Green Thumbs (Short Story)
A man lived in an apartment but he called it sanctuary. His was the easiest to spot from the street; a overcrowded window—leaves pressed against the glass and tendrils curled around the frames, an eternal party with participants in green. And because belongings multiply and these ones do so literally, the man started moving his plants to the top floor of the apartment, pot after pot, big and small and they grow and flourish, necessitating more and so the rooftop becomes a haven, a jungle, a reprieve from the city’s din.
Then comes Strata; the entity that eats all souls.
Strata claimed that the rooftop was a shared space. Strata bemoaned that his plants took ‘more than his fair share’. Nobody one uses the space, they're all too busy, and if they do, they come to see his plants, but Strata didn’t care. They fired an angry email—ignored—and followed up with a very annoyed call.
“My plants belong here,” he insisted.
“They are full of bugs!” screeched Strata. “You put beetles on my windowsill!”
“That beetle was here first. You are the intruder. That life thrives regardless of your violence is a beauty in itself.”
And because Strata sat in a room with mosquito screens, ant bait traps, and mental barriers of inadequacy, Strata found the argument incomprehensible. “Get rid of the plants.”
“No.”
“We’ll get someone to take them away.”
“They’re welcome to. Everyone deserves a plant.”
“You think your resistance matters? You think we’ll be inconvenienced?”
The purpose of Strata is to inconvenience. It’s only right to speak their language. So the man nods.
“You’re right,” said Strata. “Because you do inconvenience us and we hate being inconvenienced. So we will hire someone else to do the admin to get rid of your plants. Best part is? We’ll make you foot the bill.”
The man hung up. Then he rang his friends.
From that day forward, Strata fell under attack by potted plants. The elected manager entered the hallway and walked headfirst into a mass of palm fronds. Another was almost stabbed in the shoulder by a Norfolk Island pine. The rest squealed, caught and pricked by cactuses, and they groaned and they roared and they tried to move them away but those pots were too heavy. They called for help and they (reluctantly) opened their wallets, but the plants returned the next day, different and varied.
Strata seethed over the phone. “We are putting up an apartment-wide notice banning all plants."
“Tooth and nail," the man replied. "This is my final warning.”
“You can’t win! The law is on our side because we make the laws!”
“This isn’t about winning."
“Nice talk, loser.”
They hung up. The man left his apartment and went to the rooftop via the stairs. When he got to the top, slightly out of breath, he hesitated before opening the door. His steps were slow and shuffled. It was getting harder and harder to enter his sanctuary.
A girl named Erica sat on an old bench amidst his plants. There in the cold evening air she sang—often about zombies or how mother kept forcing her to church because she had yet to give her heart to god.
But mostly zombies.
He had only spoken to her once, months before.
She had climbed atop the guardrails, arms spread wide, telling him that she was going to fly because flying was preferable to a world where everyone swam but she couldn’t, she was born without flippers, and all her days were akin to drowning. But the man was an adult and adults in general have trouble answering direct questions. He stammered a response incomprehensible.
She had asked him if he knew about salmon.
The man said they were high in omega-3 fatty acids.
I saw it in a documentary, she said. They start off as freshwater fish but migrate to the oceans to live most of their lives. They’d return though. They’d leap back up to the rivers where they hatched to mate once more.
And then the horror.
The sheer stress and exhaustion took their toll. After mating, their scales and skin started to flake. Eyeballs turned milky white. With the light robbed, their bodies still swam, instinctively, but their fins and tails were nothing but broken spines. And then one by one, they would pop open and burst. Floating gelatinous messes left their sockets and their flesh fell off in chunks.
They’re zombies, sang Erica to the cold night air, arms spread. They’re zombies, zombies, and they don’t know.
And then she turned to look at him, a twist of her body so fast that he yelped because he thought she would fall, but her feet were surprisingly steady. She had been on edge her entire life.
That’s how I feel about my country. Just swimming along blindly. Rotting, decaying, and dead—they just don’t know it.
