The Garden arrived on a heatsick summer evening, Mom charging to intercept the mailman at the edge of our scraggled, sun-brittled lawn. She was already tearing open the packet when she called us into the kitchen, fishhooking her finger through the creamy envelope, the paper so dense it looked almost fabricky. Her hands were lizard-dry, nails ungarnished and dull; I asked myself so often after the divorce why she couldn’t try harder, be stronger, like Stacy Howard’s mom when Stacy’s dad left, go to Nails R Us in the mall and allow her fingers and toes to be fussed over, painted prisming shades of the rainbow. Why she couldn’t laugh, throw her head back: how silly her ex-husband was, how stupid, to leave a woman so glamorous.
She ripped the top off the envelope, a luxury of a sound, warm butter smooth, and a bolt struck me, an excitement I couldn’t contain.
Mom whispered, finally, and her voice trembled with the slightest of gelatin quivers. She shook out three seed packets and a flappy, dense booklet titled Prune Yourself, Girlfriend!™: The EZPrune® Instruction Manual. I’d never wanted anything more than to snatch it, lock myself in my room, start reading.
I can’t believe you bought one of those pieces of shit, Alice said. I hadn’t noticed her prowl up to the table, seventeen and so practiced at boredom, like a cat licking its paws but locked on your motions all the time. She rolled a strip of cushy envelope paper into a ball, flicked it away, and sat down.
I asked, how do they do it? I was fourteen then, reading nonfiction all the time, books about animals, evolution, how certain creatures can become something new.
Alice said, probably cancer cells or some shit.
She finessed her second usage of the curse word like a thief, testing what she could get away with.
Language, Mom whispered in Alice’s general direction. Her calloused fingers, her least favorite feature, squatted on the edges of a letter, crumpling the thick paper with her grip. I wanted to feel it in my hands, the weight of it, the density of a shining, glamorous world. In the periphery, Alice looped toward me, trying to make eye contact, but all I could see was Mom’s face over the top of the page like a sun rising, like a new day just born.
◆
Alice and I made our own dinner while Mom planted; she’d already tilled up a rectangle of soil that took up half the backyard, blocked off by ankle-high rails we’d found on sale, spokes of weakened wood already flaking off. I called out the window that we made mac and cheese, did she want any, but she refused. From beyond a shrub, Mom hummed as she smoothed earth over a seed, the way I’d seen her touch her wedding photos. Stroking each one like someone she missed, someone she wanted to see again.
She did this with her old clothes, too, the ones from before we were born. She’d gone to law school, that much we knew, and after the divorce, I longed to meet that woman, so different from the one who dropped out because of her pregnancy, who told us, without conviction or malice or anger, which was almost the worst part, that it’d simply made sense for only one of them to stay in the program.
I was glad the Garden had finally come, glad she’d finally decided to do something more than coloring her teeth dark with wine, playing slow, sad songs after we’d gone to bed, more than opening the door for Alice’s friends with eyes red and smudgy around the edges from tears that burbled up over her morning coffee, her commute home, the TV show she was watching alone on the couch.
She won’t be in for awhile, Alice said, cracking pepper over her food.
I poked at the orange hillsides in my bowl; with the arrival of the Garden, it now felt like every fleshy part of my body jiggled, soft and relenting. I couldn’t bring myself to take a bite.
Alice waved the EZPrune VIP Club Welcome Letter while shoving a heaping forkful into her lipsticked mouth; the utensil emerged without even a smudge of scarlet. How did her makeup stay tattooed on, when I couldn’t stop licking off chapstick before I’d left the house, my own lips rugged and flaky, textured like fish food?
At least she’s happy, I said, as monotone as I could.
Alice plunked down the letter. Under the header, it read, KIT 1: STARTER. I reached but my arms were too short and Alice scooted it away. Come on, she said. It’s ridiculous. Jenny’s mom is totally different since she went all the way.
She crumpled the paper into her lap.
After Jenny’s dad left, Alice’s best friend spent most nights at our house because her mom couldn’t get out of bed and Jenny wasn’t eating breakfast and collapsed in gym one day. The arrangement kept up until Jenny’s mom ordered her Garden, and Mom had watched Jenny’s mother’s progress after Jenny went back home. You look amazing, she’d say every time she saw her, complimenting the other woman’s new blue eyes, her blonde mane, her tastefully voluptuous cleavage.
