Prophecy is a Broken Line

It was after the accident that all the strangeness started. After I moved back in with my parents in the city. I had been living for several years on a struggling micro flower farm in Pennsylvania, with a college friend and all her friends. For some reason that one of them came up with, we all called each other by the names of flowers—Lily, Poppy, Clover, Magnolia, and Rose, whose real name was actually Lily, but we had decided it was only fair for her to change her name too. When the accident happened they had been full of assurances like take all the time you need and your health comes first, and it was winter anyway, so there wasn’t much to do. But when they found out that I was lying about what the doctor told me, that there wasn’t any reason for me to be doing nothing but eating and watching TV after seven months, they sent Poppy (who was my occasional lover) to tell me that it might be best if I found somewhere else to live until I was ready to work again. Maybe they thought it would be easier to hear it from her.

I always hated the city, its right angles and flat surfaces. I couldn’t wait to move away. I read The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables and eventually Thoreau and Muir and I loved the storybook pictures of the tiny rural colleges I applied to, the crenelated clusters of Gothic buildings in an ocean of green. I took classes with names like Understanding Water and Time and Imagining Sustainable Systems and I scoffed at students who wanted to work in policy because I was going to live off the land and do real climate research, instead of turning into some lobbyist’s shill in D.C. I was going to really be a part of things.

My parents weren’t thrilled to have me in the two-bedroom apartment they had downsized to after my brother moved out, but they seemed glad that I wasn’t farming anymore. They put me on the couch in the room that wasn’t the bedroom, which managed to be everything else—storage, guest room, living room, and home office, where my mother worked from home Monday through Wednesday and my father Thursday and Friday. Often I woke up to the half-conversation of a meeting on the phone, my mother’s docile fake laugh.

When I was little, in the first apartment I can remember, above the open doorway to the kitchen were two frightening faces, Venetian masks leering down at me, one long distended nose and one grotesque devil’s smile. When we moved they vanished into a box and never came out again, but often in my dreams they showed up, the faces of shadowed figures that stretched their open hands out for me to take. It was strange to see them in real life again, smaller than I had remembered, with details that I had forgotten. I had thought the red one had its tongue lolling out; but no, it only smiled, and its teeth were blunt, and the mustache was pointed at the ends.

I couldn’t take it anymore: the silence, the staring masks, the clicking keyboard and heavy breathing. “I’m going to the store.”

Shoes, wallet, keys, jacket even though it was much too hot, to cover the worn-out t-shirt I wore with no bra.

The corner store which sold the good salt-and-vinegar chips was only a block away, so I walked as slowly as possible. Plastered across a low concrete wall was a thick skin of ads, which I liked because once I had seen the man who put them up, his roller dripping ribbons of runny white glue as he moved mechanically to cover a set of posters hawking custom shampoo with pictures of glossy-faced nymph-women who wanted to sell me skin creams. I liked how he surrendered to the movement so completely, the roller’s smooth glide across the wall pulling his body along with it. Today they were advertising some European watch and declared: WE MUST LOOK BACK TO MOVE FORWARD.

I passed the fluttering sound of a mass of pigeons taking off and the hammering of a machine operated by sweatybacked construction workers and the hoarse voice of the man whose daily travails took him up and down the block loudly reading prophecies from a notebook that rested on the shopping cart of old clothes which he pushed in front of him. Around his neck he wore one of those novelty license plates in yellow and black that said JESUS. I passed three huge stickers in three second-floor windows that said ANGEL PSYCHIC READINGS and I wondered whether the psychic was named Angel or talked to angels or was themself an angel.

$1.37 for the chips and then I was making my slow walk back home. I made a game of putting my feet as close together as I could, placing the heel of one sneaker almost on top of the toes of the other, watching the ground. My footsteps would make one perfect continuous line, which I pictured in clean white paint, across the sidewalk from then to now. I made people step out of my way instead of breaking the line. The city always made me feel like lines were important.

When I reached the yellow bumpy curb-cut I looked up and locked eyes with the doe. She was standing inexplicably on the other side of the road, in the middle of the crowd waiting to cross the street. She looked like every deer I had ever seen: slender and delicate, emptyheaded, big wet black eyes. The doe started her unhurried walk, each hoofstep picked out with care, and the pedestrians split around her easily without looking. I almost reached a hand out as she came closer and closer to me but someone bumped into me hard with their bag and in the time it took me to rub my shoulder and look back up she was all legs springing and frightened bright tail in the distance. I stood there for a long time, after, with the white paint pooling around me so that my perfect line had a single large bead strung onto it.

