McMaster Class of 2025: Short Story Contest Winner
Natalie Begley
Jungle of the world-widowed
“Too many plants” is an oxymoron, but when I had to scoot a wispy spider plant off the toilet paper roll, I’ll concede that my apartment was officially more jungle than living space. It was summertime though, and the pandemic was still crawling along and I had to find some way of marking my confinement. Therefore, every day we were stuck inside and I couldn’t see anybody, or at least not in the way I wanted to, I bought one houseplant. At some point it became so ridiculous that I was going to invite some indie magazine over to photograph my apartment and squeeze a quirky article about my green-thumbs-gone-rogue in their online magazine, but I was worried that they’d tip off the hoarders tv show people instead. I pictured them knocking slyly on my door, ready to catch the disgruntled culprit within and portray all my actions as terminal neuroses. Their edit would paint me as some misanthropic hermit who anthropomorphises her plants as divine children or something, so instead I just kept it all sealed up.
I swear I had quite a good reason for starting the whole affair though. Of course I could have sewn buttons onto a dress for each day we spent in quarantine, or baked hot cross buns for all the shelters in Hamilton, but the thing is, my life had already been consumed by a plant for the previous nine years. The genesis of my problem was a palm sized orangey-red berry that looked rather like a kumquat with a nipple. I’d been gifted this berry in a Sumatran jungle by members of my extended family, who didn’t speak English and conveniently couldnt convey the burden this plant would confer upon me, as I — to my eternal shame — didn’t speak Indonesian either. So we gesticulated fruitlessly at each other and they gave me a seed, that unbeknownst to me I would have to tend to as its personal lady in waiting for ten whole years before it would bloom.
Thus in order to fulfill my promise I’ve had to undertake some rather drastic measures. First of all I’ve had to swamp up my apartment to a constant 90% humidity and for that reason have also had to scour the depths of second hand stores to collect the higglety pigglety tropical wardrobe necessary to survive my apartment. It sounds less than desirable, but I’ve found that having a task to do every day, like watering a great honking root ball, adjusting its heat mat, and making sure my apartment is humid enough to nearly stew me alive has made me pretty proficient at sticking to routines. A skill that has, rather conveniently, kept me kicking during this whole shebang.
The other reason I persevered in maintaining my little botanical ark, is that when I started was also when my father died. The funeral was like a sad stained glass collage of little faces on my laptop and he was buried without ceremony by his four children and his white wife, polarizing the Indonesian half of the family who couldn’t be with his body. I won’t go into it; we’ve all borne enough grief, and at the time I simply flung myself at plants to make it through. I didn’t expect my greenhouse to flourish into a year’s worth of plants but I certainly wasn’t about to half-ass it and give up. After all, the corpse flower still required my constant nursing and it hadn’t even bloody bloomed yet. You see, corpse flowers are extremely rare. They grow only on this one sort of pancreas shaped island in Indonesia called Sumatra and even there they’re on the cusp of endangerment.
That I could have been visiting my family when their local plant was in bloom, which happens only every eight to ten years, was beyond fortunate, but that my father had died before he could see ours bloom? I didn’t begrudge my vegetal motherhood so much after that. I of course do have a normal job that I attend rather disinterestedly each day but when I squeeze home through the door every afternoon, it’s to the rapturous greeting of a thousand little people all snoring peacefully.
Fronds, vines and leaves are draped from every surface, consuming the walls, ceilings, and tables with greenery. I’ll sneak in and tiptoe through on a game trail I forged past the languorous foliage splayed across the hardwood and the small-swimming-pool-sized pot of my corpse flower to slip into my Indiana Jones attire.