“Come back,” the man said. “Please come back.”
Why?
The man was lost. It is the individual, his angry father shouted inside his mind, it is always the individual who is at fault! And here he is, an individual matched up against another, nothing in his repertoire.
I am an individual. I am helpless.
My parents don't want me. They just give me a tablet and shoo me away. I’ve played all the zombie games, you know. I’ve played every single one on the app store.
“You couldn’t possibly—”
I’ve played all one thousand six hundred and forty-two games. There’s only one thousand six hundred and twelve left now, because thirty of them got removed for IP violations. Anyway, that’s not my point. I hold the record for the highest killing streak across all servers and that’s not easy given the shitty ping, but it’s a fun handicap.
All this goes over the man’s head, but he gets the gist nevertheless. “My niece also plays zombie games.”
Yeah?
“She says the only defence between her house and zombies are a bunch of plants.”
Okay, can you, like, get your niece to play something up to date?
“Her tablet doesn’t have an internet connection. Her parents forbid it.”
What do you think’s going to happen?
“I don’t understand.”
Like, do you think she’ll grow up socially deficient? Or do you think she’ll grow up less depressed because she’s not bombarded by algorithms designed to obfuscate the difference between bad faith marketing and honest engagement?
“I can’t say I’ve considered the ramifications.”
Maybe your niece’s parents should.
“And which way did you go?”
I got the worst of both.
“Would some plants help?”
Hmm?
“The rooftop area is bare and empty. What if I brought some plants up here?”
I don’t know.
“My niece likes it when I bring plants over. She says it protects her from zombies.”
How old is your niece?
“She’s six.”
Did you think the same rhetoric would work on me?
“I think everyone could do with a nice plant,” he said, hoping it would distract her from planting her face on the sidewalk. “You could get all sorts. Honestly, a bush or two is pretty great. Then you could have a creeper up along the wall—”
Are we still talking about zombies?
“Probably not. I don’t think there are plant zombies.”
You’d be surprised.
“Actually, I don’t think zombies exist at all.”
The man was sweating. Hard to talk someone down from the edge, especially if they’re talking about subjects you can’t grasp. He remembered—too late, too late—from watching procedural dramas that he wasn’t meant to use negatives. Don’t deny. Try and drive the conversation towards gentler thoughts. But his head was filled with plants even though he wanted nothing more than to run and grab her. He couldn’t. There are things in life you can reach out and grab, things you may do on impulse, but a person perched on the edge so far away—steps, so many steps, how many would he have to run?—was not something he dared to do without proper thought.
“I’m going to walk towards you now.”
If words failed—
He took a step.
If society failed—
Then all that’s left is action.
And he ran anyway.
Months later, the girl on the rooftop had graduated from wearing over-sized hoodies. It’s the first time she’s been allowed to experiment and she makes do with stuff from op-shops. Her dress sense was horrendous, but those weren’t mistakes—she was learning. About herself, her own loves, her own fashion.
Up on that rooftop, she sat on the bench. The man took a seat beside her.
“I know why you put the plants up here,” she said.
The jungle caged them in. It’ll take a machete for her to fly again. Sometimes that’s all that’s needed. A pause. A moment, a breath.
“Do they work?” he asks.
“I guess.”
“Are you still a zombie?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But Claire asked to hang out this weekend.”
“Oh?”
“She held my hand. It was very warm.”
“That’s nice.”
“I think I’m starting to breathe.”
He wanted to tell her everything: that the first love hurts the deepest, that they never work out because we’re all too young and innocent and think romance is all that’s needed to carry us through until life rears its ugly head; Erica, love, you will have more chasms than hills, you will trip and you will fall and because you are young and you don’t know who you are, each step towards yourself will split you further and further apart.
He would’ve said this; as an adult, he felt it was his duty to warn and caution but there was something in her eyes that told him otherwise.
Perhaps she knew: even zombies shuffle forward.
“Okay,” he said simply.
Together, they watched the sunset.