or maybe just worsened ADHD. Portals felt prickly, like electricity, and whooshy, like white water canoeing, and delicious, like arousal or an amazing book or the first beer. She knew not to go looking. You couldn’t rush a portal. Like inspiration it would come when it was ready.

She had booked a week at The Red Arcade on a self-directed residency in the hopes that the hotel would be a place where she could recapture her youth. She was broke and Berndt had told her she could swap workshops for her room rate. She didn’t care about her crow’s feet and laugh lines, but she wanted to be able to write like a young person, without a deadline, without tweeting about what she was working on, without rephrasing the cover letter twice after dinner. Although nowadays, maybe all young writers did those things and it was the old ones who didn’t.

Her fantasy trilogy had done well enough as these things went, but she had lost part of herself along the way. She had lost the first writer, the youthful creator who loved William Burroughs and feminist science fiction and black American women writers and French symbolists, and wanted her writing to be the purest possible expression of who she was and believed that doing so made the world a better place, opening doors to spirituality and imagination in a post-capitalist world, not just for herself but for her readers.

Yeah, whatever.

Rachel unlocked her door with an actual key, instead of putting a card in a slot. The room smelled of old carpet and rotting plaster. She wrenched at the window in its wooden frame. A stick was called for, not a memory stick but the old kind of stick, the kind one threw to dogs and started fires with and used to prop windows open. Hotels like this, Rachel thought, should provide a window-propping implement. At last she thought to try an upright pencil; amazingly, it didn’t snap. Rachel was relieved. It was summer, too hot to sleep without an open window in a musty old hotel with no AC. She fell into bed. There were two, both twins with godawful mattresses. She chose the opposite one from the one she slept in the night before after staying up late with Berndt talking about anarchism and music and literature. She had only slim hopes that it would be better.

Rachel closed her eyes, still thinking about writing, which of course was much different from actually writing.

At a certain point it had gone flat. She’d start something new and in no time at all the main characters became words, the settings became obvious strings of words, the plot became words. Fiction writing only ever worked when the people were real and the colours of the tea cups were as bright or brighter than the colours in this world.

She couldn’t sort it. She went to sleep.

The bus that travelled the coastal highway no longer made the turn into the village. It was already getting dark when Esme asked the driver to let her off at the dusty crossroads.

“Do you have anything underneath?” he asked.

She shook her head. She carried one bag, a big flowered tote, and wore only her jean jacket and a straw hat with her dress. He wouldn’t need to get out and open the luggage compartment.

“You know people there.”

“Sure.” It wasn’t actually true, unless Margit still ran the hotel. “When will you be back?” she asked. Esme knew the bus would follow the water to one more town, before looping back and making the long trip back to the city.

“I turn around here.”

“It didn’t used to be like that,” she said, and she wondered. How did one get to the last town now, by walking? Was there any vehicular traffic? Could one hitchhike? “The bus used to go to the actual last town.”

“There isn’t another town.”

“There was the last time I came,” Esme said.

“And when was that?” the driver asked.

“Ten years ago.”

“You came here ten years ago?”

“With my aunt.”

“I wonder if I knew her. Not that I was driving this route then.”

Esme was going to volunteer her aunt’s name but then thought she had better not. You never knew what people were saying. “And where is your aunt now?” the driver persisted.

Esme picked up her bag and started down the stairs. “In town.”

“This town.”

“No, the last town,” she said.

“No one lives there now,” he said.

Not even Annielle? But suddenly Esme was afraid to ask. What could have happened?

At least he had finally admitted it existed, even if he hadn’t mentioned it by name, but then neither had she.

The town renamed Dream long ago by the woman Annielle many said was crazy.

Esme climbed the rest of the way out of the bus hauling her canvas bag with the orange flowers. “Where is the hotel?” she asked from the road.

He pointed. It was the right turn as she had thought. But you had to ask—sometimes the hotel moved, especially in the summer. “It’s just past the bend, that’s why you can’t see it.”

“I was going to bring my suitcase, the one with wheels. This bag is heavy.”

He shook his head. “They’d just have gotten stuck in the potholes. It’s closer than you think.” He hesitated. “Closer than it used to be. Sometimes we used to stay overnight. I liked that. I could have a drink with John.”