Thrives in the Waste

The heat oozed through the windows and pooled behind Scott’s blackout curtains. If he sat still, hunched over his desk, he could stay cool enough to think.

Scott’s home office was dim, every lamp left off in favor of the roaring air conditioner that hissed tepid air through its bared teeth.

Half-filled applications glowed primly on his computer screen. He would get to them today, he promised himself, the same promise as the day before and the weeks before that, every day since the startup had gone under.

He would not get to them. By the end of the day, he would not even be Scott anymore.

His eyes were dry and glazed, stinging as he rubbed them, colors bursting behind his eyelids: black-red, blue-gold, a green that hurt.

Scott made his way into the kitchen, which was sweaty and dank-smelling. Dishes filled the sink, and Scott did not look at them. He scooped handfuls of cereal into his mouth. Outside, the neighbor’s rhododendrons waved red blossoms into the boiled-looking air.

Scott looked at the closed fridge, considered drinking juice, considered drinking soda, but failed to see if he had either.

A muffled chime sounded from the counter. His phone, buried under mail.

A month ago, a thrill of hope would have shot through him. You’ll bounce right back, his coworkers had said to him as they packed up the office. Everyone’s hiring.

After the first two dozen applications, he’d woken one day with his bones turned to lead and his thoughts drowned out by static. He hadn’t applied anywhere in weeks.

A notification blinked up at him: Heath, his sister’s husband. His only friend outside of work. Now, maybe, his only friend.

What’re you up to today?

Heath was a doctor and an optimist. He’d texted almost daily since the layoff, a kind concern that made Scott feel queasy and undeserving.

The text went on to offer Scott beer and a hundred dollars to clear the blackberry brambles from Heath’s garden.

Scott stood still. The gray light of the apartment seeped up from the carpet and into his skin.

Sure, he typed and pressed send.

Heath and Rebecca’s house was not large, but it radiated grandness from under a giant oak tree in the back garden. Scott parked his car in the sunbaked driveway and hurried inside, sweating already.

Heath was on the couch with no shoes on. He handed Scott a beer as they walked through the crisply cool house.

“I’m on call today,” Heath said. “Otherwise, I’d cut down the blackberries myself. I promised Bec. You’re a lifesaver.”

They looked through the sliding door at the back of the house. A vent blew softly chilled air over Scott’s ankles. A vase full of lavender stood on the kitchen table.

“It grew fast this year,” Heath said, pointing outside. “I guess we didn’t notice.”

The garden shimmered green behind the glass. Where the oak’s branches extended, blue shade soaked the lawn. But the oak did not stretch to the far, bright corner. There, a sprawling blackberry bramble stretched its crazy limbs. The breeze did not move them.

“Too fast,” Heath muttered.

He handed tools to Scott: shears, a trowel, a pair of yellowing gloves.

Scott slipped through the door, sliding it closed behind him. He turned, but Heath had disappeared back into the house. The garden reflected itself in the glass.

Scott made his way across the back lawn and stood at the edge of the oak’s shade. Beyond it, the flowers and herbs had wilted and curled. Rhubarb stalks tipped horizontal and lay rotting. Dandelions had shriveled before they could flower. Even the outer leaves of the oak drooped and shrank from the beating sun.

But not the blackberry bramble. The bush piled and splayed, a deep verdant mass folding over itself in the center and sending its chartreuse canes in every direction. They clung to the back fence. They tangled around themselves like hair. At each cane’s end, grouped tendrils shot like fingers, reaching.

Brittle white flowers fluttered on various stalks. On some, hard green berry clusters clung to spiny stems. On others, berries had already swollen to a deep purple that vibrated in the humid light. The fruited briers swayed gently back and forth against the breeze and seemed for a moment to reach their tendrilled tips toward him.

He looked back at the silent house. He wiped a thin slick of perspiration from his face, and it soaked his sleeve.

Lazy, he thought to himself, and the scorn turned his sweat sour on his lip.

The too-small gloves suffocated his hands, but he kept them on. He did not want to touch the brambles.

He found that the gloves held the thorned brambles well, and he was pleased to see that the reaching green canes yielded easily to pruning shears. Soon, Scott had amassed shorn briers around his feet, lurid green against the grass. Petals clung to the blades.

He avoided the brambles that had borne fruit.

The outer canes cut down; Scott grew more confident that he could tear out the bush entirely before heat overtook him. Only the thicket remained, twisted and dark green. Here were the clusters of fat, purple berries.

As Scott leaned in, the scent of the fruit hit him at last: syrup and jam, dark and warm. But something else, also. An artificial sweetness, a chemical edge. He plucked one from its cluster.

It glistened in the sun, but even in the leafy shade, there was a glow to the fruit, an inner light that gleamed from between the little globes.

Scott blinked. Sweat filmed his eyes and blew out the edges of the shapes in front of him, everything wreathed and emanating. He dropped the berry into the grass.

Scott hurried to cut at the thicker canes and reached further into the thicket to where the woody stalks met the ground. Even the leaves were barbed here in the heart of the plant, and they scratched shallow cuts into his forearms. Scott breathed through his mouth. The smell of the berries now surrounded him, and he felt a heave of nausea if he took too deep a breath. But still, the perfume cloyed the air and coated his tongue. He grasped at the briers, each more gnarled than the last, hacking at them with the shears until they split and tore, oozing a translucent sap that ran down the stalks to the ground.

When he got to the last, thickest bramble, he stopped. His breath caught. Heat came off the plant, and the air seemed to shimmer with its sick-sweet smell. Scott felt the sweat turn tepid and gray on his skin, his mouth filled with liquid, and his eyes slid in their sockets; the nausea was no longer containable.

He clenched back bile in his throat and gouged at the soil around the thickest stalk. It was packed and hard as concrete. He chipped out a few desiccated pieces of dirt with the trowel before falling back, panting.

He would have to stop, he thought. He needed water. He’d have to finish it later.

Pathetic, he thought to himself, and, unbidden, the memory of Heath’s beaming smile as he handed Scott and the startup’s co-founder their first seed money came to mind. He’d never paid Heath back.

Scott peeled the sticky gloves from his hands and felt momentary relief from the heat. He looked around the simmering yard. A pickaxe leaned against the shed, and he reached for it, the wooden handle rough on his bare hands.

Scott cursed under his breath as he hacked at the ground. He felt hot saliva pool, dripping down his chin as the axe found purchase in the clods of packed earth. It grew hotter. He worked fast.

He did not let himself stop until he felt the root ball unearth itself. Dust sparkled as he reached down to rip the tangle from the soil, and he dropped it with a gasp, huddling his burned hand to his chest. The root ball smoked on the dry ground, stinking of charred carbon and that same poison, magnified.

Scott swore, his voice garbled in his ears as though distorted by the heat, and fell back on his heels. The root ball was shrinking, burning itself away to nothing from the inside until finally it snuffed out of existence entirely, leaving a scorched divot in the earth and a stinking haze.

Scott crawled back into the oak’s shade, a sick roiling in his gut, and half-stumbled back to the sliding glass door where Heath was waiting, a look of concern on his face.

“Jesus, Scotty,” he said, standing back to let Scott in.

The air-conditioned room pumped oxygen back into Scott’s lungs. He took gulps of air, registering how dirty or crazed he must look by Heath’s expression.

“Done,” he gasped.