The Dead Fern (final version) (i finally fixed the verb tenses) (i speak english i swear)
It was a Friday night, and I was drunk, sitting under a tree. I held a crumpled plastic water bottle about half full with vodka, absentmindedly crunching it into the sidewalk as I waited for Daisy to get back. I sloshed the vodka around, squinting at it dubiously in the half-darkness of the streetlights. I didn’t want to drink anymore, so I poured the rest of it out at the base of the tree. As soon as I did it I worried that trees couldn’t drink vodka and I’d accidentally doomed this tree to death-by-rot — or sterilization? — or something.
When I was a kid, I used to water all the plants in the house with cups of water that had been left out on the kitchen counter. My sister would always leave her cups out, a habit that my mother and father hated and tried to cure many times, to no avail. So, just because I liked doing it, I would periodically pour out all the little glass cups into the potted ferns and sunflowers and bamboo my mother kept around the house.
One day, I accidentally poured out a cup of my father’s gin all over the fern that stood next to the dining room table. Ferns, according to the encyclopedia entry I frantically tore through after realizing my mistake, are tough little guys, able to grow in marginal spaces without much sunlight. They thrive in rock crevices and the most inhospitable of swamps—but the entry did not mention anything about them being resistant to gin, and so I watched the plant slowly turn brown and wither over the next few weeks. Since then I’d been very careful about what I poured where.
Remembering the fern, I dug half-heartedly in the saturated soil at the base of the tree, trying to scoop out the worst parts, but the smell made me nauseous so I stopped and turned back towards the direction Daisy was going to come from. My wet bathing suit clung to me unpleasantly, and all of a sudden I regretted buying it. Daisy and I had gone shopping the other day at this little store by my house called My Baby Jo that had fifties-style bathing suits. She’d filled out her bikini well—so well that her pouting and posing outside of the changing stall had made the cashier clear his throat uncomfortably and walk into the other room. The suit I’d tried on was white with red cherries, and tastefully covered my midsection under the pretense of being “vintage.” It was perfect. But sitting here on the ground, post-Jacuzzi, the shriveled white and red of the pattern smeared with dirt, this suit was the enemy.
Stepping out of the community center Jacuzzi was like being ripped from the womb. We poured soap in the jets like we always did, and I felt safe and warm sitting in the corner, ensconced in bubbles up to my chin. And then—Dis que tu dois aller aux toilettes, Daisy slurred at me in rapid French. We always spoke French when we were drunk; it was sort of a game we played with the boys we were with, like a ha-ha-you-can’t-understand-our-secret-language type game. We’d done it since middle school. This time there was only one boy, though, and Daisy wasn’t playing the game right. Comment? I asked, thinking I must have misheard her. Dis que tu dois aller aux toilettes, she repeated, adding Je vais le baiser! and glaring at me when I didn’t immediately get up. Baiser. The noun meant “a kiss,” but the verb meant something else entirely.
“I have to, um, go to the bathroom,” I said to no one in particular, as Daisy and her boy were not paying the least bit of attention to me. I grabbed a towel and my clothes—and the water bottle of vodka at the last minute, just in case—and opened the gate, walking unsteadily over to the windowless building next to the pool that held the restroom.
The door was open, miraculously, even though the center had been closed for hours, and I let myself in, too tired to care that I was walking barefoot where many a homeless man had undoubtedly relieved himself. I locked the door and leaned against it, sliding down until I was sitting with my face pressed into my knees. I lifted my eyes and looked at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. A moth fluttered by one of them, dangerously close to the buzzing electricity. I found if I stayed still enough, I could make all the lights turn off.
Time passed and she didn’t come get me, so I left, beginning the steep walk back up the hill to her house. I thought I would wait again for her there before sneaking back inside. And now here I was, soaked in vodka and nasty, soapy chlorine. Sitting soggily under a tree. I wondered if all the alcohol I’d drunk would kill me like it had killed the fern—if Daisy would come back weeks later and find me here, withered and brown.
I got to my feet, kicking the tree with my bare foot in a fit of misplaced frustration. I was going to have to sneak back in by myself; it was too cold, and I kind of felt like vomiting. I crept over to the house and opened the side door, tiptoeing up the stairs and past her parents’ room, holding my breath, not letting it out till I collapsed on her bed, wet bathing suit and all.
It was there that I found myself about an hour later, face down, being shaken by an unknown assailant. “Anya,” she whisper-screamed, shaking me until I groaned and turned over. Daisy put both hands on my shoulders and pressed down, her grinning face looming close and blocking out the light. “It was like—amazing.” She fell over next to me and let out an exaggerated sigh. “You know? I’m so glad that happened. I thought he wasn’t into me but then he kissed me and—oh hey, wow, you killed that vodka. You must be really drunk.” I got up to go brush my teeth, avoiding eye contact, and she followed me into the bathroom.
She stood close behind me at the sink and put her hands on my hips as I squeezed out some toothpaste and held the brush under the water. Her face was unreadable in the mirror, sort of apologetic in a slack, satisfied way. Her hand crept up the side of my shirt and I spun around angrily, getting toothpaste on her. “Daisy. I am not. In the mood. For your bullshit.” She looked surprised, looking down at the blue smear on her boob. “What the fuck is your problem?” she asked. “This better not stain.”
“I was waiting for you,” I said quietly, pushing past her and back into the bedroom. I slipped the big sleeping shirt I had brought over my head and then reached underneath it to slide the bathing suit’s straps off my shoulders, shimmying out of the wet material and into some underwear as subtly as I could. She was watching me from the doorway, but when I caught her eye she looked away and walked back into the bathroom. “Sorry,” I heard her say through the door.
I climbed under the covers and waited for her to come back. She crawled into bed next to me and turned off the light, laying her head down on my shoulder. I knew she felt bad. But like my mother said so many years ago, feeling bad doesn’t bring dead ferns back to life.
