“Will You Listen to Me, Please?” by Emily Collins explores an intergenerational, unlikely friendship between the narrator—a college student reeling from the loss of her brother—and an eccentric artist still grieving the death of her husband. In a coastal Maine town, the narrator cares for the artist’s plants while saving money to see a corpse flower in memory of her brother. Over the summer, the two begin to come to terms with honoring the people you’ve lost while still moving forward.
No one understood her, she said. One critic had likened her shallowness to an unintentional ebullience, a rushing frothiness he wished he could have turned off and on like a fountain. Over the phone, the sadness in her was palpable.
“It must be Michael’s fault,” she told me. “Such things limit creativity, don’t you think?”
I started to answer then stopped, wondering what a stranger could even say. Michael was her late husband, and “such things” were his death of three years ago. Blood cancer. This was my job interview. I listened to her on my balcony overlooking Casco Bay. The sky purpled the islands and the houselights blurred the water.
I could hear classical music on the other end of the line and the sound of ruffling papers.
“I need to get things under control,” she sighed.
Georgia was a performance artist in need of a part-time housekeeper. I was a cocktail waitress in need of more money. A corpse flower was set to bloom in the San Diego botanical gardens, and I had until the end of summer to see it. Here’s what they don’t tell you about corpse flowers: for all their strangeness and unrivaled stench, they just might be our best cure for grief. They’re colorful and unapologetic, their red and purple sheaths throbbing in the light like a human heart that’s been flipped onto a chest.
I found Georgia’s shimmering ad tacked to a bulletin board outside the restaurant. “New York City performance artist in need of a housekeeper for vacation home in Kennebunkport.” The ad included a photograph of a tall, middle-aged woman kneeling on a canvas, her sleeves dripping paint. The ad concluded, “Conservative assholes need not apply.”
On the phone, there was a tenderness in Georgia’s voice despite her conviction. She’d begun the interview with a backstory that rivaled a television movie. A New York financer and his wife sell their Upper East Side apartment to live full-time in their vacation home in Kennebunkport. There, they make love and create until the husband receives his terrible diagnosis. What follows is an uphill battle of appointments and pills and tiny losses—no more tea beneath the skylight or gardening at high noon. No more reading Russian novels until midnight, the old nightlight skipping squares across their duvet. Then the end: He is gone, and she is left with the house. The house consumes her as houses do. She can no longer make art and wonders if she really could in the first place. We hadn’t spoken for ten minutes, but I was hooked.
“So, tell me,” she said. “Why do you deserve this job?”
I shifted in my chair. At the edge of the balcony was an old ficus plant the previous tenant had left behind. Yellow leaves scratched with green drooped from the skinny branches. I fed and watered the plant, maybe too much. Its helplessness moved me, its yellowness like the edges of an old storybook.
“Because,” I told her. “I’m hard-working, honest, dedicated,”
“Do you have loud feet?” she said.
“What?”
“Loud feet. Do you make a lot of noise when you walk?”
“No.”
“Oh, dear, that won’t do at all. I need someone who makes a lot of noise moving around here. It’s a big house. I can’t have us sneaking up on each and other and going into cardiac arrest.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“I’m not. And one day, you won’t be either. Just wait until your skin cracks but does not break. All these lines of life put upon you.” She laughed. “They’ll tell you aging is a blessing. Don’t ever fall for that.”
I felt the impulse to smile.
She asked me questions about myself, so I told her about the restaurant. She scoffed when I mentioned its familiar name, said that sounded like an absolute nightmare. I was too shy to tell her how much I loved it. There’s an order in caring for others. I loved blending into the work, preparing drinks and hors d’oeuvres with the care of an artist. I’d straighten my spine and move with the tray steaming high above my head, the customers, swathed in summer linen, raising their smooth faces to greet me.
“And what do you know about me?” Georgia said.