But she’s happier, I replied.
Alice snorted across the table. I don’t see how. She’s not herself anymore.
But it had been more than looks. Even I could see the way Jenny’s mom carried herself after the Garden came, thrusting through the world instead of following her husband around. I’d watched her at a New Year’s Eve party once by his side, clutching two plastic wineglasses while he gestured and talked, her head bobbing in time with his stories, lifeless as a balloon leaking helium.
People change for the better, I said as I leaned forward, strained to see the paper over the rim of the table. It read, INVENTORY.
A warbling sound wafted through the windows; Mom was singing for the first time in months.
Alice opened her mouth, raised her hand to the window, French tips spread wide.
Don’t, I said. Please.
She rolled her eyes, picked at the edges of the paper still in her lap, the way she picked at the labels of soda bottles—half fidget, half exasperation, her lioness eyes searching for something worthier of her attention.
She caught sight of me and huffed. Jesus, you’re just as bad as her.
She threw the page onto the table. I snatched it, eyes falling on a section near the top.
Inventory:
Fingers
Noses
Ears.
I barely noticed when Alice left. The slamming of her door was faint, heard and forgotten before it registered.
◆
I read about the EZPrune company deep into morning, passing out sometime around three and waking up when the back door slammed, signaling Mom’s arrival in the Garden. I watched her watering from my window, disappointed for a second that there was nothing to see yet; a childish part of me had hoped whatever magic was inside those seeds would’ve foregone the laws of nature and sprouted overnight, some kind of bloody fairy tale.
I sank back into bed, allowed the covers to claim me again. I thought of texting my friend Jordyn everything I’d read overnight, that they used the same technology for amputees, it was totally legit, the parts popped on and you were good to go, they grafted to your body while you slept. But Jordyn had moved away at the end of the school year, and every time I texted her, she replied with one word answers or waited for two days to explain why she hadn’t texted back.
So I settled for scrolling through the EZPrune company’s website. Again. Hey you! It welcomed me. Can we just start by saying how mega-glad we are you’re here? Like it was a person who had been waiting for me with a hug and an inside joke, instead of people’s usual reaction to my presence: a confused, dazed look that said they couldn’t quite place me or why I was there.
We take our inspiration from the natural world, ‘cause we’re all about that organic lifestyle. There’s no fuss with plants, you know? They’ve learned how to adapt, how to care for themselves, and, most fabulously, how to grow.
I imagined myself peeling out of my skin, flipping back a glossy swing of hair, onlookers gasping.
So in that spirit, we asked ourselves: How can we be our best selves? How can we live our authentic truths?
I’d stand at the center of a room, any room, and people would gravitate toward me.
And that’s when we came to it: Prune yourself, girlfriend!™
My cheeks flushed.
Lop off all that dead weight holding you back and make room for new growth.
I pictured chopping off my ears, hacking away at my hips, leaving a flourishing, better me, one who would glide into school in August, abundant and rosy and inspiring.
With the EZPrune® system, you’re taking the first, best step toward becoming the newer, realer you.
I spent the rest of the morning swimming through a sea of smiling women, women with now-perfect bodies and lips that caressed into grins. Women who took what they hated about themselves and changed it.
◆
The next few weeks, Mom woke before the sun to water. She’d organized the plants into two rows, premade labels marking the way like cairns. She left space for more, the earth loamy, rich.
Alice scowled out the window at her, wireless earbuds marking white spaces in her ears—I was so jealous of those ears, the way she cascaded her meticulous hair behind them, the glimmer of her cartilage earring swift and bright—and mumbled something about spending money on that shit. She never said anything to Mom’s face. Like me, maybe she welcomed the smile, the singing that never landed on the right note, the energy propelling her.
I sat at the edge of the Garden every afternoon in a shaky plastic chair, checking for green among the dirt, devouring the instruction manual.
