Work Text:
She sits at her work table that’s cluttered with little clay pots, plastic baggies full of brightly colored powders cinched with frayed twist ties, ornate wooden boxes with lids askew. There’s a jumbled stack of sandwich-sized plastic bins packed with smooth river stones, blue egg shells, arcade tickets, green pennies. A tall rack of scents stands in the corner, hundreds of little amber vials organized into tight rows and labeled with yellowing slips of paper: wood smoke on a wool sweater; wet cat fur in the sun; rising dough; bog mud.
In front of her is an empty mortar, the pestle resting nearby. The crushing end is stained and shiny.
Six unsuccessful mixtures sit abandoned in buckets by the door to the garden. They give off a burnt and bitter smell. She’ll dump them on the compost pile later.
She stares at the clutter on her table and sips a strong cup of coffee from a little clay cup. She drums her fingers on the mortar, absently plucks at her chapped lip. Her eyes wander across the room lit only by the window tossing in optimistic morning sunlight, little dust motes sparkling in lazy flight. The sparkle suddenly brings to mind a sky filled with an intimidating number of stars seen from a sleeping bag in the desert when she’d been barely out of girlhood.
Suddenly her hand shoots out and snatches a plastic baggie of turmeric-yellow powder, a plastic bin of tiny vertebrae and small bicycle gears, a clay box of gritty New Mexico sand sparkling with flecks of mica, and a vial of a scent that makes her think of a sky so big there was nowhere to hide from it.
The coffee sits to the side, going cold, while she plucks a pinch of yellow into the mortar, measures out bones and gears, guesses at the ratio of scent to grit. Now she’s gripping the pestle, arm muscles straining, pulverizing it all into a homogeneous powder the color of a rusty paint can. There. Now it just needs a catalyst.
Rubbing her hands over her face, she feels suddenly exhausted, pushes back from the work table and pads barefoot into the kitchen. She squats by the embers cooling in the hearth, tosses on dry kindling and a big old dusty log, blows air into the embers. She stares into the fire as it licks sleepily into the dry kindling, growing hungry and crackling brighter. Her mind is far away on another campfire years ago in a desert under a night sky that swallowed her whole in her tiny sleeping bag.
The heat of the fire on her face brings her back, and with a little shake of her head she fills up a kettle at the sink and hangs it from the old-fashioned hook she’d insisted be installed in the fireplace. She could microwave a mug of water more quickly, but finds that fire-heated water makes a stronger plot. Waiting for the kettle to boil sets her nerves on edge, so to pass the time she leaves her house and wanders around in the wild and neglected garden outside. She breathes in the scent of dew on the overgrown blackberry canes, and inside in her work room, a droplet ploinks into a labeled vial of scent.
She gets preoccupied subduing an overgrowth of jewelweed she realizes is choking the herb garden. By the time she snaps out of her weeding fervor, the kettle has steamed itself empty. With a sigh, she adds another log to the coals, fills the big iron vessel again, and vows to stay in the kitchen where she’ll keep a closer eye on it. She’s rescued by a bundle of fresh herbs wilting in the fridge that need processing before they turn slimy and waste the summer’s growth. She’s halfway through a batch of cilantro paste and green to the elbow when the kettle begins to whistle. Another sigh. She leaves the recipe half-finished, rubs her hands on her apron. She pulls the hot kettle from its hearth hook with a singed dishrag and hefts it through the doorway into her workroom, sets it next to the mortar on the table. She dumps the cold coffee in her mug out the window, scoops in a heaping spoonful of rusty powder, and pours the steaming water into the mug. Some of the green basil goop drops from her arm into the steaming concoction and she wrinkles her nose. Oh well, she muses, we’ll see what comes of that. She leaves it to steep.
Sixteen jars of green herb paste later, she has settled back at her worktable with the tepid tea, shoving aside pots of ingredients and opening a book to a blank page. She pulls a pen from behind her ear and sips the tea cautiously. It warms her belly and burns her tongue as if it’s spiced with chilies. She closes her eyes and finds herself in a long, treeless, sun-bleached landscape with pointy black mountains jutting out of the horizon with no warning; splodges of juniper bush dot the sand like a child’s drawing.
She walks along a ribbon of pinkish highway that passes the bleached skeleton of some small unfortunate roadkill half-buried in the sand. The road climbs suddenly past wizened trees crouching low as the road peters out to a trail winding gently around the contours of the hills and shadowy ravines. She notices the wide-toed paw prints of leopard in the sand and follows them hesitantly off trail until they end at a copse of pines. There is n o sign of the panther, but as she glances around looking for it, she finds a pick axe leaning against a Jack pine. She lifts the blunt digging tool with old practice and swingx it in an arc above her head to land with a thud into the pine-needle strewn dirt. It's fine and silty and falls away easily.
The metal of the hammer clanks against something in the dirt and she tosses it to the side, jumping down into the shallow hole she's dug. She pushes her hands into the soft dirt and pulls out a silver tacklebox with rounded corners. Crouching in the dirt out of the wind, she dusts it off, lifts the latch, and opens the lid with a creak. She furrows her brow as she examines the contents packed into the tiny compartments on each shelf. When she touches an iron nail, she's flooded with the sounds of horse hooves that ran out of control and the panicked laughter that accompanied it. Trapped in a clear plastic box is the warmth of the young man close by in his down sleeping bag who had agreed they should sleep under the stars together as a lark. Stoppered with cork is a vial filled with the effervescent confusion in her belly as she had lain next to him trying to sort out of he is like a dear brother, a best friend, or if she dares hope for more. A small bag holds ash from the burned up possibilities when he stayed behind in the desert with a woman from the crew learning Navajo weaving. Here is the postcard she received from their subsequent road trip, scorched on three sides by jealousy. She pockets each item as she examines it.
Her workroom is dark when she returns to herself. Crickets keep the beat for a veery’s night song. Her hand is gripping the pen in a stiff claw. While she flexes and stretches her sore fingers, she can see in the dim light that the pages of her blank book are covered in her own tight, messy handwriting, though she can’t make out the words in the gloom. She is hungry, tired to her bones, but glowing and giddy. A decent plot, but it must be left alone to ferment all night and withstand being read in the critical light of morning.
She pads back to the kitchen where the fire has gone cold and rummages through the pantry for some peanut butter and a spoon. After shoving several thick spoonfuls into her mouth, she chews thickly and does one last chore. She hefts each bucket of failed concoction out into the twilight, lugs each through the garden and dumps them onto the compost heap. As she turns to go, something bright catches her eye. A big fleshy squash blossom, now sparkling with drops of water from the failed plots, is peeking out from a vine growing vigorously from the compost. Over the crickets and night birds, she hears a tiny hum. She bends low, lifts up the canopy of prickly leaves, and listens to the lovely little melody drifting from the chorus of blossoms.
Well, she muses. You just never know what’s going to sprout up from a mess of failed words.
~jch