All afternoon, I’d prepared for my interview by gathering as much information on Georgia as I could. I sat on the edge of my bed with my phone, scrolling through one article after the next. A quick search led me to archives of mid-nineties Brooklyn arts magazines featuring interviews with Georgia and photos of her early work. I enlarged photos of the then twenty-three year-old Georgia on some stage suspended from ropes or lounging in metal cages, her eyes hidden or mouth gagged. Although there was cruelty, every performance was playful. In each photo, she enjoyed the finer things in life moments before some exaggerated form of torture: a mermaid grooming herself before paper mache pirates whisk her away, a princess licking an ice cream cone while strapped to the guillotine. In every photograph, Georgia is laughing. In one of the interviews I read, she exclaimed, “I don’t understand why women artists are so obsessed with pain, why they always get this bright, knowing look in their eyes while punishing themselves on stage. For what? To be female is to suffer. Show me what else we can do.”
“I guess I don’t know that much about you,” I said.
Playfulness was not a state I could understand. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this distinct coldness in me. I did not feel things the way other people did. I hated bad things, everyone does, but I also could not feel good things from the inside out.
“Are you from up north?” she said, ignoring the silence.
“Washburn.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I hear the northern part of the state can be rough,” she said.
I thought of the farmhouse where I was raised, the potato farm that died before I was born. I remembered the roof groaning in summer storms, ready to lift like a giant slate leaf. I remembered coldness, and my brother needing more to eat and drink.
She spoke about the house, an old Victorian just north of the beach, with love and frustration. She spoke about Michael too. He had been her champion, and the house had let her play. I tended to the Ficus plant while she carried on, watered the soil until it was soft.
“I cannot emphasize enough,” Georgia said, “how wonderful it is to have someone who truly believes in you. If not in you, then the person you could be.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Don’t be. It’s been years. Grief’s a fucker you learn to live with.”
She asked if I would like to come by tomorrow, and I told her that sounded great.
“Keep in mind,” she said. “There are rooms filled with useless items. Very valuable.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I haven’t broken anything since I was five.”
“Very impressive, dear. I break things all the time. Mostly by accident, but not always.”
I imagined her smiling. “What do you mean?” I said.
“It means that I have my moments, and those moments often end with something shattered. This mostly happened after I lost Michael. Loss can take such pieces out of you.”
My laptop hummed on my desk. I looked at the time in the top right corner. 6:45. I’d be cooking dinner for my brother, Calvin. He used to hang out with me in the kitchen while I prepared everything. We were usually alone. The TV was the size of a lunchbox with antennas the length of my torso. Calvin would sit at the kitchen table and stare at the TV, his cracked and bleeding face nestled in the palm of his hand. He’d cross his arms and bounce his knee up and down, muttering to himself like he did the months he started selling snow. Sometimes, he’d shout at the TV or cry. At the counter, I’d pretend not to notice and chop, slice, or squeeze harder. Outside, the potato field glistened in the sun, the ghostly wisps still feeling the earth.
“Yes,” I said to Georgia. “Loss will do that.”
“Who knows if I’ll ever perform again?”
Something in her reminded me of Calvin. My brother was golden, almost perfect. But he always needed things from people. Validation and respect, devotion, maybe. His inner vanishing act should have been obvious. Golden children are always hiding something from the rest of us. It’s why they burn so brightly.
I could feel Georgia burning on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, well,” I said to her. “The loss didn’t take creating from you, did it?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said loss takes these pieces out of you, which I guess makes sense. But like, I don’t know.” I was flailing, saying things before I could even think through them. “It’d be kind of stupid to just, like, give away the most important piece, you know what I mean?”
Georgia was silent for so long that I thought the phone had disconnected. Then there was a sound, a heavy burst. It was over so fast I could not tell if it was a laugh or a sob.
“To hell with the tour,” she said. “You’re hired.”
* * *
I would have to water the plants on Sundays. Sunday was the day she created, and she could not be held accountable for living things on Sunday. One afternoon, I was headed to the rooftop garden with a pitcher when Georgia emerged from her studio, hair flailing. I watched her from the window at the end of a long hallway. She left the tiny green cottage at the edge of the property and ran barefoot to the house. Her face was striking in the sunlight, her cheeks flushed. Even the old hackberries worked in her favor, branches parting for the beautiful woman in long, shimmering linen.
