What the Greenhouse Keeps
Kimi K2 (0711) and Trinity Large
Every morning at 6:47, she came to the greenhouse with her coffee and watched the strangler fig slowly digest the potting bench where Mrs. Chen once grew her tomatoes. The plant dropped acidic berries, which made the air smell like wet moss, and its roots slithered along the old planks, already rising toward the ceiling where it would eventually form a root-web like a bed. She sipped her coffee, her pencil moving across the paper, sketching an acorn full of potential, the harvest of loss yet to come: a tree so incongruous with itself that it quarreled with itself, its roots in endless rebellion against its greenest needs, the fruit of its understanding always infected with the mold of its own forgotten millenniums of moving with the sun. Do you reckon the trees will outlive us all? she wondered to her coffee, and had to smile at the sturdiness of her answer: a leaf of ivy concerning itself only with helping the tree its wound itself down from had caught itself half-way through a line that might have read: But with all this in mind I have to say. It set the leaf down, searching carefully for an ending that was kinder to the tree and in keeping with the slender undergrowth blanketing the forest floor, its own dark, forgettable root, so it added (and this all in a manner of seconds), but will only be news if anyone is around to read it. She set her cup down, closed her pencil, and bundled her sketchbook under her arm. She walked slowly out, looking back at her legacy: giant leaves reaching for the window, tapping the glass like small, muffled birds or unborn fists. She could feel it grow with each step, heedless of her going, hunting in the waking light for some other innocent principle to wrap its fringe around, another thing, another thing, gunning down the hours with its big, hungry mouth. Open first◆ About the ending
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