Rosa rugosa

She stood with her palms flat to the two-by-six railing of the porch. Between her hands was a flat stack of handwritten notes. Without reading them over, she was certain they were goodbyes, farewells, good lucks, all hurriedly scribbled onto the card stock. Five months ago, when a boy from a military family had to move out of the country, the same teacher had made her whole class act out the same gesture. She remembered filling hers out, unable to recall the boy's last name, as she wished him the best of luck.

Standing completely still, air cold, nose and cheeks red, all the girl could hope for was the smallest bit of breeze to come and take the cards away. She pictured them flying up, one by one. A trial run before the first snowflakes of the season would occupy the same air space. But the zephyr never came. Her unfocused eyes stayed dead ahead, unknowingly resting on the few wilted leaves hardly tethered to the fallow branches. 

Without looking down, one hand began to move towards the other. She picked up the top card, pinched it with both hands, then slowly tore it in half, releasing the pieces to fall where they may. One half fell beside the fat pile of cards, one half fluttered down to the line of stone below the porch that separated lawn from garden. 

Her eyes broke their glaze when her hands found the bottom of the stack. Looking around, she saw blocky flakes riddling the ground, a mocking staging of snow that reminded her she would not see a white winter that year. 

Crawling from beneath the railing, a pillbug began feeling its way along the grain of the wood.

From her head to her toes, she felt a numb buzz of nothingness. She did not even feel anger anymore. She had spent all her rage as she spent her tears, thrashing about the house, threatening heinous actions in protest. All the rebellion and anxiety that makes a young person want to simultaneously start a revolution and lock themselves in their bedroom had been dropped, and in its wake, nihilism, in its purest, most unsophisticated form, had filled in the space.

Her sense of self had been redefined. Everything she ever liked could be taken away in an instant. Any feeling was not hers to feel. She was only allowed to feel those emotions at a given time. And because all those feelings were out on loan, they were all useless, disingenuous in their impermanence. 

She raised her hand to the height of her shoulder, then brought it down flat, quick, her palm dead-center of where the pill bug had been crawling. 

The sting of impact radiated through her hand, but she did not rub out the pain. She left it there as a means of trying to feel anything at all. 

Not even bearing witness to the little crustacean escaping from under her hand was enough to jumpstart her brain out of its black pit. The reappearance prompted a second squashing attempt and a more painful palm. 

She was slightly taken aback this time, when the pillbug managed to appear yet again. It continued on, completely unharmed and entirely unphased by the two assassination attempts. It did not even bother enacting its most basic precaution of curling into itself.

This time, she brought her hand in slowly, thumb extended down. She bullseyed the pad of her thumb straight into the bug, leaving no room for escape, pressing in hard and rotating back and forth as she did so. 

And yet the bug carried on. 

For the first time in days, her face showed something other than indifference or disdain. Shock, while not as profound as love or hate, was a change of pace she had not planned on trotting to. 

Raising her hands to eye level, she examined them. They were worn and red, gloveless in the late fall chill. But there was something odd about them, too. A slight translucency she had never noticed before. As though her body was made of a thick wax paper. Solid enough to be functional, but letting some light through the flesh not blocked by bone. 

She was as she felt: fading and powerless. 

Taking a few steps across the porch, she moved to where her father had planted Sunflowers. The oversized heads shrugged their weight over their stems. She reached for the florets slowly, uncertain of what was going to happen. At first, her hand had seemed to stick the landing, but as she put more force behind her swipe, she could see her fingers begin to slide through the face of the flower. The whole motion took consistent pressure, the flower was viscous despite its decrepit, late-season state. 

Her shock turned to scientific method. She repeated the experiment, her hand moving through slightly faster each time she ran it through the flower, until it took almost no effort at all to graze through the head. It was one thing to believe your life was an arbitrary sequence of uncontrollable events, that you do not make choices, that you do not matter. But for the physical world to look back at you and agree, was something unbearable. With each pass of her hand through the sunflower, she felt herself sink deeper into herself, deeper into that pit of nothing she had allowed to fester untreated. 