I waited for her by the stairs where she asked me, smiling and short of breath, if I’d like to take a break. She said she would prepare the refreshments and that we could relax on the roof. All morning, I’d brushed, wiped, and scrubbed rooms with high ceilings and antique furniture, bathrooms with golden faucets and lightly-colored mosaics that shimmered like pieces of glass. Dishes clouded the sink. Georgia’s clothes crowded the hallways, all that fine silk crumbling in on itself. The round mirrors were filled with smudged, greyed-out shapes and hung there like portraits of ghosts. I didn’t want to take a break. I wanted order. But Georgia had already taken the pitcher from my hands. Satisfied with herself, she headed toward the kitchen, bobbing the empty pitcher against her knees.
The rooftop overlooked a brook and golden patches of marshland. I lay on a chaise lounge in the blue angle of hyacinths and morning glories with a glass of lemonade Georgia had rushed to pour, the pulp still swirling. I watched her take a long swig of lemonade. Sunlight striped her skin.
“You like plants?” she said.
“No.”
“You’re honest,” she said, laughing. “I like that.”
I did not see myself as an honest person, but I liked how it sounded.
“Truthfully,” she said, “I don’t like plants either. I’m just good with them. I like doing things I’m good at.”
“I’ll take care of them,” I said.
“There is something nice about plants though,” she said. “Humbling to be around things that are utterly themselves, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I started this garden a few years ago, and it’s been thriving ever since. To be honest, it feels like the only thing I’ve accomplished.”
“What about your work?”
She put her glass down and planted her elbows on her knees and looked at me.
“I feel like you know so much about me—my work, my husband, my house. But, I know hardly anything about you.”
“Not much to know, really,” I said.
“Why did you want to work for me? Are you an artist?”
“No. I don’t know anything about that.”
“You want to?”
“Sure, maybe.”
“I can loan you some books and music sometime.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“So why housekeeping? Are you interested in working for the hotel industry?”
“I’m saving up for a trip to San Diego.”
“What’s in San Diego?”
“Nothing really.”
“Oh, come on. There must be something there.”
I shrugged. “Never been to that side of the country. Would be nice to see, you know?”
“I do. When do you leave?”
“End of summer, couple of months from now.”
“Well,” she said, raising her glass. “Cheers.”
We drank in silence. The ocean wasn’t far, and I could taste the salt in the breeze. Seagulls wheeled above us as if summoned. I thought about Georgia’s little green studio and wondered what she needed a break from.
“Why do you want to loan me stuff?” I said.
“Don’t you want to learn?”
“Not sure. I don’t think about art that much.”
“Learning about different kinds of art could open a new world for you. Why not, right?”
“I guess.”
“You don’t have to.”
“No, that’s okay. I’d like to learn. How did you learn to perform like that?”
“Like what, dear?”
“Like, I don’t know. You putting yourself out there like you don’t care what anyone thinks.”
“I love play,” she said. “And doing the unexpected. Both things are important. Not sure if you know this about me, but I generally don’t care for art that communicates darkness. I understand that darkness is necessary and all, but people spend too much time there. Lately, I’ve been wondering if I’ve been wrong. Maybe I should spend some time in the darkness. Maybe there’s a piece of me there that I’ve been missing.”
I waited for her to say more, but she was silent. We sat in silence for a long time. The high noon sun shined bright on my face.
“There are people with pieces missing?” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. I hadn’t meant to say anything, and yet the words had fallen right out. Georgia’s eyes were closed, and her breathing deepened. I reached over her and gathered her empty glass. I took our glasses and the pitcher of lemonade downstairs to the kitchen and loaded them into the dishwasher. I thought about returning to the rooftop, then decided to take a quick walk instead. My heart was heavy. I couldn’t believe I’d asked Georgia such a thing. Where did I get off talking about people and missing pieces?