Poppy called on Saturday afternoon. Her picture showed up on my phone preview and I covered it with my thumb.

“Yes?”

“Clover?”

“Sure.”

“We—I—I just wanted to check in, to see how you’re doing, how you’re… recovering.”

I didn’t like the long pause before “recovering,” or the thought of the rest of them egging her on to call me even though she probably complained. And I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t hear my parents moving around in the kitchen suddenly, which meant that they were pretending not to be listening.

“One sec.”

I listened to her breathing as I walked down the four flights of stairs and out the front door of the building.

“I’m recovering fine,” I said, trying not to be sarcastic.

“I’m glad.” She was silent for a moment. “We all miss you here. We—I—hope you’ll come back soon.”

I sat on the stoop and poked with one of my bare toes the green shoot of a plant pushing through the space between squares of sidewalk. “I don’t think I’m ready yet.”

Quiet again, breathing. This call was more air than words. The base of the stem was woody and hard but the soft green top of it bent back easily into a bridge.

“Clover, what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“You know what happened.” I fixed my gaze at the ground: another poky little plant, a foot away, in a thin crack in the cement.

“You—what were you doing out there? And at night? Why’d you even go out? Were you trying to… Did you want it to happen?” She sounded on the verge of crying and I could suddenly picture her so clearly: the baby curls working their way out of her ponytail, the sheen of sweat on her smooth forehead from a morning cutting blooms under the hot sun, the strangely pretty way her mouth twisted as she tried to hold back the tears.

I blinked, rubbed my eyes, refocused. The plant I had been pushing on with the foam edge of a flipflop was bigger than it had been a moment ago. It was dark brown and branching and wider around than my thumb. As I watched, it swelled and stretched upwards in jerky, accelerating movement. The branches fluttered and multiplied until I was looking at a small tree, almost my height, its roots buckling the sidewalk.

“Clover?”

“I have to go.”

I hung up and watched two more plants blossom open into trees, covering me in their soft shade. The noise of traffic was growing muffled. License plate Jesus pushed his cart along its usual path, but instead of the dry rolling sound of wheels on pavement there was the slither and hiss of damp leaves.

I ran up the first two flights of stairs and trudged up the last two and burst into the apartment breathing heavily. In the bathroom there was a small frosted window through which—shoved open—I watched an entire city block become overtaken by forest. The trees shot up taller than my building, obscuring everything beyond it. Squirrels ran up and down their trunks like insects. I watched and I watched until my father hammered on the door.

It had been a long time since I slept at night. Since high school, maybe. Rural nights are quieter but that only made the few sounds—cicada screeches, a distant truck, that fucking nightingale—so much louder. Days full of manual labor made me tired, but when I lay down with my fresh-washed hair cold on my neck, all the daytime colors would leach out of my memory and fizz into great swaths and swirls in the darkness and I couldn’t put them back for long enough to let me sleep. I napped in the hot hours of the afternoon and while everybody else washed dishes after dinner. At night I made aborted landscape sketches and wandered ghostlike through the house.

I thought it would be easier to sleep now, back in the city, but at night the world finally cooled down enough to feel sharp and pulsing with life and I wanted to be a part of it. All night I smoked out the window and watched nothing happen. There were lights everywhere, white lights and red ones, and when I let my eyes relax they swam together into one big blur of light, a hundred thousand little sparks of life mashed into this huge shapeless mass, and in my mind I lifted the light up, up until it began to break apart again and populate the grey sky with stars and then all of us down here were finally left in dark and peaceful night. I looked at the tips of my fingers, pale in the darkness, and tried to will them to dissolve too.

It was a car horn that woke me up, persistent and angry and too soon. The apartment was empty. I looked out the window, a little scared of what I might see, but everything was normal—busy, bustling; the only animal a dirty white dog on a leash, the only tree a ragged bush contained to its fenced-in square.

I poured both my suitcases onto the floor and looked for something to wear. All I seemed to have were work clothes and pajamas, and I was tired of canvas overalls and cargo pants with reinforced knees. I wanted to look nice—to look like myself again. I rifled through my mother’s clothes until I found something that fit—a loose grey skirt, long, made out of a soft fabric that made me think of the skin of a mouse.

Walking down the block with large rapid steps. Abandoned construction equipment. WE MUST LOOK BACK TO MOVE FORWARD. Finally, the psychic’s triptych, the signs washed out in the light of the morning sun. I pressed on the buzzer until the door clicked open.