When the Sunflower had proven entirely unaffected by her touch, she moved on. Punches were thrown at the shed siding, fists flying straight through. Hedges were kicked to no avail. Then she laid her eyes on the Rose Bushes. 

When she was six, seven, or so, her fathers planted those Rose Bushes as a way of christening the house. She had been warned of the prickles and their tendency to do harm, but she either forgot the words or simply disregarded them. Her fathers found her wailing, her skin hardly dimpled from the incident, but not once did she come close to those Roses again.

Stretching out her hand in the direction of the prickles was her way of taking her life back into her own control. If she was no longer given the gift of impact, then at the very least she would use it to conquer her past enemies. Her face contorted, her eyes widened, mouth opening slightly. Her hand was pierced. She felt the pin-pricks of reality as they sat inside her penetrated skin. Her body had reverted. She was as real as the bush she grasped. 

She did not retract her hand. Instead, she tightened her grip, pushing blood through the open wounds. A small trickle rode its way to her wrist, then her forearm. At the elbow, it pooled to a drop, and when it fell, it splattered over ensiform blades. 

The world was returning to her, and it made her so furious her lip quivered. Once again, something was given, and just as she was accepting it, it was taken. She shut her eyes, so tight her sockets radiated with wrinkles. 

She had embraced this ghostly feature, a final rebellion against a world she never asked to know. But at the excitement of wielding that ability, she lost it. She had been fading away, believing in nothing. But she believed in the prickles. She still remembered how they felt the first time she touched them, and feeling them again was enough to reground her. 

Her eyes were watering, the drip off her elbow holding steady. When she opened her eyes and saw her white knuckles, numb from the grip, still clenched around the cane, she let out a growling noise deep from her throat. She released the bush, and began swiping at the plant violently. 

Her sleeves tore, her skin scratched. She battered continuously, only allowing her mind to fixate on the thought that nothing mattered. Not only did the Roses not matter, but her memories of them, and her father’s planting of them, and the yard they sat in, and the town around them, the town she was being yanked out of, and all the friends she had made in that town, were worthless as well. After many minutes, enough to see a change in the shadows under the sun, she succeeded in her relentless denial that anything in this world had worth. On one of her swings, she spun, nearly finding herself on the ground when nothing was there to meet her blow. She swiped again for good measure, her hand passing through the bush. She had relinquished her memory of the Roses, gave it up to the pit. Slowly nodding her head in success, she backed away from the plant, raising two adolescent middle fingers to the shrub as she did so. 

A feeling of lightheadedness was beginning to overtake her. Whether it was from her outburst, or finally succumbing to her extended hunger strike, it was hard to tell.

  Every step she took back to the porch had the same feeling as pumping bike pedals backwards. She was not really contributing to her momentum, but her legs were moving and her body was moving all the same. It was something between walking forward and walking in place. 

The porch was getting slightly closer, but it also appeared to be growing taller. There was no traction beneath her feet whatsoever. She looked down to see her femurs half buried in the lawn. She continued the motion of walking, if only to feel natural. As her eyes came down to ground level, her last glimpse of anything was a card that somehow managed to escape her shredding. It was pedestaled by grass, the world’s valediction to her.

Clarissa, I wish I had gotten to know you better. I still remember that time I saw you last summer while I was at my uncle’s cabin. Those are really great memories I’ll hold onto. Stay cool.  ♥ Erin

If she wanted to, Clarissa might have been able to reach up and grab the card like it was the painfully real cane of a Rose. She may have been able to pull herself out of the dirt, and begin to heal in that gruelingly slow speed anguish requires. But she did not. Her actions felt final, and so her fate was a self fulfilling one. 

She could no longer see, but she could feel her eyes were with the worms. Many crawlers slid in and out of her ephemeral body, unaware they were passing through a specter. In school, she had learned that the inside of the earth was warm, but down in the never-ending quicksand of consequence, she felt cold and lonely, unsure of what comes next in a life forfeited to misery.