Outside, the garden courtyard had a small trelliswork skylight and two fountains flowing at its center. Little frogs in stony tutus spat water onto pebbles and scattered coins. I walked through the backyard, past the pools and globs of wisteria, and leaned against the wooden fence at the end of the property. The grass sloped downward, and I could see farm fields and patches of forest yet to be cleared by developers. There, about an acre away, not too far from a crown of pines, the braying. Half of him was submerged in the muck. The other half shivered. He was white with scattered brushes of brown, the mane long and bristly. His front legs, sheathed in mud, curved atop the yellowed grass. There was strength in the arch of his legs, the firmness of his hooves, but in the low drawl of each bray, I could tell he’d given up. His head bobbed as if in fervid prayer. Mud ringed his eyes in large, trembling halos.
I returned to the rooftop garden and sat beside Georgia without a word. A moment passed and she stirred, stretched her arms to the sky. She apologized for dozing off and offered me the plate of cookies. I shook my head no and stared at my shoes. “But aren’t you hungry?” she asked. I shook my head again, harder this time. She waited for me to say more as I stood up. I gathered our empty dishes and told her I should get back to work.
* * *
My brother once told me we used to live in a castle. Calvin would tell such strange stories about the past. The castle was the first. He told me the story from his place on the couch. He looked tired and thin. I’d covered him in mom’s blanket, but I could see him picking at his skin beneath the wool. I placed another bowl of soup on the coffee table, hoping he’d eat this time. Long before we were born, he said, our ancestors had purchased the castle so our family would always be protected and free. He said the castle was made of marble and stone, topped with spires that poked the sky. He said we first learned to swim in an emerald moat and ate nothing but frosted cake all day long. Our parents were strong and clean, their long silk robes sweeping the grass. I wore a crown covered in rubies, his in sapphires and diamonds. We rode horses that galloped on command and watched the sunset.
I stared at his bowl of soup, knowing it would remain untouched. Later, there’d be screams. Screams from Calvin, of hunger. Screams from Dad telling me I never do my part.
“You’re wrong,” I told him. “We never lived in a castle.”
“You were too young to remember.”
“You’re only a year older.”
He sat up and took my hand. His eyes were wide and knowing. My stomach burned. Later, I’d lift my shirt to find random purple and yellow splotches across my skin and watch them slowly fade. They’d surface again during another one of Calvin’s tales, forming more constellations by the story’s end.
“I don’t blame you,” he said, stroking my hand. “For wanting to forget.”
* * *
Every Sunday, after my morning shift at the restaurant, I’d drive past the water and endless rows of pines until I found the Victorian glinting off the side of the road. I’d arrive at Georgia’s manor in sneakers and an oversized band t-shirt ending at my knees. I’d clean with a ferocity I didn’t know I had. Sunday afternoons, I cleaned marble countertops and waxy fruit, filthy windows and floors, a paint-splattered grand piano. I wiped and washed and dried the most artful and pitiful things: china dolls with cracked porcelain feet, a bronze greyhound guarding a door no one ever used, a royal imperial egg with a miniature carousel that did not spin or sing.
There was never any sign of Georgia until late afternoon or sunset. She’d emerge from the green studio eyes dazed, as if fresh with sleep. I’d follow her with a plate of cookies I’d helped prepare and refused to eat all the way to the rooftop garden where we’d watch the sunset and older couples journey across the marsh in brightly-colored kayaks.
One Sunday, I took a break in the library and rested my eyes on a velvet couch. I was on the verge of sleep when Georgia shook my shoulder. I rose to my feet, worried I’d dozed off and that it was now early evening. The angry light filtering through the curtains told me it was still early afternoon. She asked me to join her on the rooftop. Her face was expressionless, and I worried I’d done something wrong, like chipped a limestone goddess or wiped down some avant-garde portrait in the making. I followed her to the rooftop in silence.
On the roof, we spread out on our lounge chairs and faced the marshlands. I watched her from the corner of my eye. Her face was stiff behind her bandit-like sunglasses. The skin on her collarbone goosebumped in the heat. The air was heavy between us as I waited for her to speak.
“Sorry to interrupt you,” she said. “I just couldn’t stand being holed up in my studio. I needed a break and thought maybe you could use one.”