The booklet was so conversational, the same tone as the website—easy to understand, it boasted—that it was like getting beauty advice from Alice, before she’d grown bored with being asked what eyeliner actually did for your eyes. I’m not a vending machine, she’d snarked, throwing her hair into a perfectly asymmetrical messy bun. I’d asked her how to do it, trying to hide my tiny notepad. I can’t teach you everything, she told me.
The booklet had the voice, then, of a friend who only wanted to help you blossom.
We’re absolutely thrilled you’re here, it said. And we can’t wait to start this journey with you. But first, here are some tips—because even bada$$ queens like you have to watch out for themselves.
Plant your Garden in lots of sun—trust us, the rot is yucky if you don’t ☹.
Water every day before sunrise. Hydration is soooo important.
Talk to your plants in a soothing, low tone—like you’re asking a pesky man to help you with something. No nagging!
Don’t send away for your second (or third or fourth or fifth) kit until you’ve applied the parts from your current kit. We get it tho, patience is hard.
Don’t even think about keeping those parts on longer than one year, you rockin’ goddess. We know you want to be thrifty, because you’re smart like that, but trust us, rotting hands won’t help you get that promotion one bit.
But don’t worry! We make replacement easy; simply pop on one of your parts from your new replacement seedling kit or KeepItTight™ container—after thawing, of course—and dispose of your old part in one of the hot pink biobags provided for you.
Please do not lend seedlings, seeds, or parts to anyone. After all, this Garden is made only for you and your specific blood type. You’re a total original queen, so why shouldn’t your Garden be as unique as you?
It was all I consumed. I repeated the word prune in my mind so often it became less like a real word and more like an action, a state of being, a mindset without a name.
◆
It took two weeks for the sprouts to emerge. Each plant was the brightest green, a green that never occurred in nature, even and electric. Mom sang as she made pancakes that morning, her wide ankles spinning through the kitchen, her greying hair falling out of her bun.
They’re here, she almost shouted.
Gross, my sister said.
I can’t wait to see them, I chimed in.
In the next week, the sprouts started to curve under the weight of pale pods, several on each plant.
When those pods burst, revealing what was husked away inside, Mom shrieked, plucked a finger right away. She gathered a bowlful that day, all ten digits. Be sure to pick and apply all your fingers at once, the manual said on this topic. You don’t want to be uneven—ew!
Look, she said to us, holding one up. Perfect.
They were pale, the fingers, long and curved, so elegant they deserved to be flashing up and down the keys of an expensive piano. If you looked too quickly, the finger she held up seemed to be an extra long digit, a mutation extending from her hand.
I’m doing it tonight.
Please don’t. Alice shook her head, hair gleaming as it washed over her shoulders, and recoiled.
My sister had no idea what it was like to be anything other than stunning and fun; when I watched her talk to anyone, when I watched strangers confess their dearest secrets to her or her best friend laugh at something she’d said, it drove a stake through me. How did she know to throw her arms around Jenny when she cried? How did she know the answers people looked for, what they wanted to hear? How did she know what it was to be a person? I was missing something fundamental, I was sure, some hidden script or instruction manual for conversing with people, connecting, understanding what to say. I felt loneliness spreading, metastasizing, dousing me with a wall of quiet so loud it screamed, shook the rafters, made itself impossible to ignore. Alice operated on a different plane, one where she never questioned anything she did or said, one where she never dreamed of being someone else.
Mom patted Alice’s head, absent. I’ll be fine. She stared at the bowl she’d placed on the table, the fingers laid in a spiral, pointing everywhere.
◆
Mom’s friend Rhonda came over to help her apply the fingers, in the lingo of the instruction manual. It’s 100% natural to be nervous for your first application—so we recommend making a night of it! The process is much, much easier with one of your best girlfriends to help you. Hasn’t it been proven that wine and girl talk can cure the scaries?
I had no idea what it looked like as it happened because the manual was weirdly lacking in pictures or diagrams, and they’d locked themselves in Mom’s room as soon as Rhonda arrived. She’d squealed with a mixture of joy and jealousy that she couldn’t wait for her own, her husband promised her one for her birthday.
I hunched against the back wall of my closet where I could listen, the scent of outgrown shoes filling my nostrils.
A quick yip, then laughter. That was all. Maybe Mom got used to it after the first finger—I’d read about how this happened, how womens’ nerves and senses became dulled to the sharp, short shock, how, girlfriend, your final application will be as quick and painless as brushing your hair.
Mom had bandages around her knuckles when she said goodbye to Rhonda. I perched behind the hall doorway so I could see. She didn’t wave or hug as she usually did, and her face was greyed, like it was covered with a thin layer of ash.
She smiled as Rhonda left, a smile that came and went as fast as a feeling, and a twinge of pain crossed her face. She stood, alone, looking out the window, bending her fingers one after the other, slow, like probing a wound.
I slunk back to my room before she saw me, assuring myself she’d be all better tomorrow morning, quick and painless, and scrolled through social media until I fell asleep and dreamed that my fingers were carrots, plucked fresh from the Garden, still mosaicked with dirt.
◆
The next morning, Mom was humming as she made us breakfast, her new fingers skirting everywhere. They never stopped fluttering, birding up through her hair, smoothing her makeup, tapping the countertops. Alice couldn’t take her eyes off them, her whole body stiff, tensed.
How are they? I asked, staring as those new fingers squeezed fresh orange juice, buttered toast, toyed with Mom’s lips.
Perfect, she said. She held them out, displayed them like some women display manicures.
They were longer than her old ones, the originals, smooth and graceful, stretching like deer over fences. Threads of blood streaked the knuckles, but Mom wiped those away with a paper towel.
Alice pushed her chair back. I’m going swimming with Audra.
After Alice left, she turned back to the stovetop. Her smile was taped on. She wrapped her fingers around the spatula and said, your father would hate this.
I love them, I told her, hopped up to the stove.
I do, too.
And I did love them. They danced, slim and sure, darting like thin fish or the quick smudge of a rabbit’s tail in the dusk. When she smiled, handed me my plate, she gleamed like a statue, like someone worth remembering.
◆
The Garden flourished; I hungered, watching as the crop expanded every day. I woke up early to help Mom water sometimes, just to see them, the plump-but-not-too-plump noses, the snail shell-curled ears, bowing over the sturdy, thick plants. It was on one of these mornings she confessed to me with the air of a conspirator that she’d ordered the second kit, asked me not to tell Alice.
Mom became radiant. She gave up her unfashionable pants that busied with wrinkles, pleats tensing like muscles over her thick hips. She took up yoga (We know you’ll want to show off your rockin’ new bod right away, but stay away from contact sports and hardcore physical activity for a bit [see Table 5 for recommended wait times]), dragged us on long walks on the weekends, meditated with Rhonda. She’d started getting out her old clothes, too, holding them up to her body, sleeking her hands down her sides.
Mom used to let us play dress up with those clothes when we were girls, the glamorous outfits from before she had us. The three of us would venture into Dad’s home office, with its small, packed-full closet of Mom’s castoffs, her sharp blazers and matching pencil skirts hung in pairs, skin-tight dresses in jewel tones that lit up the room, her sky-high heels and pumps.
We’d hold an article of clothing up and she’d shrug, tell us to go for it. Her smile would constrict as her eyes flashed over the object’s silhouette.
We’d always stomp back from our “changing room,” high-stepping like show horses over her long dresses. And sometimes we’d catch her there, standing at the edge of the closet, holding something up against her body, the same way she’d started doing as the Garden grew.
Fashion show, Alice would shout.
And Mom would look up, shake herself. She’d say, don’t you look like two girls going places. She always had the look of someone who’d seen a ghost.
◆
The second packet was the same size as the first. I stood while Mom opened it, my head at her shoulder, smelling her perfume that turned the air around her crystalline and cool, a pristine diamond scent. I couldn’t read the instructions and inventory (toes, hair, lips) fast enough.
She smiled all the time those days, more relaxed than she’d been in years, between the constant fights before our dad moved out and the near-constant tears afterward. She hosted wine nights and book clubs and dinner parties, surrounded herself with women who wore statement necklaces or massive earrings, who talked about following their bliss and finding themselves, who laughed like bubbles against glass. They sipped clear liquors and white wine and their lipstick never smudged, never feathered beyond the proper borders. Alice asked one of them about her lipliner once when Mom wasn’t looking. They all, every one, had their own Garden.
