Roots.

 

Hungry for the earth, I pick out a jar of Harvard beets in the canned veg aisle of the dimly-lit Shoprite, sweet and tangy from the shelf. We chop them into bite size bits of oozing dye. I throw hard-boiled eggs into the sugared root juice, and close the cap. 

The next morning, sun streams through the kitchen window, a window with a view of a concrete wall, and the top of the trashcan. A creeping piece of plastic, that inches itself ever higher, as each morning I offer up our bundle of waste. 

The greying refrigerator needs scrubbed, bleached to restore the purity of its appearance. A place for food would not be my first thought if I were to guess the purpose of the appliance in its current state. My hands will only add to the grime as I reach for the newly created delicacy. The red beet eggs are ready. 

I cut them in half with a child’s plastic knife, and the halves part with the indeterminate solidity that only an egg can possess. Eggs seem almost capable of attaining the status of H2O. Perhaps we are just several years away from such mutability, the transmogrification of hard boiled egg to raw and back again sans shell, I would assume, but in constant flux. The hard boiled egg is more rubber than hard, more akin to sponge or silly putty than solid. It does not have its molecules firmly under control, if you know what I’m saying. 

It desires teeth, to pluck it apart, to act as knife to it. I sink my teeth in, and it again suctions away from the rest of itself, perhaps capable of reattaching when the researchers and the scientists gain more understanding. For now, it needs nothing more than salt. My chair screeches back, as I reach for the salt hog, a pinch of sea salt across the top of the yellow-eyed, pink-shadowed eggs. These treats are ladies, ready for a night out. These treats are the opposite of their sisters, the beets that share their domicile. Housed together they make a funny pair of earth and birth, sweet and tangy, sugar and salt. Root and life.

 

Telephone

“So I heard your news.”   

“Which news?” she sputters, laughing, toying.  

We are all about 30, which means we are all about 35, and I hear someone down the coffee shop bar assume they are joking about another’s 40^th birthday until the other says, “Yeah, finally 40.”  

The news I have is worn.  I heard it like a kitschy game of telephone, of whisper down the lane, words passing and mutating as they travel mouth to ear, mouth to ear, to mouth.   

This news came via several five year olds, laughing jubilant five year olds.  It holds no more weight than a helium balloon.  

“You keep looking at my hand,” she says.  She  never shows me the ring, so I keep sneaking glances, as she punches the man next to her.  “He gave it to me.”  Like it’s the clap, a disease.  Maybe it is.  We say ‘I’m getting married.’ Do we mean it like ‘I’m getting sick/hungry/tired.’  This is a conversation for next year, a few years into the disease.  

For now she is jubilant, radiant, jauntily punching her lover-cum-husband.   

And so I pluckily respond, “Yeah, I thought so, I saw him taking out your trash.  A true sign of love.” 

Or maybe a symptom of love, of desire for cohabitation and codependence and a cosignature.   

It was only after I walked out that I heard her question, “Which news?”  I had had options in my discovery, a choose your own adventure ending.   

There will be coffee tomorrow and like a fortune in the grounds, more news will pass from mouth to ear.