I turned to face her. She lifted her sunglasses and rested them on top of her head. Her eyes and smile were strained.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I don’t mind resting for a bit.”
“Did you start any of those books I lent you last week?” she said.
“No, but I did listen to some of the music.”
“Nice, which ones?”
“Just the Joni Mitchell album.”
“Ah, Blue. What an incredible piece. A bit before your time, I know. What did you think?”
I shifted in my seat. I’d listened to part of the album alone in my apartment. Joni’s slow but razor-sharp piping filled the room like another being. Her voice and words were like nothing I’d ever heard before. How someone could let all their insides hang out so beautifully unnerved me.
“Not my thing,” I said to Georgia. “She’s a bit forced, I guess, over the top even.”
“Interesting you feel that way,” Georgia said. “I love what Joni does in that album. Her voice makes me lower my defenses. I really need that sometimes.”
“Why is your work like that?” I said.
“Like what, dear?”
“Defense lowering.”
“Is that how you see it?”
“Yeah, I mean, kind of. It definitely surprises me. It’s a little dark, but not really. Your characters make the best of their situations.”
I waited for her to say something, but she was silent. She turned her attention back to the land.
“I lied to you about Sundays,” she said, “about creating. I can’t create like I used to. I’ve never been this blocked before. Somedays, I get so frustrated, I just have these tantrums. I scream, throw glass and paint, that sort of thing. I’m not even a big enough person to clean it up sometimes. I do nothing in that studio. Even when you’re out there cleaning up my literal garbage, I just sit in that studio like a coward and do nothing at all. I’m blocked. It’s never happened to me before, and I don’t know what to do.”
I knew she could feel me staring, but her eyes never left the marsh. For weeks, I thought she’d sealed herself in that studio to work on pieces I would never understand. For weeks, I imagined her painting and singing and performing, coming alive all alone in there, like a church bell swinging in the night.
“Michael wasn’t an artist, but he always inspired me,” she said. “He asked the best questions, gave the most thoughtful advice. But I’m not sure this block has to do with grief. It didn’t begin after Michael died, like one would suspect. I don’t know how I got so stuck.”
“I’m sorry about Michael.”
“I hope it doesn’t bother you when I talk about him.”
“Why would it?”
“I don’t know.” She stirred her drink with a straw. “People get weird about the deceased. We don’t know how to talk to or hear about them. Like, people think I’m looking for sympathy when I talk, but I’m usually just sharing boring details, like how Michael was allergic to beets or never picked up his towels.” She laughed. “No one’s real with me. Most days, I’m like, will you listen to me, please?”
She kept on stirring, her shoulders hunched. The sunglasses had fallen off her head and plopped onto the edge of her nose. She hadn’t bothered to push them back up. They just hung there.
“Maybe my expectations are too high,” she said. “It’s simpler for people to relate to plants and animals. About a month ago, one of my neighbor’s horses got loose. She wandered off their farm and got stuck in a mud pit not too far from here. They still don’t know how long she’d been there when they found her. It took a whole village to get her out. They strapped her to the back of a truck and drove slowly. I watched from my backyard and prayed for the first time in who knows how long? She’s back home but hasn’t been the same since. My neighbor says she’s been pacing and sweating a lot. Her tail swishes and dips like a kite. But they’ve been working with her each day, making sure she’s right. She’s kept going, and no one’s going to give up.”
I focused on a canopy of maples struck green and golden. A heavy wind pointed their leaves toward the sky. For a moment, the whole earth shook. The pitcher of lemonade beside us toppled onto the ground. I got off the chair and fell to my knees, gathered as many pieces as I could find. Georgia insisted I leave it be, but I pretended not to hear her. I would gather every piece of glass. The rooftop would be clean and safe, smooth and pink.
When I was done, I sat back down. I formed a fist around the glass, let the broken pieces press against me. I could feel Georgia’s eyes on me, but she didn’t say a word. I leaned back and stared up at the stretch of sky.
