Catherine Reedy
Growth
The trouble began the day after it happened. I barely felt anything, but something broke through my right pinky’s skin. It was green, dew-wettened.
I tried tweezing. The tip lengthened into a stalk, one that seemed to have no end.
I pulled until it became painful. The object seemed hooked inside my pinky, the pulp surrounding bone caught on the alien thread of green. I couldn’t explain it. The harder I pulled, the more deeply it rooted.
did you block him yet
Already late for class, I ignored my roommates’ text. The night before this unexpected growth, Jin was there, at her desk, when I finally returned around 3 A.M. after all that happened with him. Chemical formulas, with their codes of O’s and dashes, reflected from her laptop to her glasses and back again, temporarily obscuring her eyes with their ciphered tangle of bonds and repulsions.
I chopped the unidentified vegetative material growing from my body with a satisfying snip. I had enough to deal with. This could wait.
#
We all joked about the Maine winters, secretly proud of our ability to navigate the tunnels of packed snow across the quad. Frozen solid, they gleamed in the morning’s dead light.
“When it gets to 30, I’m pulling out my bathing suit.”
“My fireplace is, like, filled with ice cubes.”
Morning walks were my favorite. I was alone—no other college student I knew preferred to face the day before 7 A.M.—and the air felt crystalline, diamond-sharp. It was like the ice-skating rink after the Zamboni. Thick paths of water covered the soiled surface, re-setting all into a metallic oval. Everything underneath was encased in a tomb.
#
What started as one a day turned to five, turned to ten. I cut, sometimes incautiously, but they’d resprout with a wiry thrust as if obeying the antiquated dictates of teen magazines.
Was it true that shaved follicles grew back thicker and quicker? That waxing or plucking nipped the problem in the bud, so to speak, or was this another cosmetic urban legend where pain equaled gain?
I was thirteen when I first read some version of this adage, laying on a towel in the grass slathered in baby oil, my fat flapping out of the tight band of my bathing suit.
My mom weeded, squatting on strong haunches.
“Mowing won’t do it,” she said. She pressed the long-nosed shovel into the ground and pulled up the violets by their necks, their bottoms white and bulbous, furred with tendrils.
“They’ll just come back, with a vengeance.”
#
That first growth exposed what was underneath my nail in a purple slice.
“Is that…” Jin asked.
I confessed everything, revealing the evidence stored in my purse like the mementos of a serial killer.
Jin was, as always, practical. Squinting her eyes as if popping a zit, she examined each spot. We went to the shared kitchen and she burned vinegar in a tomato-crusted pot. We stockpiled lotions, aloe vera, astringents, even anti-wrinkle creams from the CVS down the road and slathered them onto each festering wound.
“Anti-anything is what we need,” she said.
#
“You need to tell someone.”
She knew as well as I did what that would entail. A living autopsy by confused attendants. I’d be splayed on a bed, the instruments would rattle in the tray. Measured, prodded, questioned, blamed.
“Let’s just think of something else,” I said, picking a thin-veined leaf from my clavicle.
#
Despite our efforts, my right arm was encased under throbbing, multi-colored shafts.
We draped my body in loose-fitting clothing, but winter wouldn’t last forever.
Delicate peas of white flicked the bubble of fat under my left buttock. Resting on the outer curve of my ankle were oblong perianths, child-heavy and bulging in yellow.
“It’s sort of beautiful,” she said.
“I’ve always hated my ankles. Maybe this is an improvement.”
“What are your thoughts on pesticide?”
#
I finally hit my limit during midterms. While typing, I felt a worm’s guts oozing in the space between the “N” and the “M” keys.
I shook my head, wiggled my rear, and more of them tumbled out.
I knew what I had to do.
#
Emergency visits followed, first, to the gardening section of Walmart and, second, to Urgent Care.
“Just chug it,” Jin said when she saw what I was up to, handing me a bottle of vodka.
She knew as well as I. It needed to come up, from the roots. Sure, we’d need to snap the necks, chop up everything above the flesh. But that was only step one.
“Are you sure. SURE sure?”
I grabbed the hooked medical scissors, took aim, and began.
#
The gore stank. It didn’t matter how many scented candles we burned.
“We smell like lab-made coconut. And decomposing fetuses. Feti.”
I scooped up the worst part of it and felt a sac—a vestigial organ I hadn’t known existed, fluid-filled and diaphanous.
We chose a spot off the five-mile trail that wove through the cemetery, one close to the lake. The shovel was so blunt it barely broke ground. We jumped with both feet.
“This is harder than it looks.”
“Those bicep curls are worth shit.”
We smeared earth on our yoga pants, sweaty and victorious, and held hands on the way back home.
#
I didn’t tell her, but I went back the next fall.
It was like nothing had ever been there, but behind a few cigarette butts I saw one: a silver-velveted stem, spiked with a purple head.
I showed Jin later that night. We sat on the stoop outside our off-campus apartment. The nighttime security lights turned on, buzzing a fluorescent halo.
But when I showed her the plant, brushing each silver frond on my palm, I saw her feel it. On the inside.
She saw me see.
When I went to hand it back to her, she shook her head no.
“You can keep it.”
Catherine Reedy is an Instructor of English and the Chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Lake Forest College. She received her PhD from Harvard University (2015), where she studied plague, revenge, and Shakespeare’s theater. Her fiction has been published in decomp magazine and Crack the Spine; her academic research has been published in Early Modern Literary Studies and in the essay collections Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press) and Historicizing the Embodied Imagination (Palgrave). She is at work on a novel based on the Duchess of Amalfi and a monograph on the plague in Shakespeare’s theater.