Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  In the morning Harker was gone, which almost never happened. Serena put on her printed wrapper and went outside, thinking he might be on the porch smoking.

  Between the houses and the fields lit by sunrise there was a row of poles, each sharpened to a point, and each sharp point protruding through a head. She retched, recognizing the impaled heads of her next door neighbours, and Harker’s head and Blake’s. She saw Concepción’s, her black hair in a twist around her neck. Perhaps they had found her on the road outside town, the first of the girls to make her way home.

  Serena watched a group of men receding on the downland road. One of them turned as if to look at her. His face flickered even though he was nowhere near firelight.

  Her youngest came and stood beside her. She took little Jake’s hand.

  The pole that healed you was sent by the strangers to protect Harker, she thought but didn’t say. He knew it was his, maybe he even made it, but I didn’t let him keep it. Now I have you and not him or your sister and brother. What about Agatha and Mildred? Maybe it’s not too late to find them?

  Serena recognized the poles she’d sold. Letting go of Jake’s hand, she dashed forward and plucked a leaf from Harker’s eyebrow. Like the leaves on the surrounding trees, it was starting to turn a russet shade. But that didn’t matter. Serena would still take it home and set it in a glass of water. She would put the glass beside his pole, and she would wish.

  The Meaning of Yellow

  JESSICA LEFT HER JOURNALS on subways, in taxicabs, in laneways bright yellow with the first fallen leaves, soon to be brown and rumpled and smelling of Halloween. It wasn’t just drinking with Simeon; she was a forgetful sort. Each time she bought a replacement journal she told herself she’d leave it at home, but she could never bring herself to stick to this plan. She loved writing in cafés too much to ever give it up.

  She always imagined the strangers who found her notebooks. Would they take up where she left off, filling the remaining blank pages with their own to do lists, love letters, and scraps of poetry? Would they complete her failed short stories? Would they share her journals with their friends and imagine her as plump and unattractive? Jessica was plump, but her father had told her that to fetishize the very thin was actually a desexualizing of the female form, representing a male fear of womanly fecundity. He could go on. He was a cultural studies professor. Simeon told Jessica how lucky she was. Jessica’s father was never going to sigh in a disappointed manner when she showed up for Thanksgiving dinner with dishevelled hair, sans make-up and polished nails. Simeon, Jessica’s best friend, was impeccably groomed at all occasions, but this failed to impress his own father, who hadn’t yet gotten over (and might not ever get over) the fact that his son was gay.

  “Some people are straight,” Jessica pointed out, “and some aren’t. People should do what they want. Guys who want to wear eyeliner should, although I do think all those chemicals have got to be bad for your skin. And do you know what they do to the bunnies?”

  “What bunnies?” Simeon asked.

  They were in a student café called The Mermaid, drinking coffee and eating carrot muffins. Jessica had been there since one, Simeon since three. They’d had one refill each. Jessica would’ve gotten a third, but refills weren’t free, and she was out of money. She’d have asked Simeon to pay, but she was always doing that. He got money from home to flesh out his loan. Her own professor father balked at doing this; he thought she needed to learn how to budget. Jessica couldn’t budget to save her life. Just now the manager was giving them dirty looks. The place was filling up with the after class crowd, paying customers who’d ordered soy lattés and expensive pastries and were now looking for somewhere to sit.

  “The bunnies they perform the experiments on,” Jessica told Simeon as they swung out the door. It was cold. She should’ve worn a coat and not just a sweater.

  “Experiments?”

  “They wire their eyes open and put mascara on them to see how they react,” Jessica said.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Simeon said. They’d reached the corner where they usually parted ways.

  “Oh fuck,” Jessica said, patting her alarmingly empty canvas bag.

