GROWTH
Danielle Blau
In the kitchen, the gadgetry was deviously glinting. The Proctor-Silex toaster oven had never before seemed particularly ghoulish as housewares go, but just then the appliance looked more ready to spit unquenchable fires of eternal perdition than that goat cheese pizza bagel that Callie vaguely had in mind.
Drawn to the fridge’s guttural undersong, belly-rumbling with the supernatural hunger that had yanked her awake, Callie began to rummage through the vegetable crisper. She was about to settle on a bag of baby carrot sticks, when she saw that some kind of muck had sluiced its way across her left palm. Running her hand under the kitchen sink, she discovered it was impregnated with a strange sort of stickiness—remarkably steadfast and inexplicably revolting. It was the sort of stickiness that would probably reek in a sweet and poisonous way, like water from an evil mushroom in a German fairytale, but she didn’t have the heart, or maybe it was the stomach, to bring her hand to her nostrils for empirical validation. All at once overcome by a faintness and exhaustion commensurate with the ungodliness of the hour—her hunger so shriveled that even the memory of it was sloughed—Callie found herself climbing back into bed at a loss to explain whatever had compelled her to leave the spice-soft garden of their shared sleep.
She realigned herself within the borders of Dyer’s senseless limbs, cocooning her clammy left fist with his hot dry palm in semiconscious effort at spiritual ablution, and trying not to think about her brush with the weirdly distressing sludge. She bore herself deeper into the hulk of him, waiting for the heartening clamp of his nighttime death grip, ready to gnaw, just a little, on the satisfying need for her that this hefty mannish thing exhibited.
Six years ago Dyer had been one in a stream of people who had answered her ad to share the apartment she’d nabbed but couldn’t afford, and she had turned him down as too adorable for such close quarters.
“Unless of course we woman-sorts don’t really pickle your onion.”
“Oh, but you do. Your sort exactly, actually; just my luck.”
So instead of cohabitating they’d gone out for a drink, one thing had led to another as things do, and come the end of the year subleased to the girl she’d picked from the applicants, Dyer had moved in.
Vehemently a-squirm in Little Spoon stance, though, she was surprised when no opposing force squeezed down around her from the powerful auspices of Big Spoon—a position usually embraced by Dyer with brutish, boyish zeal. Never had there been a male with such a taste for cuddles; in the beginning they would lose entire weekends to them, and even now it was not uncommon for a Sunday to go by with them huddled inside each other. It was breathtaking how completely her flimsy form could be engulfed. Dyer called Callie his empyreal little lady, which made her feel august for all her diminutiveness. But friends and family seemed struck by the ridiculous cut of the couple, laughingly proclaiming them members of two separate species.
Dyer’s ability to mold himself, to adjust to her every little twist and hiccup even in his deadest sleep, was no less endearing for its being, sometimes, slightly annoying. No doubt the quality of her slumber would benefit from respect for their respective sides of bed as more than just nominal, but any suggestion to that effect would have been cruel, and a little asphyxia was a small price to pay for such outlandishly loveable loving affection, anyway. Now, though, Dyer was strangely still, his arms heavy for all her ardent nuzzling, and with nothing to press against her chest but the air that was nothing but a loose pack of cold shifty gas, it was a struggle for Callie to root herself in bed; the wait to sink into sleep—a drifting that was slow and lonely.
When she woke up again, it was black, much blacker than it had been before, and Callie realized she’d outdone even herself in slothfulness. Dyer was sleeping fast beside her, having apparently lived through and seen off a day of work while she’d been marinating in bed. She jolted up in a panic and flung herself into an icy shower, trying to crystallize her brain into useful matter, as she was determined to accomplish before sunrise the daily tasks of the missing day.
But with a renewing of lucidity came a draining of immediacy, as Callie—clean, dry and collected—realized there was nothing she’d really needed to do. There was that 1:6 scale display model of a desiccant air conditioner she had to make for the good people at Engelhard Corp., but there wasn’t much progress to be made on that until the shipment of epowood sheets arrived, and anyway it would take no time at all to finish. And there was the Gottlieb Foundation grant she’d been meaning to apply for, but the application wasn’t due for several months still, so that was hardly pressing. She began to flutter soundlessly about the apartment, hanging a couple of newly washed dish towels over the oven handle and folding the rest away in the kitchen cabinet, when she remembered the monstrosity at the bottom of the vegetable crisper that was calling out for urgent domestic attention.