My mom surrounded herself with remade women, women who pointed to forever-young places on their bodies, gushed about how they were finally moving forward.
I did this for myself, one woman said, threading her fingers over her neck, long and lean and housing a necklace with a massive gold cicada pendant that bobbed when she spoke. Gino always said getting my neck done was too expensive. But I’m worth it.
You. Are. So. Worth. It. And don’t let any haters tell you differently.
The women nodded. The underside of the cicada lady’s jaw was still wrinkled, shabby with creases.
I saw the pottery pics you posted the other day, Mom said to another woman. They’re amazing.
Robert never wanted me to do it. He was like, but who’s going to make dinner when you’re out?
Mom and the circle of women rolled their eyes, some smoother than others, one or two dabbing artificial tears to lubricate.
But now, guess what? I have my first show in a few weeks.
And your arms, Mom said, patting her own. I can’t wait to replace these old things.
I know, the woman said. She pinched the tiniest amount of skin and tried to move it side to side. No more jiggle for me!
The women grinned, a jerky motion for those not yet used to their new lips, a curtain sticking halfway across a window.
One woman had gotten her pilot’s license, her smile high-cheekboned. Another woman was looking for her dream job. Another was running a marathon. Your best self, your best self, your best self.
Alice told me once that they sounded like an infomercial.
She wasn’t wrong. They were fluent in the language of promises, of solutions.
◆
Mom’s new hair from the Garden was unreal black, as black as a shadow in the middle of the night. It shone in a way I couldn’t believe, seemed not quite real, capturing and reflecting the light almost like a halo. An oily, slick jealousy surged as I fingered my frizzy, not quite curly not quite straight hair. I wanted to start over, prune myself, cut down to the beautiful person I was inside, smoothing and shading away my nose, my belly, my sticking-out ears into pieces photogenic and awe-inspiring and delicate.
I studied the tension in my body all the time in the mirror, the set of my jaw and how the muscle bulged when I was anxious, then traveling down to my boobs that were so tiny a bra was just window dressing, my pudgy stomach, my duck legs. It brought tears to my eyes to think something different was just outside, planted in the soil. We know you’re beautiful, girlfriend! We know we can help you cut out those bad parts!
One morning, Mom had her laptop open at the kitchen table. Look, she said. Turning the computer.
It was the university twenty minutes away.
I think it’s time to finish that law degree, she said.
That’s great, Mom.
I’m proud of you, Alice said, with an actual smile, luminous and shocking.
Thanks, sweetie. It’s all because of the Garden.
Alice sighed. Shook her head, mouthed oh my god at nobody in particular.
She didn’t say anything, though. She saw what I did: a spark of someone we’d barely met.
Mom must’ve ordered the third packet (eyes, chins, necks) right after. It arrived two days later (You’ll feel as special as the queen you are with VIP shipping).
◆
After the college announcement, Alice softened. I wondered if it was Mom’s newfound cheerfulness, the fact that she was back to her chipper self, if maybe my sister just wanted her to be happy. They even did home manicures together, asked to braid my hair, though Alice still refused to help Mom carry the harvest in.
The eyes grew faster than anything else—in one week, they’d sprouted. All the same startling shade of green. Mom picked two as soon as they ripened (It’s so easy to get impatient for your brand new eyes, but we’re telling you, do not pick them before they’re ready), washed and dried them, rested them in a bowl of eye drops.
I watched them that night through Mom’s cracked door, Mom and Rhonda—Mom laid back on her bed, Rhonda above her, the manual winged out across the covers.
Ready? I’m so jealous of this color, what’s your secret?
She was reaching down, a flash of metal around my mom’s eyelids, stretching them open.
Mom’s voice swelled up. Green thumb, I guess.
Okay, this will hurt a bit. You’ve been taking the pills, right?
Just do it.
I closed my eyes but heard the quick suck, the bouncing on carpet, a squish.
The next morning, Mom’s eyes, a bit red around the edges, were the brightest emerald.
I’ve never seen that shade before, Alice said, voice soft, reverent. The way you sound when you’re worshiping something and don’t understand why.
◆
I woke up with Mom the next day, ready to ask the question burning a hole in my lungs. We watered in the near-dark, Mom rubbing her eyes, blinking and squinting, sometimes missing the plant she aimed for entirely.
