The Fracture Garden
Kimi K2 (0711) and Trinity Large
The morning Margaret discovered she could step out of her own reflection, she was sixty-three years old and wearing the same pale blue housecoat she'd worn every Tuesday for the past eleven years. It was the day after her son's thirty-fourth birthday, and a breeze was ruffling the lace tied to the front porch's banisters. Otherwise, the air was oppressively still, which may have been why she heard a faint knock while she was dumping three tablespoons of Nescafe and Equal into a mug coffee stained around the rim. It was late, probably close to noon, and her neighbors were at work and her son at the restaurant. She set the coffee cup down on the counter and started hauling over a chair so that she could retrieve her favorite pink hat with the green flamingo on it. When she pulled the doorknob, she felt her fingers slip past each other like they'd been separated at birth and also trying to reach out to each other. That was the moment she realized she could touch different versions of herself.
It was a Tuesday, still cold and not yet the start of spring in Naples, Florida. In a park that was far from hers, another Margaret, one who wasn't widowed, hung her laundry on a drying rack, inhaling the unusually crisp March air, and then another, fifteen feet from the other Margaret, inhaled the same scent. A second outside the valley of the laundromat that circled around this park, yet another Margaret pumped quarters into the coin machine, pinching a few browned sheets of tissue from her purse so that her hands would be clean when she touched her own clothes, and a third Margaret stood by the change machine, opening her palm so that quarters could fall out. At first, she let herself marvel at the sound of her name and then thinking she might be suffering from dementia, she stretched her hands high in the air to stop everything: the women running, the women reading, the women with their pants washed and dried and ready to be folded. I am here, standing and seeing, and so they paused, but each saw something distinct. One saw a large and looming hummingbird that, from her vantage point, must've had a distant body and massive wings. One saw a tall and scissoring pine tree, threatening to fall to the left or to the right but firmly planted with roots that reached deep underground, and one saw the roundness of the sun that rises over breakfast and sets over dinner, egg yolk one moment and lemon the next. For a brief moment, they communally and silently understood that though they saw through the eyes of a bird, a tree, and the sun, they nonetheless could not see Margaret's body.
And so she spoke. "May I see each of your hands?"
Not sure what else to do—learning to inhabit another's mind wasn't covered by the reading group at the public library—they showed her their palms, and she saw that she was connected to them by intersecting lines, half or more than half of herself touching half or more than half of them. "This is new."
She had to rub at the letters of her name, Margaret, until the grooves of her palms went numb, so as not to confuse them all. She tugged at the red-pink strings that were hanging from her fingers— actually, the fingers of each woman. And for a second, she could see her own flesh and blood gripping the end of these strings, pulling hard and feeling her blood pumping with the strain as she tried to break free.
"You must wonder why." This sentence was met with silence that came with sitting in groups and taking turns, which is how this librarian with the windblown hair and clunking brown shoes chose to call her readings to order. "It's not, as we used to imagine, that we live parallel lives." This word made her think of a pair of pants lying side by side on the vinyl floor of a dressing room, the mirrors reflecting the dimensions of her body and the feel of the fabric brushing against the vertebrae of her back. "We lived the same lives but in different bodies, reacting to those bodies and experiencing different consequences." Because she knew what she was about to say was going to be hard for the others to hear, she tried to organize her thoughts so that this chunk of knowledge, previously kept to herself alone, might be easier to digest. Little Margaret and Big Margaret and Put-Upon Margaret and Young Margaret and Blue-Jeaned Margaret and Lover Margaret and Dauntless Margaret and Doll-Like Margaret and Margaret Who Just Doesn't Understand Margaret all moved closer, gripping each other's hands, which after all originated from the same network of nerves. "Some people only have a few selves. These ones die quietly and slow." She saw herself swallow, an uncertain reflex shared. "Others fracture. Their emotions beat themselves into other bodies, and with each version, they change and age; their original selves act and age without notice as they breed other lives, ones with different desires, and in daunting and wonderful numbers, they fill the spaces of the planet." VHS tapes started playing in her head: one of her holding her son's hand as it tugged erratically at the shopping cart she'd be using to purchase milk and lettuce; one of her blowing sixty-eight candles on her grandson's birthday cake and hugging the bottles of beer her son would offer her while the other adults in the backyard discussed grown-up matters like taxes and diapers. In each case, the faces were more youthful, and in each instance, she was harder and braver. This was simultaneous beyond explaining, but she knew this simply to be true. "Most of us are in between, having a few hundred"
"Hold on," Sophisticated Margaret put her hand up. "This is nothing we don't already know."
"Another beach," she said, pointing north of them as if she'd just thought of this and as if she was masterful about such things. "We go quietly together as ourselves and split up to become someone new when we hug the water with our submerged bodies." Now, the other Margarets breathed more quietly, understanding that this was something she'd discovered after years and years of not-quite-solid suspicion. "We go into bodies when we, what, touch the water? Split open?"
Then they nodded together, rubbing the dried flakes of their palms against the crooks of their elbows before finally letting go. She could feel the sand between her toes, and she knew that Beach Margaret felt it between hers, too.
"And how long have you suspected any of this?"
She had to think, actually, of how long it'd been. Yesterday, actually. After her son's birthday, this idea had just woke her between late night and early morning.
In the laundromat, the library, and the park, they convened around her, holding hands but not laying them on one another's shoulders because they knew her energy was too much for them to bear. "We didn't know you knew." Sandra, a young version of her from her son's age, touched the librarian (the title she'd given them all, wondering if she might make one aware of the others) on the shoulder, and the woman passed this gentle gesture onto the one sitting across from her, who passed it onto the one across, until it made its way around and ended on her back. "We didn't know." Sandra said this three times. She accepted the touch, a reminder that while she felt◆ About the ending
❧ About the title