Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

THEY’D GO DAYS WITHOUT BATHING, wear the clothes they’d slept in. She wrote in the margins of the passing years, trimmed the wicks of the kerosene lamps. Was amazed in August by the Perseids, by congregations of moths. She remembers how, when they first arrived, her little son asked where the water fountain was. He couldn’t differentiate between this drumlin overgrown with mullein, thistle, and milkweed and the city park he’d left behind. Almost two decades later, he’s still living at home. He’s handsome and funny and helps out a lot; she wants to give him the world, but she knows she’d miss him.

One summer she found a box of mason jars in the damp dirt basement, so old the glass was wavy and tinged with green. The boy and his cousin caught fireflies and put them in the jars to use as flashlights on their late-night walks. In the morning, the candle ends on the old scarred picnic table would be full of moth wings. Moth bodies. Poems to mature later. She stayed home and nursed, listening for boys’ voices coming home over the hill.

The new baby grew round and sturdy, could identify plants at three. She helped in the garden as soon as she could walk, but protested when her mother squashed broccoli butterfly larvae between thumb and forefinger. By midafternoon, the kitchen was lined with mason jars of the green worms. When Margo visited, she said, “Do you know the jars in your kitchen are full of butterflies?” So busy trying to find time to write and keeping the fire going, she hadn’t noticed them hatching. Twenty years later the girl is gone. Margo said, “It’s the wild one you remember more.”

The fireflies lived in those glass jars, year upon year, winking in the bedrooms at night. The butterflies still line her kitchen. Sometimes she thinks they’re not in jars at all, but in her throat, made, too, of green glass. Sometimes it swallows you up, all that green, and when it finally spits you out two decades later, you look around and say, this place has changed, and so have I. You have to know how to hold on to things, and you have to know how to let them go. Tonight they’ll sit on the back step, she and her son. It’s August again, just like it was when they first came. They’ll open the jars and let them go. The fireflies will fly up to meet the shooting stars, soon become indistinguishable.

The butterflies will find her daughter and settle on her arms, sink into her skin. Become the tattoo that reminds her who she is.

She wonders what her own tattoo will be. Is glad she waited this long to get her own; maybe she’s finally old enough to choose just the right one.

THE WITCH SIENA LIVED at the bottom of the gardens on Vine Street where there were woods, mostly cedar and willow for it was damp. Nature’s natural cycle seemed altered there, for the ground was in places knee deep in broken sticks, and littered with the arms of dead trees. It was March, and Siena piled sticks and some old half-rotten clothes into a big heap; the village teenagers might come one day to have a bonfire. No one else came down much, so that the few paths were often overgrown, too brambly to struggle through, and decorated with takeout containers, beer bottles both whole and dangerously broken, and Styrofoam, both in cup and slab and pellet form.

The streets and driveways of the village were swept clean often, the lawns sprayed and weeded and raked and mowed, but no one cleaned up the ownerless woods, unless the witch did it. Siena didn’t actually hear what people said about her, but she could guess: they thought she was stupid enough to think if she cleaned up after them they might give her daughter back. Noelle wasn’t dead, Siena was sure of that. She’d have felt it if the girl was dead, just as she’d have felt it if her men had died. But her entire family was still alive, Siena knew it for a fact. She just didn’t have them near her anymore, the way they were supposed to be.

Early spring runoff filled the lowland gully beyond the fallen trees and piles of sticks. While she gathered bottles, disconcerted as ever by how many there were that once contained hard liquor of all sorts, Siena talked to herself. When had she begun? She knew it didn’t help her reputation much, that she’d spent too much time alone in the raggedy woods. She rarely entered the village proper anymore except to fill recycling bins before anyone else was up, as she was doing now. It was very early on Thursday morning, and Siena was fulfilling her weekly ritual of carrying sacks of pop cans and bottles up the disused lane from the woods to the street. Surreptitiously, she tipped the sacks into the big blue plastic boxes, otherwise woefully empty. Why, Siena often wondered, was it better to dump garbage off the bridge at night than to sort it into bins? Why was that so hard? But the villagers couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t.

Siena knew that even before dawn on Sundays the townsfolk made an opposite trek to her own: they went out, also with sacks, but they went to the bridge and tossed in their old pillows, used condoms, empty pill bottles, pornography, vomit stained sleeping bags, single shoes and sometimes even used toilet paper. They treated the gully beneath the bridge as an impromptu landfill in the middle of town. Yellow, green, orange and clear garbage bags hurled on top of one another made such a nice sound: a kind of sliding squishing ker-thunk . The witch, they seemed to think, would deal with it. She always had.

And the morning after their midnight purges, Siena thought bitterly, they could go to church and talk about how disgusting she was: now so solitary, and untrustworthy because of it, and because she wove things she found out of old string she gathered; she knitted spider webs out of the dirty old string, and hung them from the trees. They were frightening, like things spiders on LSD might have made, and there were more each year. Siena made them painstakingly; each intricate piece of webbing took at least a month to make. It was especially because of the spider webs, Siena thought, that they could face the day pretending they were clean nice decent people. But she couldn’t have stopped making them even if she’d tried. They were a compulsion, like her paranoid and vengeful thoughts. She was sure the villagers looked the other way when their boys bent to reach for stones, even though they knew not one would ever make its mark; Siena knew how to deflect stones even before they flew.

Aside from taciturn little boys, the only other person the witch saw early on Thursdays was a woman who combed the streets looking for things others had thrown away that she might drag home to sell at her weekend yard sales. “Looks like rain,” the woman said this morning.

“Yes. Have much luck today?” Siena asked.

“Some old shirts, and two nice lamp stands.” She gestured at the lamps, missing shades. Siena had hailed from the city once, and knew the lamps would sell for a hundred dollars each at a trendy retro boutique. But how would the woman get to the city? And how much would the store owner give her for the lamps? And so she just smiled and nodded, and only said, “The lamps are nice.” They’d already spoken more than they ever had. Speaking to a real person was actually quite hard.

“Do you want to buy them?” the woman asked, startling Siena out of her reverie.

“No.”

“I guessed not,” the woman laughed.

Was there a touch of derision in her laugh? Siena couldn’t be sure. “Why’s that?” she asked, a little belligerently.

“They say you sleep under a heap of odds and ends, other people’s garbage and sticks.”

It seemed hard to believe she’d survived winter doing that, but maybe she’d been so damaged by trauma Siena didn’t even know where she slept anymore. The rag picker looked at her, and Siena waited for the verbal spasm of hatred she knew must be coming, either from herself or from the woman. But they just looked at each other, and finally Siena pointed at the lamps and said, “You’ll get twenty dollars for them when the cottagers come to open up.”