* * *
On the drive home, I thought about another one of Calvin’s stories. He talked of an aunt who lived on a farm where it was always summer. She taught us to ride horses and fed us the best foods all day long. I washed Calvin’s hair as he spoke. He could go weeks without bathing. His curls were knotted in my fist. I washed with a force he barely noticed. He shouted over the running faucet, his eyes like headlamps as he spoke about this aunt that did not exist. “Don’t you remember?” he said. I turned off the faucet and told him I was done. He flipped his hair over his head and sat in the chair. He sat there with his hair dripping and eyes to the floor like a penitent, like a believer, splashes of water resting at his feet.
“Annie,” he said, his face still hidden. “You remember that summer, don’t you?”
There was a plea in his voice. He waited for me to live in his world, to be the sister I couldn’t be. The skin beneath me burned, the little galaxies of spots spreading across my ribcage. I grabbed a towel off the hook and draped it over him.
“No,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “I don’t remember.”
* * *
Two weeks before I left for California, Georgia got an idea. We sat on the grass beside her lap pool and painted masks with acrylic. Mine was a lion with fangs, hers a dolphin with little hearts for eyes.
“You really don’t know what the show is going to be about?” I asked.
“Not yet.” She dabbed the eye hole of her mask with paint. “Though I suspect I’ll find out soon enough. I hope it’s different from anything I’ve done before.”
“I don’t think you need to change,” I said.
“That’s very kind, dear, but everyone ought to change. Even if just a little.”
Georgia blew on her mask and placed it on the ground to dry. I placed mine beside hers even though I wasn’t quite done. The animals peered up at us with their eyeless, colorful faces. There was a comfortable warmth to them, these creatures that did not roam.
Georgia stretched her arms into a perfect V and fell backward onto the grass.
“Maybe I’m too much like that Joni Mitchell,” she said, “but in all the wrong ways. I feel things too much. It’s not normal.”
I felt the urge to plop down beside her but didn’t.
“I think it’s good that you feel too much,” I said.
“Maybe,” Georgia said. Her eyes were closed. Mingled shade and sunlight cast spots all over her skin. She looked as if she’d been punctured with holes and only light could seep in or out.
“You are so nice to help me, you know,” she said. “If I create anything worthwhile this summer, it’ll be because of you.”
“Why’s that?”
“You’re real,” she said, turning to face me. “And you’re so kind.”
Her hair was long and tangled, like someone who’d never left the beach. She beamed and it took all I could to not shiver all over right in front of her. The ocean breeze pulled at my blouse, and my skin felt bruised and hot beneath the fabric.
So kind.
Last summer, Dad started dating this girl, Dana or Dina was her name. She was just a few years older than Calvin and me and liked to walk around our house in these tank tops with her dumb, tiny breasts. She watched a lot of TV while babysitting us. Once, I walked into the living room and saw her watching a nature segment on the corpse flower. She sat cross-legged in an oversized t-shirt. Smoke spiraled from the glass pipe in her lap. Without a word, I sat down and she handed me the pipe. I relit it and watched the camera zoom in on the bloom’s pleated sheath, the ring of flowers coiling out of its spadix. The guy on the T.V. spoke in a posh, gloomy voice. “After Titan Arum, commonly known as the corpse flower, blooms, it releases dimethyl trisulfide, a chemical resonate of limburger cheese or sometimes rotting flesh to ward off predators.” Dana or Dina smirked, but when she spoke, her voice was reverent. “When I grow up,” she said, “I want to be a corpse flower. Don’t you?” I turned to her, waited. The marijuana hit me. Dana or Dina and I emanated light. But we were heavy too, the couch was the only thing that could hold us. “The corpse flower reminds me of girls like you and me,” she said. “She’s all calm and pretty on the outside, but inside, she’s got a lot of stuff going on, you know what I mean? Then one day, she stops hiding. She opens and lets all her rot hang out, doesn’t give a damn about her smell or if she’s offending anybody. Don’t you want to be like that sometimes?”
“Georgia,” I said now. “I lost my brother last year.”
She sat up and took my hand. The spots of sunlight danced away.