  Simeon started to laugh. He knew what was wrong. Jessica ran back to the café, hair flying. Her clogs made a nice thunking sound on the wet October sidewalks. She burst into the door. Her notebook wasn’t on their old table, nor was it underneath. The people now seated were all wearing new brand-name jackets. Didn’t they have coffee chains for people like that? She asked if they’d seen her book. What she really wanted to do was go through their bags, one by one, as if she were a store owner and they were suspected shoplifters, but they were already looking down their noses at her obvious desperation. She asked at the counter. The pierced and tattooed manager rolled his eyes; it was his rush and he was understaffed. His eyes willed Jessica to disappear.

  Back on the sidewalk, she looked around for Simeon. He was gone, home, she supposed. It was raining now, and she hadn’t really expected him to wait for her since they were going in different directions.

  She set off for her little bachelor around the corner. Almost at her door, her clog kicked something on the sidewalk. She looked down. At her feet there was a hard-cover journal. It was yellow. She picked it up and stashed the book in her shoulder bag. She turned the key in her lock. She walked up the three flights of stairs. Her sweater and jeans were damp and wet. She unlocked the door to her tiny apartment, went inside and sat down on the old yellow couch. She opened the book she’d found and read.

  Renee and her friend Neil climbed down the iron fire-escape that led from her kitchen to the roof of the first storey, where she’d planted purple fall asters and canna lilies in halved oak wine barrels. The cannas’ foliage lent the roof a tropical feel, and much to everyone’s surprise, managed to bloom, displaying huge spikes of glowing red flowers.

  It was a perfect description of the back of Jessica’s flat.

  Was this one of her journals? Maybe she’d forgotten she’d ever even had it, never mind written in it. Maybe she’d been experimenting with autobiographical fiction, and her first step had been to change her own and Simeon’s names.

  Except the handwriting wasn’t hers, so that couldn’t be it.

  She turned the page and read on.

  She and Neil climbed down the second set of iron stairs and cut through the yard of the butcher shop, even in winter stinky from heaps of discarded beef bones, through the alleyway, and back out onto the main street where they’d seen it earlier in the afternoon. It was an enormous brocade couch with a real wood frame and not a pasteboard one, and was henceforth, extremely heavy.

  Now she was sitting on it. Stained yellow; round wooden feet, brocade flowers, a missing centre cushion.

  Jessica went to the kitchen and put water on for tea. She changed out of her wet clothes while the tea was steeping, sat back down on the couch, and turned to the next page. It was empty. Impulsively she picked up a pen and wrote:

  Renee was in shape from swimming twice a week so she and Neil were able to carry the couch down the street, around the corner into the alleyway, through the butcher’s yard that always inspired her, for fifteen minutes at a time, to become a full time vegetarian again, instead of a lapsed little-bit-of-chicken, little-bit-of-fish one. They set it down to pant heavily, exuding vast puffs of vapoury breath, dragon like, staring at their frozen whale, the return journey up the fire escape: the hard part. It didn’t help that they’d gone to the campus pub earlier and were drunk, or maybe, on the contrary, that was what made them think they could pull it off.

  Jessica remembered she’d gotten the top end, being so much smaller than Simeon. She’d asked him to abandon the project because the slats of the fire escape were icy now and slick with sleet. She was afraid she’d lose her grip on the couch and kill Simeon. She told him so but he thought it made more sense to keep going th
an to take the couch back down. Jessica had hoped they could just leave it on the fire escape, a canted yellow whale.

  She put down her pen and turned the page.

  The unknown writer continued the story:

  Renee learned to hate the couch—she always meant to find a replacement for the missing centre cushion that, if it wouldn’t match, would at least fit. She never did. The couch sat there for a year and eventually she called Neil and they lifted it once again and carried it back down the fire escape from whence it had come. They left it on the second storey roof; a place to sit and contemplate unlikely cannas. The young women downstairs appreciated it more than she did. They always drank cold Steam Whistles on its leaf-shadowed squishiness in the afternoon when they got home from their landscaping jobs. Leaf shadows joining with brocade fabric ones, mutating.

  Years later, when Renee was happily married, she found a yellow couch at a yard sale that reminded her of the first one. It was as if the couch had followed her. Why? What did it mean? Should she buy it? She pulled out her cell to call Neil and ask him.

  Jessica shut the book. She was apparently reading her own future.

  It was a good future. She still lived in the apartment; she had nice new downstairs neighbours. She still had the couch. She still had Simeon. And later on, she found a nice guy, and got to keep Simeon too.

  There was a tiny part of her, she realized, that had always doubted there would be a later on, for her. She felt reprieved by this story, by whoever had written it.

  Jessica remembered her and Simeon’s Ouija board phase. Ouija boards were usually a girl thing, but Simeon was Simeon.

  Will I find love?

  O-H Y-E-S.

  Who will it be?

  M-O-R-G-A-N.

  Jessica spent all of grade eight looking for Morgan but he never appeared.

  This was like that, only much worse. Or better, depending on how you looked at it. Except that Jessica wasn’t thirteen anymore. She couldn’t get excited. It was just nuts. There had to be a rational explanation, and suddenly its obviousness dawned on her. She picked up the cordless and called Simeon. “I found your book,” she announced.

  “That’s great,” he said. “I thought I’d have to get a new one! Bring it to class tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Jessica said. “It was right on the street outside my door. You must have dropped it last time. We drank two bottles of wine, remember?”

  “I’m so relieved. They’re eighty dollars,” Simeon said, “and there aren’t any at the used bookstore.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jessica asked.

  “My biology textbook.”

  “No, this is a yellow hard-cover journal with lined pages. You’re writing a short story in it. It’s about you and me, and that day last winter we brought home my couch, only you’ve changed our names to Renee and Neil.”

  “Not so,” Simeon said.

  “You’re lying to mess with my head,” Jessica said.

  “That would be someone else,” Simeon said.

  “But who? No one saw us that day. The description of the roof, the cannas, the fire escape. It’s all there, exactly as it happened.”

  It was Simeon’s turn to say it. “You’re lying to mess with my head.”

  “But I’m not. And it even describes our future.”

  “Oh?” Simeon didn’t do too good a job of sounding credulous.

  “We’re still best friends in a year, and even after I get married. See you tomorrow.”

  Jessica hung up. She picked up the yellow book, opened it to the page ahead of the last entry. It was empty. Should she write something more? She leafed through the remaining pages one by one. Every single one was empty.

  If she wrote something else about Renee and the yellow couch, would another entry appear, one page ahead?

  Jessica knew how to find out, but she was too afraid to try. Instead, she slipped the yellow book into her canvas bag. She’d show it to Simeon. He’d admit it was his after all. That had to be it. The part about her writing the missing part of the story was just a coincidence. Pleased with her analysis, Jessica went to sleep.

  The next day Jessica went to the café after class to meet Simeon. Her cheque from her little job at the library had finally cleared, and it was her turn to treat. She stood in line at the crowded counter while the manager stuffed two carrot muffins into a paper bag. Someone tapped her shoulder. She thought it was inadvertent; the café was so crowded. The tap came again. She turned around. A young man in a wool scarf and a duffle coat stood there holding out her journal, the black one she’d lost the day before. Everyone had those notebooks. Except that she’d taped a postcard of a Christiane Pflug painting to the cover, “Cottingham School with Yellow Flag.” What was it about yellow, anyhow?

  She took it. “Thanks,” she said. She felt exposed, wondering if he’d read it. She wrote in journals to vent, not to be brilliant. She felt suddenly angry at all the imaginary people who’d found her many lost notebooks and snickered at her.

  “Do I know you?” Jessica asked. “How did you know it was mine?”

  Maybe he stared at her in some class. Maybe he’d surreptitiously stolen her book so he’d have an excuse to introduce himself.

  He smiled. “I’m Morgan,” he said, and turned away before it even sank in.

  “Wait!” she called when it did.

  He was already at the door. He heard her, though. He turned around and said, “I don’t think you’ll lose your notebooks anymore, Renee.”

  She pushed through the crowd to follow him. On St. Andrews she turned both ways. He was gone. She felt like someone was performing experiments on her. How would she react?

