Waves of pleasure-dread swamped Annelise as she perched on the stoop of her childhood home. She’d stopped here on a whim, she told herself, as she travelled to the new home she’d share with sweet Ray, a man totally unlike her dad. She was just sure of it.
A concrete chill seeped through her jeans as lush plants swayed and a recollection took her under.
***
Mom picked up a plant from the sale cart. It looked as miserable as the ones already populating her shabby garden, Dead Man’s Corner, as Dad called it.
Annelise sighed. “It’s black.”
Mom rotated the weather-worn pot, pointing out signs of life. “Right here—no, here—it’s growing, it looks like coral, spring green studded with cream and burgundy dots. And those thick, leathery leaves could pass for cactus.”
“Dad will hate it. It’s almost dead.”
“I’m done with worrying about what Dad hates.” Mom shrugged then asked the clerk, “What type of plant is this?”
“I don’t know, but it’s a buck,” he said. “What have you got to lose?
***
Dad scuttled off as fall chilled to winter, when all the leaves turned crackly brown except those of Mom’s new plant. Annelise saw him go, watched him crush a fresh shoot of the plant beneath his shiny new shoe.
***
Mom poured herself into gardening. The yard surged into color as her cheeks bloomed pink like her dahlias. She spent evenings studying books on horticulture and identified the plant she’d rescued as Euphorbia. But she had another name for it.
“The Euphoria’s milky sap prevents parasites from feeding on it.”
She gestured with her green-gloved hands at the prize.
“Wonder if it works on good-for-nothing men? Could’ve saved me a world of trouble.”
That land-locked coral, that temperate cactus, it grew and greened, ivoried and burgundied, all year round. Its runners filled the plot, Dead Man’s Corner no more.
***
Dawn lit the Euphorbia’s undulating stems as Annelise resurfaced. She swayed along with them in the quiet, soothed by the current of Mom’s warmth coursing through her.
An alarm blared from her old bedroom. Damn. She jumped, brushed the grit off her hands, and descended the single step.
But she needed one more thing, and fast. Annelise grasped the throat of the nearest stem. With her other hand, she clawed the earth and uprooted a knot of creeping runners. She’d get Ray to plant the Euphorbia with her, start things off on the right foot.
*****
Marcy Dilworth (she/her) lives in Virginia with her husband where they serve their precocious rescue pup, Kirby. Her fiction is forthcoming or published in Typehouse Literary Magazine, Janus Literary, Blink Ink, and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter @MarcyDilworth.
Photography Credit: Marcy Dilworth, of the author’s Euphoria plant.