Just as she’d suspected, the culprit was the old Stoic of a cabbage that had been peacefully stagnating for weeks, months, or years beneath an inconstant throng of more upwardly mobile vegetables. She lifted the ragged head, and below, in the crisper’s forbidding bowels, unrolled a thick landscape of mold the likes of which Callie had never seen.
Its jagged surface was ruthless—vicious, almost. Valleys ended where cliffs began with no hilly deliberation, and cliffs dove back into valleys without musings of plateau. Before she knew what she was doing, she reached down into the barbarous terrain, and felt its scabrous fiber in currents against her fingertips. It seemed of a different stuff entirely than the garden variety canker, and as the prickled sense of it went twining through Callie’s dermal ridges it became unclear to her whether it was she who was examining the growth or the growth who was examining her. But the longer she fingered and considered, the less pressing the question seemed until it revealed itself empty of meaning and was left rustling on her mind like an aphid eaten from the inside out.
It must have been weeks already, judging by the advanced stage of putrescence, that the mold had been churning out of sight like a silent stomach. While she and Dyer had been reading aloud from Peter Pauper’s Authentic Comic Epitaphs over Dyno-Bites in the morning, while they’d been flinging sprinkles and Gummie Creepers at a lopsided trifle at night—there it had been, folding grimly in on itself, pumping itself fatter by the hour. There was something alarming about the sturdiness of root it had managed to take in the blind hollows of their cheery housekeeping; so alarming, in fact, that for a moment Callie felt positively sickened.
But, Orange Glow All-Purpose Cleaner and Brillo Pad in hand, she was reluctant to do away with the cabbage rot just yet. It was quite the specimen of organic artistry, and at the very least it merited a more thorough gander.
Perhaps the most compelling feature was its primal pigmentation—magentas with no hint of simmering blues, blues who, savage, defied red to the death. It was almost like the mold’s colors were qualities of another order—no relationship with light to speak of; in fact, she could easily conceive of them as creatures existing apart from substance. The more she looked, the more plausible it seemed that these terrible colors were merely humoring matter, deigning to rest in mute decoration. And the possibility could not be ruled out that this was a temporary agreement, that it was just a matter of time before the colors upped and set out on their own, a thrashing mutinous bunch, even dangerously haughty.
If only she’d been this mold’s creator, she was sure she could die happy right then and there. Callie couldn’t help but think that, for all her chiseling and welding, all her frightful striving after something too big to name (maybe—she’d been increasingly afraid—something too big to sculpt), nothing she would make in all her life would come close to this, which thought, at first, seemed a barebones call to up and hang her fiddle. But the more she peered down into the growth, the more she was filled with something very much like ecstasy. This, after all, was her vegetable crisper. At some point (presumably) she had purchased this cabbage that begot this transcendent mess. And, most importantly, these fingers were hers, which were coaxing the mold to show more of its slyly hidden features.
Dyer would share no interest in this vegetable excrement, she knew. For him filth and decay were things to be prevented or, should worse come to worse, things to be annihilated upon detection. A reasonable maxim, whose limit she could hardly expect to be grasped by less than a true connoisseur of ruination.
But his shaky grip on the matter was beside the point, practically speaking. There would be no run-in anytime soon between Dyer and the mold; the crisper was as good as an intergalactic safe, given his low opinion of veggies. A bit of foliage comfortably seated in dirt he had no problem with, but a severance of stem from roots released a suffering that was not disanalogous, by his lights, to that of a nuclear fission. If ever in need of a small guffaw Callie had only to recall Dyer’s face on the night, first and last, she had made him her Thai-spiced eggplant. After a few minutes watching him chew—overeager Mmm’s just barely getting the better of his gag reflex—Callie had given in to belly laughs so hearty they hurt, and Dyer had looked at her, thankful almost to tears. That was the only time that that dumbfounded giddy look of his, that how-could-I-possibly-be-so-lucky-as-to-have-you-as-my-girlfriend look, had been induced by a nightshade. They chucked the eggplant with a gleeful ferocity more symbolic than practical (Callie really liked her Thai-spiced eggplant, actually) and dined instead on Doubleberry Twists that evening. Dyer had declared her the awesome-est with that childish solemnity of his at once idiotic and hypnotic, and Callie had squeezed his man’s hand, blessing him silently for the hairiness of his knuckles.