I don’t know what I was expecting from the name Angel but it wasn’t this. A middle-aged white woman, probably, wearing a long skirt and a shawl that she had knit herself and bangles all up her arms. But Angel was a young guy, my age maybe, and looked Mexican. He had the largest mouth I’d ever seen. When he smiled at me it seemed to take up half his head, a small head and slightly pointed on the top, like an egg. He took me upstairs to a room, which was small and stuffy with black gauzy fabric draped all over the walls.

He had a deck of lotería cards and the whole time that we talked he flicked them back and forth between his hands effortlessly like a casino dealer.

“I think I’m having psychic visions. I think I’m seeing the future. Or maybe it’s the past.”

Angel didn’t even look up. “Probably you’re just crazy.”

When I didn’t say anything for a long time, he stacked the cards into a deck and slapped them onto the table theatrically.

“Tell me what you’ve been seeing, then.”

I told him about the forest. When he frowned, his ears moved too, like a cat’s.

“Yup. You’re certifiable.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it. My uncle thinks he can talk to ghosts, and he’s doing just fine.”

“But aren’t you a psychic? Don’t you… you know, see things?”

He gave me a withering look. “It’s all bullshit, all the psychics. Nobody really believes in it. It’s all smoke and mirrors and saying what people expect to hear.” He pitched his voice lower, slightly breathier. “What can the spirits do for you today?”

Unexpectedly, that made me laugh, and I was surprised by the sound. An ugly “hah” of air pushed out of me by some force I didn’t control. I didn’t know my laugh sounded like that.

Angel looked at me through thin slits of open eye and picked up his cards again. “Do you smoke?”

Over the next two hours we got steadily higher until the shaky standup routines we were watching on Angel’s cracked iPad actually started to seem funny. He told me about his grandmother, who had been the psychic before him, who had taught him how to know everything about a person’s desires just by the set of their face and the words they chose in greeting, and I watched the way the shape of his mouth moved when he talked—the stretching skin above his upper lip and the shadows of acne scars there—and thought about whether he would be a good kisser. I told him about the flower farm. How much I started hating the people we became there, how we always talked too high and hugged all the time and overused words like responsible self-sufficiency and sourcing sustainability and pretended that we weren’t being repeatedly bailed out by Magnolia’s parents. He tried to teach me how to flick all the cards from one hand to the other but I was terrible at it and eventually all the cards were on the ground and I was picking them up and laughing at the little pictures on each one, LA PERA, LA SIRENA, EL CAMARON.

The forest had grown up around us out the window while I wasn’t looking. I put my face up against it, forehead and nosebridge on the cold glass.

“See? D’you see it?”

Angel laughed and blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “You’re crazy, flower girl.”

I walked home at dawn, following the ragged shapes of sidewalk squares torn apart by trees and bushes erupting through them. My street sign was embedded in wood, flat bluegreen and white shiny in the thin light. The tree bulged around it, a thick smooth rim of scar tissue emerging from the craggy bark. Somewhere a blackbird took up his morning song and I flinched.

The apartment building was still there, its façade dotted with pustules of balconies. Still sort of high and dizzy from not sleeping, I put a hand out to the concrete and closed my eyes and let it start to crumble, little chunks of stone breaking away and the little worming green shoots wrapping around my hand and holding it tight, trying to pull me into the wild of the forest, to be a part of it, to be swallowed into it and separated by it into my component parts and reabsorbed into animal and plant and soil—until the skin pinched and my knuckles started crunching into one another. I ripped my hand free and shook the pain off sharply, reached for my key and swung the door closed behind me. I let myself into the apartment as quietly as possible and fell asleep in my clothes as soon as I lay down on the couch.

It was dark when I woke up. I knew I had dreamed, but the memories tangled in my head, muddy and dripping onto one another.

I had slept for fifteen hours at least. There was too much light in the room to see out the window. My mother had been doing something at her laptop, but she turned around when she heard me moving.

“How are you feeling, hon?”

“Fine.” Surely there was something more I was supposed to say, but I didn’t know what. My mother’s face was a perfect picture of concern. I was never any good at reading faces. I had no idea whether this was a carefully rehearsed bid for connection or an expression of reluctant obligation to her only daughter. “Sorry I slept all day.”

“Don’t worry about it. You probably needed the rest.” She had taken all the piles of clothes and folded them into neat piles next to my sagging suitcases.

I stretched my bent arms to either side of me. “I think I might go on a walk. My legs are sore from being scrunched up.”

“At this hour?”

“I won’t go far.”

I adjusted my bra underneath my shirt and tried to rub the feeling of sleep out of my face and shoulders.

“Is that my skirt, by the way?”

“Yeah.”