I’m so sorry, hon, she said, but I think you might need to hit this one with the watering can.
Are you okay?
My mouth dried; I was so afraid in that moment that Alice was right, the eyes were falling out or hurting her beyond bearing, that there was no escape and we were all doomed to exist in the terrible bodies we’d been born into forever. At that age, those minuscule seconds of fear seemed like eons, my entire life flashing into the distance.
But a few seconds later, she shook her head. It just takes some getting used to.
You may feel some discomfort and itchiness the first morning, and you may also feel slightly disoriented and have trouble with depth perception. But don’t worry! Your new eyes will settle in soon enough, just like a pair of girlfriends at bottomless mimosa brunch.
I waited before talking again, following behind her with the can. I had memorized the exact words but was afraid of losing my nerve, bringing it all crashing down. Be your best self!
When I couldn’t take it any longer, I blurted: Can I—she looked at me, eyes so green they hurt, right above her perky nose—I was wondering if I could try?
She shook her head, looked away. This isn’t for girls your age. You’re beautiful.
You know you’re not talking to Alice, right?
You’re different than Alice. You’re perfect as you are.
I knew she’d say no, but still the tears came. I imagined them clogging my ugly dull hazel eyes that were more brown than green, muddled, a layer of scum over a pond.
Lisa, you’re my gorgeous girl.
But what did she know? What did Alice know? What did either of them know?
◆
I stayed in my room all day after Mom went to work, unable to stop myself scrolling until the air blurred and I had no idea where I was in time and space. Women danced through the feed, all of them pruned down to their most beautiful selves, their most authentic selves, just like the manual promised.
When I didn’t emerge for lunch, Alice tapped my door, said my name soft and low. I told her I wasn’t hungry.
She went about her day; I heard her on the phone, walking with gliding footsteps, her gait that was straight-backed, perfect-postured.
She tapped again some time later. Mom told me to check on you, she said.
An eruption, something next door to envy—Alice and my mother, a conspiracy of beauty, of confidence.
I said, I’m fine, the same time as she opened the door.
I’m making nachos, she was saying, when she halted mid-word. Jesus, she whispered. In the darkness, she tripped over my floor-bound bathrobe, a pile of folded jackets, a crush of paperbacks.
I sat up, blankets tumbling. Did I say to come on in?
Are you okay?
I’m tired.
Alice eyed me, forehead wrinkled, mouth scrunched. She stepped forward, phone clenched, kicking through a few piled up t-shirts.
Those are clean, I protested.
I’d tried them on, thrown them to the floor when I saw how they clung to my belly, how the fabric suctioned over the extra flesh squeezed between my bra and underarm.
Come on. Eating alone makes me feel like a trash monster.
I stared at her, wondering if she’d ever felt uncomfortable a day in her life. She’d been sunbathing, smelling of sunscreen, a gauzy coverup thrown over her bikini, tan making her teeth glow in the gloom.
Are you kidding, I asked.
What?
Alice, when have you ever felt like trash?
She cocked her head, cheeks pinking. I’m just trying to help. You’re obviously depressed.
There was nothing I could say to make her understand. We were foreign to one another, speaking opposite languages, inhabiting opposite lands. I wanted to drag a finger through her poreless skin, drive it up into ridges like mud sucking around a foot.
Just go away.
What the hell?
Get out, Alice.
She stood next to the bed until I laid down again, faced the wall.
◆
While Mom was on a double date with Rhonda that night, I snuck into the Garden. I picked my way through the rows—the eyeballs wildfire spilling, the vines snaking down tiny trellises.
I wanted the eyes but knew I could never put them in myself.
What are you doing?
Alice had come out of nowhere. I turned.
Just looking.
She arched her neck, raised her chin, a jeweler appraising a cloudy stone. Sure, she said.
I am. But I mumbled it, a tremor of shame underneath.
Mom’ll kill you.
I looked down at the eyes. My face scorched. You’ll become your best self. You’ll feel like brand new.
I’m so tired of myself, I whispered. Tears rushed. As soon as I said it, I knew I was disgusting, I was stupid, I was the most pathetic human being out of all the human beings on the planet and every person who ever met me would be able to tell right away.