That was in the early days when, young and cocksure, Callie had thought all it would take to make a vegetable lover of Dyer was a little beef stock and some peanut oil. She had then brought in the big guns—the cream sauce, the breadcrumbs—but a vegetable drowned, buried, its dignity in tatters and cheese, was for Dyer an aberration of cuisine in the same vein as steamed broccoli. So it was that Callie had realized there was some essential vegetablehood shared by all vegetables, in no matter what degraded states of verdure they might find themselves, and that this essential vegetablehood, whatever exactly it might be, was a thing despised by Dyer at the very core of his essential Dyerhood.
And anyway, health concerns aside, Callie couldn’t deny that she thought it an irresistible aspect of his Dyerhood. Had it not been over a lunch of microwave pizza and some dipping ketchup that she had first noticed those tendrils of creeping adoration? So enchanting, those bachelor-child ways of his—banging his head along to The Nosebleeds at devilish volumes, beaming conspiratorially up at her whenever his handmade Tanino Crisci shoes came off to reveal his naked toes sticking out of indecent socks. But, of course, Dyer was so sensible in most respects, so adult.
In any event, the main thing was that Callie could be sure her secret was quite safe. But, then, didn’t it smack of dastardliness, keeping things from Dyer; Dyer, who for a period of months had opened up—if not graciously, at least resignedly—his half of the nook they called the study to an army of dried cuttlefish, in the name of a grand-scale sculpture of Callie’s that was doomed, of course, and never to materialize? He had put up with innumerable obstructions, for no other reason than that he loved her. And with so few pieces to show for all the shambles, with what Callie had made so far a cry from what she meant, Dyer had no way of knowing the sublime justification, the gloried creation that would have made worthwhile—and more—the household tumult, if only, just once, Callie didn’t foul things up. Without that, there was nothing but love to keep Dyer patient with her and her lamentable fire hazards. And for this she was inexpressibly grateful.
Callie woke up a little later that morning feeling weirdly well rested. From the hollowed-out silhouette freshly laid beside her, it seemed she had missed Dyer by just a matter of minutes. She almost never rose early enough to see Dyer off, and she usually dedicated at least a quarter of an hour to working herself up into verticality. But that day her every particle was abuzz with purpose, a billion tiny pulses drumming up a forward march. She couldn’t remember waking this pumped in ages, not since the days when weekends were devoted to the construction of dioramas depicting American Indians in various states of food preparation—baroque affairs exacting pains from little Callie that were comically incongruous with the expectations of her grade school Social Studies teacher.
Dyer’s customary farewell scribble swerved in heartwarming capitals across an unwanted scrap of newspaper (from the Home & Garden section that day, it looked like) but Callie’s legs were too hell-bent for even a cursory glance.
The growth beneath the cabbage, too, seemed vibrant with a sort of heartbeat—bloodless, soundless, but formidable—that Callie somehow hadn’t noticed before. She plunged her pinkie in an amaranthine pit and a chain of unnamable shades shot out, a ripple unbroken just below the skin. Supple and sinister, it caressed the underside of the mold’s immoderate topography as though inspirited by rabid, infinitesimal dominos. And just when it looked like the quiver of condensed pigmentation could be contained no more, it was gone.
Of course she knew the throb was still there, would be, had been there always. But now that it had thrust back towards the growth’s lush core, it was out of Callie’s sight again. She stroked the gash of Indian green where the current last was, and it spumed forth again, warmly, like an ulcerous friend.
The better acquainted with the mold Callie became, the more exquisitely sensitive it showed itself to be, and she regretted her initial stab. The daintiest of taps on one end could make for unseemly undulations on the other, and, though she had no sort of firm grasp yet on the nature of the growth’s dynamics, her fingers were fired by quickening intuition. She wondered what terrible twitterings rippled out between two points, what messages went hurtling through the space between her fingertips.
Callie hummed as she bounced the growth’s whispers—dark, mute as a spider’s web—across its depths and breadths, blind conductor of a buried orchestra.
It was only when a familiar sneeze came crashing from the stairwell landing that Callie looked up and found she’d been in some sort of a trance. Her vision was hazed over but she could just focus enough to see the last shades of daylight loitering on the roofs across the street. She hadn’t even eaten yet.
