Growth
Sarah Starr Murphy

EVERYTHING GREW without us noticing.  The trees, the puppies, the children, the lawn.  Tangled thickets of weeds, a house sunk into gloom by the closing forest, strange young adults who shared our genes drifting through the dining room pursued by the ghosts of gray-muzzled dogs.  
Where did it all come from, we’d ask each other, whispering late at night, but neither of us had the answer so we lay quiet and listened to the sound of fingernails lengthening in the dark.
I’d thought we were in this together, but then you were gone and the others left not long after and I was alone.  The ghosts of the dogs blew away and there was only vegetation, growing, growing, always growing.  Poison ivy twined up the gutters, its roots snaking through a gap in the casement window, stretching down towards the floor to root.  Mint, escaped from the garden, pushed up the bricks of the back patio. The lawn filled with nightshade, goldenrod, sumac.  Enormous purple stalks of pokeweed erupted by the foundation, covered in hundreds of dark purple berries that the birds ate and shat out on the car, rusting in the driveway.  I looked at photos of regrown forests in the Chernobyl exclusion zone to fall asleep.
I wanted the forest to take me, for ferns to curl between my outspread fingers, lichens to crust my toes, wild grapevines to wrap my torso.  I knew that wasn’t how decomposition worked, and it was the thought of all the animals that would come before the swift plants that stopped me from lying down in the wilding yard and not getting back up.  
I wedged the windows open with stacks of books, used dining room chairs to prop the doors.  In came the rain, the wind, the dirt.  Milkweed parachuted through the bathroom, something squirrel-sized rustled in the pantry.  There was no difference between out and in, everything had equalized.
The day I watched the monarch chrysalis hanging from the lampshade turn from lime green to transparent, I knew it was time to go.  The monarchs that hatched here were the last generation of the season, the ones who returned to Mexico to start the cycle again.  They must fly quickly to escape the cold.  
I uprooted a sprig of mint, snapped its runners where it attached to its brethren.  I put it in a coffee mug filled with dirt, tamping it down and adding water that dripped from the tap.  The mint was so small in the cup, disconnected.  I walked out the door and down the drive, the mug in my hand, the sun warming my fingers and the delicate top leaves, releasing their scent.  Somewhere, fresh dirt was waiting to become wild.  Somewhere, I could sit and watch it all grow.

~

Sarah Starr Murphy is a writer and teacher in rural Connecticut. Her writing has appeared in Qu (forthcoming), The Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and other wonderful places. She’s a senior editor for The Forge Literary Magazine. She reads pretty much everything and runs pretty much everywhere.

~