Then, watering can in one hand, spray bottle in the other, I’ll dive into a complicated rotation of pouring and misting, drifting around, hands flitting seamlessly in and out of terra cotta islands. That is, until one night. I awoke at four in the morning to a titanic stench and knew immediately that the flower had sprung. I flung my feet out of bed and stumbled down the stairs to where the creamy yellow spadix of my corpse flower was soaring in the moonlight. It was ten feet tall and nearly piercing the ceiling. As the name suggests it also smelled like a sack of meat left in the trunk of a car too long. A few moments later somebody pounded at my door. “Hey, you okay in there?” He yelled in the pinched way one does when they’ve pegged their nostrils shut. I tried to reply but all that emerged was a burble that preceded deep choking sobs. I heard worried murmuring and realised that a task force had mobilized on my landing and that the vast waves of stench circulating through the building could only indicate one thing to my anxious neighbours. I couldn’t stop sobbing though; at the twilight shafts spotlighting a plant that I had taken care of for years, that represented mine and my fathers heritage and that made me think of all my Indonesian relatives who were most certainly sat up in their beds then, smiling knowingly at the marvel of their gift. There was agitation outside my door before Serge the doorman’s boot snapped though the hinges and splintered a hole in my door like a SWAT raid from the movies. I didn’t budge, gazing instead at the drooping maroon fringes and the great banana spear that I had nurtured into life for ten years, my mind heavy with memories of my father. When at last the door had shattered enough that they could squeeze inside I was of the mind to suspect that all eighty of my prying neighbours poured into my apartment. They clapped their hands over their shock as they spied a vast forest of shadowy tendrils dangling from every surface. Then they saw me sobbing in front of an enormous alien-looking plant and really gasped. My next door neighbour Sawyer hurried over and kneaded my shoulders, cooing with sympathy as I convulsed. Slowly the parade of people trickled into every corner of my apartment, one of them whispering “so is there a body or what?” and another shushing him with a: “I think it’s the plant, man.” The atmosphere held a timidity, everyone suddenly unsure of their intrusion and confused about both the smell and my hysteria. “Ahh” The great dane lady from downstairs inhaled sharply. “We’re not wearing masks.” I looked up and squeegeed the tears out of my eyes. Everybody was gazing around at one another, looking thrilled as they divined in their sin. “And just when we need them eh”, joked one neighbour, flapping his hand dramatically in front of his nose at the stench. The responding chuckles dramatically lowered the tension. It occured to me that this was the company I’d been pining for all this time, that these were the people who my plants were personifying. “It’s a corpse flower”, I said shakily. “It blooms once every eight to ten years during a twenty four hour period and only a handful come into bloom each year. You’re witnessing a miracle.” The reverence I delivered it with brought everybody into the present. The air was electric with the thrill; that the space held both the purified air of life and a pathogen that could silently sow death within any one of us. I waved to the surrounding surfaces, “sit down” and pleaded, “stay.” Some people, relieved that they could rule out rotting flesh simply trickled back to their own rooms, some complained of having work to rise for, and some squeamish folk didn’t take well to the realisation that we weren’t protected, but 20 or so of my neighbours sat down, embracing the mysticism of the moment to watch my plant, enthralled. It was a silence of warm company, sitting in the ring of light outside which was the chasm of aloneness. We simply watched, the leaves drooping ever so perceptively, biology unfolding before us. Hours dissolved into a wash of time, and it was only the collective roar of empty stomachs that reminded us of our mortality.
“I’ll cook breakfast, can anyone work a French press?” An appropriately hipster looking dude wearing cutoff David Bowie pyjamas raised his hand with an amused nod of self awareness, and rose to grind the beans. I began rummaging through my fridge, tossing aubergines, bean sprouts and greens onto the counter only to turn around and find the couple who cook at the Indian restaurant downtown extracting my knives from the block and sizing up my produce selection. Yet another platoon of neighbours began delicately syphoning my plants off the table to make way for the ceramics contingency who swept across the room bearing anything that could conceivably be eaten from. In this way we proceeded, as if we had done this a million times, the primal forces of connection ratcheting us into place and directing us with ease. All the while the corpse flower towered like a panopticon surveying and conducting our communal flow. Once Stenson topped off twenty steaming mugs, most of the others sat and talked around my table. I smiled at the bubbling stops and starts of first encounters, everybody flirting with the possibilities of these people they’d never yet encountered despite our proximity. All the while, me, Avyaan and Hannah simmered, boiled, sauteed and stewed, fusing cultures, techniques, spices, ingredients, heritages, stories and abilities into something blazingly unique. We eventually loaded platters full of food to share, and everybody rose once more to cart our feast to the table. When were all sitting, Stenson stood up to toast: “I don’t even know some of your names, and I’ve seen barely a soul in a year and a half, but when unmasked I have found that you, the people I share the same pipes with, walls with, are the people I want to be with in this moment. Citra, you and your corpse flower are divine, so I thank you for this remarkable morning. To this plant loving quack, cheers!” Everybody rose and clinked coffees in an apex above our feast, drinking and laughing. When the cheers settled we each levered food onto our plates, the foreign flavours igniting neighbours whose eyelids performed seizure-like acrobatics of delight. We ate and talked until the call to work was too pressing and we all stood with the understanding that it had been a once in a lifetime occasion.
I hugged each person individually and before they could stream out my door and vanish, I channelled my best Lizzy II, and granted each of them a plant from my collection. Devil’s Ivy, Money Tree, Maidenhair Fern, Snake Plant, Eucalyptus, I gifted them deliberately, intuiting somehow the consonance of the people and the plants’ essences. And one by one they left. Finally it was Stenson who, before I could heave a hulking Monstera into his arms, took my hand and kissed it, “Thank you.” Then in an amused murmur: “If I give you COVID you can sue me for all I’m worth.” I lifted the huge plant into his arms, its heart shaped fronds roped across his shoulders. “Monstera deliciosa. Swiss cheese plant. Or vegan Swiss cheese plant if you will.” He chuckled and started to leave before turning around one last time, “May I ask why you were so upset when we came in?”
“My father died recently.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, my mother died three months ago”
“I’m sorry.” There was nothing more to say.
“Did he like plants?”
“No, he always said they were dust collectors.”
“What’s all this for then?”
“Growth.”
He smiled and left, leaving me in a home speckled with bald spots amid the greenery, scattered with dirty dishes, stinking like a ten foot tall jungle plant and in a state of overall disarray. But people had pollinated my life, and I felt the first shoots of a new existence stirring within me.
Thank you to our judges:
Ross Belot
Haider Khan