She scrawled an apology beneath the unread note from Dyer—she wasn’t well, gone to bed early, loved him madly—and was beneath the covers, with the lights out and the shades drawn, by the time he’d climbed the flight of stairs and turned his key in the lock. She felt guilty—Dyer always seemed so eager to give her a recap of his day—but there was no other option. It wasn’t that she was loath to share her past ten or so hours with him; it was that she had no idea what language to share them in.Callie could barely bring herself to open her eyes the next day; she shrank back from the sunlight like an air-dried fly. She couldn’t remember feeling so godawful since she’d been six or seven and had scared her mother half to death, bursting into fevered delirium after a standard skinned knee had gone wrathful on her.
Her dehydration felt almost climactic; a desiccation a lifetime in the making, ripening inside her like a perverse fruit since birth. It’s too late; the damage has been done, Callie thought, but she lurched toward the kitchen sink anyway, drank from the tap with feral, fatalistic gulps.
The growth looked even worse than she’d expected. The unruly cliffs and chasms were simpering, seeping like wounds. She turned away and dove back shivering under her covers.
But heat and moisture generate all things,
Their discord being productive
Callie jolted up in bed with these words in her throat and knew what had to be done. It was night, and the air felt mild again, and warm. The sheets rose and fell, placid above Dyer’s unconscious form.
Callie lifted the cabbage and carefully removed the growth beneath from the vegetable crisper. She laid the sick mold on a styrofoam plate left over from a party they’d thrown that weekend.
Dyer had at first been unenthused by the party-hosting prospect, but by mid-morning when the last of the guests had tugged off, he’d gushingly declared to Callie that they ought to throw parties more often. This was the sequence every time they threw a party: curmudgeonly resistance, before; vigorous merry-making, during; and, after, a spirited call for more bacchanalia. This past weekend he’d even insisted—an over-stimulated kid, post-birthday bash—that they continue before bed with a few more rounds of C-low, and, spent though she was, Callie had gladly obliged; it was just too ridiculous and too irresistible, watching Dyer’s exuberant throwing of dice, his brooding over the fickle pot—which he’d ended up taking and his great relief was especially silly, given there was nothing they had that wasn’t had by them in common. Callie smiled; next time she suggested they throw a party, Dyer would put up a small fight, and wouldn’t recall one of his orgiastic pronouncements. She was sure of it.
She sprinkled the mold with warm water, and draped it tightly in plastic-wrap. Then she put the plate on top of the refrigerator, at the very back where the hot air flowed up thickest. She could almost feel the pigments stir, feel them puff up restless and enraged, violently dilating. She dropped into a kitchen chair, breathing deeply.
Heat made the slimy marshes swell; as seed
Swells in a mother’s womb to shape and substance,
So new forms came to life…
Callie whispered and smiled. So Ovid’s Metamorphoses had come to the rescue. It didn’t really surprise Callie much. But, then, that was the strangest thing about it—the natural air of necessity as those words came sidling back, decades since she’d touched the book or anything like it. She’d been well-versed in classical mythology for as long as she’d been acquainted with the English language, maybe even longer. In elaborately staged productions of The Bacchae put on by her mother, Callie’s favorite Cabbage Patch Kid had often starred as a crazed Agave in the hallucinatory grips of a Bacchic trance, blindly leading her fellow women worshippers (a multi-species menagerie of stuffed playthings) to tear limb from limb her own pleading son (a much-abused Hulk Hogan action figure). And her nightly doses of Metamorphoses were roughly concurrent with her friends’ devoted followings of Sweet Pickles books come bedtime.
But she hadn’t thought of this paganish aspect of her upbringing in years. An entire world seemed to stand between Callie and the cozy revelry of her childhood; and, in fact, so did stand an entire world—the “real” world, as Dyer and others were inclined to call it. In their most generous estimations of one another, Callie’s mom was a fruitcake and Dyer a square, and, though they had never been less than polite to one another, Callie had dreaded any occasion that brought them together. Luckily, these had proved few and far between, particularly since her mother had taken up residence in a large ashram in Jupiter, Florida, these days leaving “The Ranch” only when duty called—the occasional unannounced drop-in on a voyage to give tempeh to the homeless of Coney Island, or to pay respects to the Ganesh Temple in Flushing, Queens.
The ancient stories had once served as much more than entertainment, though, both to Callie and to her poorly closeted heathen of a mother; not quite so solemn as bedside Bible readings (which, to be honest, she’d heard tell of in connection to the early lives of serial killers, for the most part), but imbued with a certain holy magic, a soft empathic all-seeing shadow. It was through these tales that Callie first became aware of a gently wafting tragedy, a larking ache in everything, which as a kid she’d have dreams she could touch and sculpt like Silly Putty.