“It looks good on you.” She gave me one gleaming toothy smile and then turned back to her computer, a silent dismissal.

I didn’t really know where I wanted to go. Somewhere else. I had a vague idea of seeing if Angel was in, even though I knew it would be weird to return less than a day later in the same wrinkled clothes. But I liked his warm room and his busy hands and his wide mobile mouth and the fact that he had made me laugh.

Trees burst into existence around me as I walked, not violently like before but with soft airy sounds like a fast exhale. Everything was grey-and-white in the cold streetlights and seemed to tumble endlessly on and up away from me.

The forest. That was where I had been going on the night of the accident. Lying on the cold floor, sleepless as always, the unending trill of the nightingale outside making me crazy. Its song was something physical, heavy, which dragged itself into the crack between the sash window and its peeling sill and slopped across the floor and drenched every part of my body in the same endless tune. I needed out—I needed to get away from this place, where we were all lying all of the time, where we poured time and water and blue beads of fertilizer into the ground to grow wilting Eurasian flowers in overbright colors and sell them to people with closed faces at expensive markets. And all this winter waiting, waiting, wasting time and sunlight. I wanted to be somewhere else—somewhere feral and honest, somewhere I could become a real part of.

I was very methodical. I put on my long underwear and my jeans and my sweater and my coat and my boots. I left my cell phone on the unmade bed and ignored the heavy yellow flashlight on the shelf of the mudroom.

Then I went out walking. The air was fresh and so cold it smelled like nothing. I walked past the fallow fields and their blanket of frosty straw, the threads of brown stems that poked up through it. Past the skeleton of a greenhouse, an abandoned project. There were no lights and as I walked farther away I lost my sense of space. All I knew was that the land was flat and open here, and that if I kept walking eventually I would find the road and then the place where the dark mass of the ground rose up above my head into trees and there I would be adopted by wolves and learn how to run fast and silent with them, a rabbit in my jaws and chin dripping gore, until one of them turned on me and with its sharp teeth severed the fat from my bones. Except there weren’t wolves in Pennsylvania anymore, not since we killed them all.

Coyotes, then.

I found my way to the road somehow, its occasional streetlights faint and orange. I walked on the edge of the asphalt where it crumbled off like the torn edge of a piece of paper, feeling with each step the corner of it like a burning line through the center of my boot. I passed under a fuzzy circle of light and saw on my right the pitted road with its faded yellow lines and on my left, much closer than I’d thought, the ground falling away into the frozen riverbed which had carved itself deep from year after year of rushing snowmelt. Beyond that, the thin ghostly trunks of yearling trees, and the promising darkness behind them.

The more I walked, the closer the riverbed drew in to the road, until I was nearly balancing, arms out like a gymnast. Standing on the ten-inch strip of ground between the road and the dropoff, feeling the edge of the asphalt, one heel directly in front of the other toe, I let my head fall back on my neck and looked at the sky. Despite the streetlights there were all these stars, the bright familiar ones and their million paler shadows in the spaces between. They danced for me in small jerky circles, and my arms lifted higher as I watched the stars swim and grow and get faster and brighter and more brilliant and the brightness grew louder and more and greater and it wasn’t just up there it was all around me and approaching me from behind to take me up into the sky and also approaching was the sound, the roar of all the million million stars and they were rushing towards me and with a great exhale they passed by me and I stumbled from the force of it but the ground was gone and then suddenly there again as my leg crunched underneath me and cold was seeping into me and I heard a woman’s scream.

In the distance the car screeched to a stop. Clunk of the door opening, steps running back toward me, shouting, but the stars were all gone and the pain was a rising wave filling the riverbed and holding me under and drowning me.

I never got to the trees. After that it was all hospitals and crutches and bouquets. But here I was, now, in the city, in the forest. It unfurled around me, eating up everything, new ancient trees growing with every step. And the plastic of the streetlamps cracked and their lights dimmed until there was only darkness that felt full and darkness that felt empty, and so I moved in the direction of the emptiness, and my white paint trail slalomed and swayed. A fragment at eye-height, half-covered by climbing vines: WE MUST LOOK BACK. I picked my way around roots and heard the crush of leaf litter nearby. It was something huge. I could tell the bulk of it by the sound of its hot breath. An elk or a moose, its hooves the size of my open hand, antlers reaching out wide.

High up, in the weak light of the moon, I saw the faded sign: PSYCHIC. But the building had half-collapsed, only one wall still standing, and the branch of a tree punched through the window that used to say ANGEL.

So it was just me and the forest, then. I pulled my jacket tight around me and sat down. I sat on the cold dirt and waited for the wolves.