  “Jessica!” someone said behind her, and she started, afraid to turn and look, see the young man again. Except whoever it was had called her Jessica, not Renee. And she knew Simeon’s voice, she always had. She was just so disoriented she’d momentarily forgotten. Just as she’d forgotten—or pretended to have forgotten—that the handwriting in the yellow book wasn’t like Simeon’s, not even remotely.

  She reached into her bag to get out the yellow journal and show it to Simeon. But her bag felt, once again, alarmingly empty. Jessica felt as if she’d been captured, and taken on a long ride through inexplicable weirdness—unmoored in space and time, coerced to explore a maze of many new dimensions.

  “Oh fuck,” she said, and laughed.

  “Fuck what?” Simeon asked. “You haven’t lost your journal again; you haven’t had time to buy a new one since I saw you yesterday.” He noticed she was holding it then, the postcard of the Pflug painting still taped to its cover. “Oh,” he said. “You found it.”

  “That’s right,” Jessica said, still laughing. “It’s Morgan’s notebook I’ve lost this time, I’ll bet you anything.”

  For just a moment she thought she saw the yellow flag ripple in the breeze, and then it stopped. “My turn to buy,” she said, and they headed back into the Mermaid Café.

  “I remember about Morgan,” Simeon said, as she’d hoped he would. “So you finally met him?”

  “Yes, I did. He’s not what I thought, though.”

  “Is he your true love?” Simeon asked.

  “Possibly,” Jessica said. “All the same, can you help me throw the yellow couch off the roof this afternoon?”

  “Whatever for?” Simeon asked.

  “I want to watch it fall,” Jessica said.

  Trading Polaris

  I’D ALWAYS LIVED ALONE until you came, Alia. We hadn’t just been lovers, companions; you led me beyond time. With you I was able to watch its comings and goings from the tops of invisible ladders, of trees, its messengers little ghostly animals we’d given birth to while dreaming there, while making love. We spent three summer months together, in my white clapboard house facing the sea. Before you came it was just an empty ballro
om where I danced with sea winds.

  September came; you had to be home. You lived an eight-day walk above our seaside valley. You asked me to take you part way. On the fourth evening we camped by a rocky waterfall; in the morning our campsite was enveloped in a golden mist. You were gone, our fire dead. I was afraid I’d never see you again, for you’d disappeared into that yellow fog as though into a cloud that might carry you away, to rain you down in a place where you might find smarter lovers.

  I left the fire pit and began to walk in the direction I believed your village lay. The flat land swelled into shallow wooded hills, reminiscent of a woman’s body, but it wasn’t yours. It was Sonia’s, but I didn’t know that then.

  sss

  When I made camp that night I tried to climb the spirit ladder as you’d taught me, up to the starry place we’d gone together. At the top of that ladder it’s possible to see into the past and future, to retrieve from the sky what is necessary to the life of Earth dwellers—the trick is to keep your brains intact on your way back down—such as they are. I’d so willingly shucked the husk of self to fly—a husk that seemed, while visioning, irrelevant, but a necessary cloak, you reminded me, for navigating this world, its people. On the way down, my first time with you, I was still so borderless I could understand the speech of trees, the secrets of rivers. I consumed this wealth of new knowledge gluttonously, never thought how there’s no use in wisdom if it can’t be shared. I understood so many new languages but could no longer speak. Is that why you left me? You said you’d go, part way, but I’d always thought we’d say goodbye first. It was when we descended together I learned how much stronger you were than me, how much more treasure you could carry down the ladder and still remain intact. Did you vanish because I proved too weak to carry knowledge?

  Alone, I tried to climb again, the way you’d shown me. Hoped that, could I climb high enough, I’d be able to signal you, call you to return, but four of the ladder’s incorporeal steps were missing. I thought perhaps I’d broken them our last time. Who had we left up there, unable to descend? What nameless beasts had we spawned—dream pigs or fishes running amok in a world I couldn’t see? The part I could see it with was still up there, perched on a broken rung. I would have to find my own way to knowledge now; the path you’d given me was barred. I’d have to go into the woods alone.