Callie’s absolute favorite—the transformation she’d most often ask her mom to revisit, even though afterwards it would always make her cry—was that of the beautiful young mother Dryope who picked a flower by a lake from a water-lily tree so that her baby boy, whom she was suckling, might play with it. The tree, unbeknownst to Dryope, had once been the nymph Lotis, whose body had been changed while she was fleeing from imminent rape. Drops of blood fell from the crimson flower, the boughs of the water-lily shuddered in terror, and when Dryope, bewildered and petrified, tried to draw back, she found her feet were rooted. Bark came creeping up her legs; her breast hardened—her milk run dry—in the mouth of her infant son. Her adoring husband, father, and sister came and flung themselves down, kissing the still-warm wood and clinging to her roots.
And as the bark was closing in, Dryope spoke her last words, saying If the unhappy / Can ever be believed, I swear by the gods, / I have not earned this evil; I am punished / Without a crime; my life is innocent, / Has always been/...Take my boy away from the branches of his mother, find a nurse / And let him drink his milk under my tree, / Play here, and when he learns to talk, then teach him / To say in sorrow: ‘Here my mother hides’. / But let him fear the ponds, and pick no flowers, / And let him think that all bushes are / Bodies of goddesses.
No story, fiction or otherwise, rang truer to Callie. An endless chain of cruelty and no one to condemn. She remembered the night when—sobbing into her terrycloth hippo (her mother knew nothing of these silvery mourning spells, which took hold only after she’d been kissed goodnight, her lights put out)— she’d realized she had no idea who it was she was crying for. For Dryope, certainly, for her baby boy, her family, but also for the nymph Lotis, so wretched and warped. But even that came nowhere near filling the bounds of little Callie’s lament, which went falling down softly as a spreading locust swarm. Dyer would be getting up soon; the sunrise had somehow snuck up on Callie. She got up from the kitchen chair and reached on tiptoe for the styrofoam plate. The growth already looked stronger and healthier after one short session on top of the fridge. She crept into bed feeling tired and calm as daylight began to inflate beneath her window; it was looking like it might end up their first real week of spring.
The heat-and-moisture therapy proved just the ticket, and Callie was diligent about taking the mold out for a wrap on the fridge for at least an hour every day.
The growth was more crackling with vigor every time Callie looked down at it, more barefaced and lavish of its mysteries. Sometimes when she sat unfurling its ripples her hands seemed to spiral out of control, to ride on tails of galaxies that were dashing headlong into shreds. It occurred to her that unwittingly she’d been fancying herself an astronomer, straining to peel back millennia and study the firstborn star.
Astonishments were becoming a matter of course, so when Callie first saw shards of melody rising like steam, she just beamed down rapturously. Although melody wasn’t really the correct word for it, since without warning it would wail back into current then to color right before her eyes. It reminded her a little of those 3-D magic eye folders that had been all the rage in grade school—a surface as flat as bathroom tiles in an instant eclipsed by a blistering meteor, to which, mind-bogglingly, it had all along served as sole parent and guardian. Except this was by far more fantastically maddening. Callie would squint and rack her brains at how she ever could have taken that slithered vermilion for song, when again the hissing vapors of its ghost opera would form.
Then, a few days into her euphoric regimen (two, three maybe, she’d been too bustling to consider keeping track), Callie made a ghastly discovery. Somehow or other, when she hadn’t been looking, Dyer had acquired a taste for sugarsnap peas. It was inconceivable. Not just any fruit of the earth, but one so crisp, so fresh, so fertile and surging with all the qualities most vegetable-like; condensed flora, almost, inside tender pregnant sacks. She spotted the stringy pod cadavers, still green, in the drain of the kitchen sink while she was doing the dishes, along with some breading bits that looked nugget-related—scraps of Dyer’s makeshift dinner from the night before, perhaps.
So Callie’s efforts at systematic desensitization therapy had wound down with no hint of advancement, but years later, with no prompt, no word, he’d decided greens weren’t so bad after all. At first she took it for a puerile insult: Dyer was lashing out, piqued on account of her attentions lately thrust elsewhere. But then the monochrome flatness of the situation clamped down, and rather than mad she felt boneless, weedy and damp. No shadowed resentment here, no layered confrontation; just the remains of a dinner Dyer had made for himself the other night, maybe not even snap peas and chicken nuggets, actually. He’d always especially liked chicken piccata; maybe Dyer had dug up her recipe book from the jungle of the everything-drawer.
For so long she’d trusted implicitly in Dyer, her bachelor-child; now his vegetable-loathing proved as essential to him as a bit of dandelion snow, and his Dyerhood seemed poised to slink back in on itself at any moment, to skulk away without a trace and leave her stumped as to how she’d believed it there at all.
Well, that was that; Dyer didn’t need her anymore. She was fine leaving him to his own devices with her recipe book, if that’s what he wanted; he could eat veggies till his ears sprouted mung beans, for all she cared. The important thing was that precautions be taken to protect the growth; being in vegetable territory would no longer be enough. Using a slab of plastic that was in the vestibule closet (behind a rusty grate, a stray bicycle wheel, a painting—which she’d been meaning to integrate into a sculpture of hers for years now—of a lotus bud by an elephant-artist named Pong, several planks of jujube wood, a lone cuttlefish adrift from the long-dumped herd, and other miscellanea), Callie fashioned a false bottom for the crisper drawer. She cut the scrap down so that the plastic lodged fast just low enough to draw no attention, just high enough to give the mold some legroom, with all ridges in the crisper walls exactly mimicked so that along its edges the true bottom was entirely sealed up. Towards the middle, though, she riddled the false bottom with breathing holes, which she then camouflaged beneath mesclun leaves (this latter step proving a mere flourish as soon as the crisper’s contents were returned). It was, she had to admit, an artfully executed project; erring, perhaps, on the persnickety side (Dyer wasn’t likely on the lookout for a trapdoor in the fridge), but that was far better than the alternative.
Fortunately the ruse—quite possibly due to skillful craftsmanship—turned out not to cramp on the luxuriating growth in the least, and in the hours of her solitude when the mold was out in the open, Callie felt the sumptuous puzzle of things again, the exquisite, excruciating pang that she’d forgotten since the days of Metamorphoses. Except now—much like in those childhood Silly Putty dreams—she felt it slowly open beneath her ready palm, and she could gauge progress by her fingertips’ (her fingertips!) tingling. It wouldn’t be long before they’d come to the ancestral note; not long before at last they’d unravel to the core.
She did have a few paralyzing spurts, when she was seized by the fear that she’d go on like this forever—an abject fool to trust in a beginning or an end. The worst came on right after she’d noticed the lone white flower in a vase on the kitchen table—a Stargazer lily said the flower shop tag, and, beneath: “Miss you, O Mysterious Woman of the Night” in familiar capitals, gut-wrenching mostly because cruelly untrue; she knew it even if Dyer didn’t yet. But this horrific possibility was, quite frankly, unthinkable, and these bouts dwindled then left her wholly alone as she worked towards the point where the two poles meet.
The brush of strange skin woke Callie one night when she, starting, found Dyer still sleeping beside her. She gazed down at him, blinked in the curious dark and, My God, she thought, he’s turned into a turnip. She squinted, brought her head in close and examined noiselessly so as not to disturb him. Can it be true? she whispered, and: Maybe not. She was, in honesty, no expert on root vegetables. From what she could tell, he seemed too smooth of form to be a tuber like a cassava or a sweet potato, and he was by far too textured to the touch to be a leek. It was possible that he was a parsnip. Or a rutabaga, maybe.
She shook her head and blinked again ferociously. She needed to think, but her brain felt low on oxygen. Perhaps she’d forgotten how to breathe? Callie concentrated on her lungs, two beached guppies, pathetically flopping. She reached out with quivering fingers and stroked his terrible cheek. What could she do? There was no explanation and no one to blame. Most likely, if she’d never looked under the cabbage, Dyer wouldn’t be in the state he was in. But on second thought, even that was unclear. It was so hard to pry so-called cause from effect. Perhaps he’d always been a turnip, or had been one for a while, at least.
And who was to say for sure what state he was in, anyway? For that matter, what state she was in? Maybe he was looking up at her that very moment thinking, My God, Callie’s turned into a blade of onion grass. And maybe it was for the best.
She kissed Dyer’s glassy forehead, thinking of his nighttime death grip and his Thai-spiced eggplant face, and rose slowly from the bed. There was nothing to be done, no real nexus to point at, just some haphazard happenings inscrutably strung. But she had no interest in tracing the chain backwards; the long blunder forward, up to this point, was just about all she had in her for now. She closed her eyes and crept down the hall, trailing her fingertips along the walls on either side for balance.
And Callie burst into the kitchen—all overgrown now, and winking.