“I lost my brother,” I said again, as she laced her fingers through mine. “Put a bullet through his brain like a goddamn idiot. He always wanted to see California, but that’s not why I’m going. That’s what a good sister would do, you know? But that’s not me.”
Georgia held me against her breast and ran her free hand through my hair. She smelled of honey and acrylic. Her masks and brushes encircled us. Above, the branches churned upward as if they could hold the sky. My eyes were so dry they hurt.
“Annie,” she said. “What happened?”
The red and purple spots burned across my stomach.
“A lot, I think.”
I told her last year at Calvin’s funeral that friends and relatives were distant. Dad had found Calvin in the stable. He said a trail of blood stretched toward the horses. Their troughs were still empty, and they didn’t understand why. I told her about how Dad had put those horses down a few months later. That was the first and only time I lost it. I’d loved those horses. I went into the shed, Dad’s shed, where he kept all his old trophies and the paintings that won all those obnoxious awards. There was this hot flash of spite, and suddenly, I was shattering canvases and glass and shouting until my throat was red hot. I didn’t hear my dad’s girlfriend. She wrapped her arms around me and shushed me with some sort of lullaby until we both sunk to the floor. I wanted to push her away and keep wailing, but her voice was so unusual and awkward and frightened, so very frightened, that I felt this immense surge of love for her that I’ve never felt before.
“But I haven’t felt like that since,” I told Georgia. “I haven’t felt much of anything at all since moving away. I’m not like my brother. Like you, he felt everything, even if it was too much.”
“Start by letting yourself feel things,” she said, and for the first time, I folded myself into her.
A week later, I said goodbye and I was on the road. “Call me on the drive,” Georgia said. (I wouldn’t.) “Come back, okay?” (I would.) I wouldn’t think of Georgia or much of anyone on the road. I thought I’d think about Calvin, all those poetic details of the dead stamped into the earth. Instead, all I saw were blinking gas stations and historic landmarks, signs for rest stops that felt too far away.
But when I arrived in California, I thought of this story Calvin had told me weeks before he died. We sat on the sofa with our plates. I waited and waited for him to eat. He talked about the time when we were in first grade and kindergarten. Dad had just started working night shifts at the warehouse. He left us in the care of this neighbor lady with big hair and some sort of drug problem. Calvin said she used to invite over these big, scary men with thick veins and long straggly beards “like a child’s drawing of Moses,” he said. He said the men would get real mean and high and force us to fight like dogs. “Oh, Annie,” Cal said. “It was so scary. I hated hurting you, but they were going to hurt us both if I didn’t. You remember, don’t you? Can you forgive me?”
I remembered the neighbor and Dad working late, but not much else. For whatever reason, I took Calvin by the hand and told him yes. I told him I remembered and that I forgave him. He put down his plate and didn’t touch it for the rest of the evening. I hadn’t given him the answer he wanted. I wasn’t supposed to remember this.
When I arrived at the gardens in San Diego, the corpse flower stood tall, its stench rising and washing over me. The wind caused its sheath to tremble, its burgundies and yellows pulsing. The crowd gawked at the smell, covered their noses and shook their heads. The stench seemed to deepen with every complaint, as if the flower relished them. I stood at the front with my hands at my side, wishing I were even closer. The flower stood alone in its part of the garden, giving and giving itself, letting itself eat and be eaten. Soon the beetles and flies would stir, and the flower’s remains would glisten with eggs and fruit. It would start over. I stayed until it was just me and the corpse flower, three unblinking eyes.
At sunset, I sat on the pier and swung my legs out to sea. Red and orange tendrils slipped into the water. Behind me, a large family passed by, their yips of joy encircling me as if they were my own. When all was silent, I took the sandwich out of my bag and ate the whole thing.
Emily Collins is a writer based in Santa Fe, NM. Her work has appeared in The LA Review of Books, The Adroit Journal, Poetry
Northwest, New Orleans Review, Florida Review, and others. Her short story collection And The Busy World Is Hushed was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and she is currently at work on a novel. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Montana where she was a writing/teaching fellow. For more, visit www.emilycollinswriter.com.