Timothy Wojcik

In The Knotweeds

We’d lived in a small apartment in a quiet neighborhood in Queens, and while that was better than the place in Brooklyn, once we unloaded all of our things into the drafty, old Colonial, we finally realized just how cramped we’d been living, everything compressed into two hundred and fifty square feet. Juliet sat on a sagging box and looked at the mostly empty room.

“We’re gonna need more stuff,” she said.

Before we moved we’d grown things in pots on the balcony–basil, rosemary, flowers, a small lemon tree–and I had big plans for the couple acres of land that now were ours. I’d spent countless nights staring at my laptop screen reading blogs about DIY irrigation systems, natural pesticides, planting schedules, Juliet’s mind and sometimes body elsewhere entirely. My first task was going to be the most difficult: clearing out the weeds and brush in the wild, overgrown yard. I looked through the window and in the dark could just make out the understory, pulsing with life.

Juliet and I ate a frozen pizza and threw our bed together. As we lay back, under the covers she put her icy feet against mine for a moment before I could pull mine away. She turned away and shuddered.

*

We woke at sunrise groggy, our curtains in an unidentified box among the many others, and while Juliet got to unpacking boxes I took a shovel and machete into the yard. I chose a spot near some ancient stones poking their craggy faces out of the earth and spent the morning hacking at the woody plant that had overtaken the land, digging up the strong roots beneath.

Hours later, my shirt drenched, I stood to survey my work, a considerable patch cleared. This is where our vegetable garden enclosure will live, I thought to myself. I walked back toward the house and only then noticed that the vines were also climbing up our wall. It was odd that I hadn’t noticed them before, and yet there they were, thick as kudzu.

I found Juliet looking at a framed photo, misty, and she didn’t seem to notice me. I poured myself a glass of water from the tap, gulped it down. I stuffed a cold slice of leftover pizza into my mouth. I thought of asking her to maybe take a drive, check out the small town, buy some groceries, but I decided against it. Juliet hadn’t taken her eyes from the photo, in any case, and I knew it was best to leave her alone when she was like this.

I went back to my cleared patch of land. It seemed smaller, as if during lunch the plant had been busy growing back. I knew that was impossible, and spent the afternoon the same way I’d spent the morning, working my hands raw and back sore. As the sun set, a cool breeze whirled through the yard, the fluttering leaves hissing like ocean spray, the yard clear almost to the treeline. As I passed I tugged at a vine on the wall, and it held firm, as if embedded into our house.

Juliet was standing over a pot of boiling water, a box of dried macaroni in her chapped hand. I kissed the back of her neck but she shrugged me off. After dinner we went to sleep with the window open, listening to the plants sway in the night air.

*

We woke to a crisp cold and leaves flapping on the windowsill–the vines seemed to have crawled up the wall to the window. I’d deal with them later, I decided, excited to perhaps begin planting that afternoon if I could clear the rest of the yard. I made a pot of cowboy coffee–the machine was still somewhere in a box.

But the cleared patch was gone. I walked around the house twice, thinking maybe I was confused, but no. I found the stones I’d used as my starting point, now obscured by leaves–it seemed as if the bushy plant had grown closer to the house than before.

I snapped a photo on my phone and plugged it into a plant identifying app. “Japanese Knotweed,” notoriously difficult to get rid of, but it couldn’t be possible that it had grown back so fast.

I spent the day working furiously, only taking breaks to gulp down water when I felt dizzy. As the sun set and the breeze picked up again, I looked over my progress, saw that I had cleared well into the woods. My knees and back and hands ached terribly, my nails nearly black with soil, and I felt a swelling within, some mixture of pride and emptiness.

I turned to the vines, and there was no mistaking nor denying their rapid growth–they were nearly covering the entire wall now. I yanked at a thick branch of vine and it held firm. I grabbed another and found a tangle of vine that fit the toe of my boot, and hand over hand, foothold by foothold, I climbed the wall and peaked through our window. Juliet was on the bed gaping at the photo, looking pallid, her eyes dark. I climbed down and ate the leftover macaroni leaned over the sink.

The light was off in our room once I’d showered and gotten into bed, Juliet’s warm breath playing against my face, her chest rising and gently falling. It was terrible, what had happened. To him, to us. I knew who it was in the framed photo—the chipped-tooth smile, the curly hair, the single dimpled cheek. I didn’t need to look to remember. In fact, I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

As I drifted off, I heard the sound of fingers crawling along the floor towards our bed.

*

We woke to find the vines had grown all over our room. The door blocked, Juliet and I climbed out the window. The yard was completely covered in knotweed, even the trees, knotweed as far as I could see. Juliet lowered herself down into it and was swallowed.

I felt a stirring of panic and went after her, and as I paused over the knotweeds I had the sudden urge to take a deep breath and hold it, as if about to plunge into a frigid sea. Once I was under the canopy of leaves, I didn’t see any trace of Juliet. I worked my way through slowly, and I was covered in scrapes and scratches when I stumbled upon my shovel and machete. The knotweed had grown in a peculiar way, wrapping its woody trunks around the tools’ handles. I tried to pull them free but it was no use. I turned to the house, but the house was no longer there, just a writhing mass of knotweed and vine, Juliet being carried up as if by hundreds of outstretched hands.

I knew why she was going back. As I felt the plant working its way around my legs, my midsection, my neck, I felt happy for her. At least she’d have that photo, the one that I now had trouble picturing.

Timothy Wojcik’s fiction has appeared in december mag, CAGIBI, and After The Pause, and his poetry in Hobart, Caketrain Journal, Heavy Feather Review, Belleville Park Pages, and Front Porch Journal, among others. His poetry was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015, and he was a semi-finalist for the 2021 American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Short Story Prize, the 2020 Driftwood Press Adrift Short Story Contest, and received an honorable mention in the 2020 Texas Observer Short Story Contest judged by Bryan Washington. He graduated from Hendrix College in Arkansas in 2011 and currently works as a literary agent and rights manager at Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency.