by Zuzanna Dutkiewicz

The one certain thing I could say about my grandmother is that she loved nature. Loved greenery. She had a myriad of plants in her stuffy apartment, all dying, slowly, from her cursed hand. She’d say I didn’t water them, didn’t care for them. That I killed them. I still don’t know if she was right, but I expect that there was a seed of truth in that delusion.

I think that I was the scariest child she’d ever really known. But we grow in our homes like plants, and it was she who made me so disgustingly terrifying. She ruined me, just like she ruined those plants. After all, I was dying back then too.

Back then, I used to choke myself on dirt. The house felt dead, so I sneaked outside into the garden, which had to be the most alive place I’d ever known. I would eat grass, flowers, leaves, bark, and then finally dirt for dessert. Nobody ever knew. It was my little secret, mine and the earth’s. The soil loved me.

When she locked me in my room, I could feel myself wilt. I turned dry and wrinkly. My skin was grey and my fingers numb from the cold summer morning inside. I lay dead on the dead wood panels, choking on every ray of sun. Growing colder and colder until the hard metal turned and clicked. And the door opened, and it was warm again, and I knew her spindly fingers were cold, but still they burned hot against my skin. I’d cling to her like wine vines to a stone wall, but she’d push me away and lock me in again. There were no more plants to consume, no more soil to swallow, and I withered there until she came back.

I kept a secret stash of seeds under my pillow, hoping they’d burrow deep in my stomach and sprout the same bright embrace in my mind. I fantasised about one day bursting apart with vines, crawling out of my eyes, nose, and ears until this warm life was all that remained. I prayed to God that he would blow a dandelion seed into my mouth so I could swallow it whole and feel it move deep into me.

And years later, he did.

I was at the doctor’s office, eyeing a bonsai tree, thinking I could snatch it off the low table and run off, when he walked in. I didn’t think much of him at first. Didn’t think much of anyone, really. But then he sat next to me, even though the waiting room was full of empty, sterile seats, and I was covered in mud. My fingers were itching for the little plant. I imagined sucking on its tiny leaves like candy, crunching on the thin branches like pretzels. But then his knee pressed into mine, and it was warm, like when I’d burrow my feet in the moist earth. And suddenly his leg was a branch that I wanted to lick, his suggestive whisper smelled of fresh grass on my cold cheek.

Later, he was the worms in my mouth and ears, eating out my brains as I twisted against the blue bathroom tiles, basking in his heat like a sunflower turning towards this new sun that I’ve just miraculously found. But then he locked me out, and I was cold again.

I snatched the tree on my way back from the appointment.

But this new, fertile earth fed my roots, which budded at school, at a restaurant, at the airport, on the plane, at my grandmother’s funeral. They were patting the soil around a sapling as I popped seeds into my mouth. They were almost as good as the sun, the water, and the soil. They would tighten around me like a flower bud as I fought to blossom.

When my grandmother died, I was in a bathroom stall with a woman who had twigs for hair and grass for teeth. I stained her mouth with soil, as she licked it off my throat.

Two weeks later, standing at attention in church, I wondered if Jesus was made of earth and leaves too so we eat him to this day. Maybe he was the most delicious of them all, closest to the bliss of my home garden. I suddenly wanted to rip him from the priest’s hand, devour him and relish in the wetness of the wine and the crunchiness of the body, like birch bark and rainwater. But I sat back down as my whole family gathered for the feast. I had never confessed, never atoned. I had grass in my teeth and behind my fingernails. I deserved to be cold and hungry.

I walked away from church.

Until two weeks later, when I visited her grave.

Freshly dug, it still smelled of cemetery earth—bones, muscle, and worms. I couldn’t help but breathe it in, get high on it. I knelt by her, tried the flowers, licked the leaves. It was all surprisingly tasteless, dead, and dry. She always had a hand for plants.

I leaned in, pushed my face into the ground, muzzled into it until my mouth was full of the soil. It was so good I didn’t even chew, just swallowed. It was in my nose, in my eyes. I dug my head in until it was all under the soil, until I was floating upside down. I could smell her calling me deeper, down. I pushed my hands into the grave. Like a dog digging for a bone, I was digging for life.

And though I couldn’t breathe through all the love in my mouth or hear through the worms sliding into my ears, I was finally loved by the moist soil around me. All love, warm and wet and fertile love, up until I became it too.

Zuzanna Dutkiewicz is a Polish student of philosophy and psychology, which she tends to explore through her writing. Though a longtime writer of fiction and poetry, this is her first-ever publication! (Hopefully[Definitely] not her last.) In her free time, she crochets, roller skates, and pretends she can cook.