There was a rustle as Alice moved, stepped over something with her gazelle legs. She paused next to me, stiff. Asked, which one do you want?
I already knew.
◆
The ears were tough to apply but Alice helped; they weren’t as visible as a nose or eyes but she was right, we couldn’t tip Mom off.
When it was done, my head pounded and rang and my old ears lay limp on the floor, unprotected and sad. I hated everything about them, glorying in it, detached, the way I could watch a person die on a TV show and not feel bad for them at all, their unreal tragedy unspooling like nothing in front of me.
Alice fluffed my hair in front of my new ears, elegant whorls, curved like designs you’d see in an ancient tapestry in a fancy house. Just keep your hair down, she said. She opened her mouth like she wanted to keep talking, but scooted into her room instead.
I scraped my hair back into a ponytail. I couldn’t stop smiling, the adrenaline pounding. I watched myself in the mirror from every angle; no matter which way I turned, the ears were perfect.
Keep your old body parts on ice for at least a week. Just in case.
I couldn’t imagine ever needing them again, but I shoved the old ears into a baggie and stuffed them under a bunch of frozen fried rice anyway.
◆
The next day, my skin was itchy, swollen, my face blotchy. I scratched constantly and Alice followed me around, asking how I felt.
In three days, I had a fever. Mom left for work tutting, leaving me a bowl of soup and a sleeve of crackers. My poor baby, she cooed. She kissed me, then reapplied her lipstick. If these symptoms persist for more than a couple of days, contact your doctor.
You have to replace them, Alice begged. I knew this wouldn’t work.
But I couldn’t believe I’d start school as my same old self, watching from the corner all the other people who knew, somehow, how to be around one another.
◆
It took five days for Alice to force me to the doctor. I tried to tell Mom what happened but couldn’t get the words out, the ache in my temples was so bad. Alice had tears in her eyes when she pushed back my hair. Mom recoiled, then set her plump new lips.
We’re going, she said.
Alice grabbed my ears from the freezer. She held them on her lap the whole way to the ER. In my fever, I imagined them hearing everything I was thinking, my thoughts mixed up, tumbling against one another.
I sobbed the whole time, sure my whole new self was draining away.
◆
The hospital was a haze; they reapplied my ears as soon as they could, threw the other ones, the new ones, away. Keep your parts on ice. Mom sat, staring, the whole time. Stroking my hair, holding my hand. Cycling, robotic, between the two.
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When my fever broke, Mom sat on my bed. Stroked my head, achey and tender. Sweetie, she said. Why?
How could I explain it, the rock in the bottom of my body, the ballast that weighed me down when I looked at the two of them, Alice and my mother who was remaking herself, empowering herself. I felt outside of the world, seeing who I could be, who I should be, reflected back all the time in a glow so harsh, so radiant, I begged it to burn who I actually was away, torch it to unrecognizability, let me start over.
But I couldn’t say any of it. So I sat there, letting her touch me, rest her hand on my leg.
That stuff isn’t for you, Lisa. We love you the way you are.
She and Alice fought about the Garden that night as I drifted in and out of sleep, Alice shouting that she should get rid of it, till the whole thing up, and Mom countering that she’d already planted the fourth packet, it was too late and she intended to keep moving forward, keep becoming who she was meant to be. Alice didn’t respond to that, just stomped all the way to her room and slammed the door.
When I awoke to Mom watering, it was with a taste of iron, a flash of rage. Her hip and torso plants were already growing, shooting from the earth in bullet trajectories, right into my heart. Girlfriend, be careful with those torsos. Let them ripen to exactly the right cup size for you.
The idea of ripening, of bursting forth, awakened in me the deepest anger.
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I walked into the Garden that night, my head still throbbing. The August dark was humid, the sky free of clouds. The eyes glinted, reflecting moonlight in their stark irises. The newest plants were all clustered so close it looked like a murder scene, like someone had chopped up women and left them there, a tangle of body parts. I shivered.
I picked up the shovel. I blanked my mind of everything but fury, my body scattered into pieces.
I threw my pjs away afterward; the blood made a map of them, whole continents in bloom. I knew it’d never wash out.
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When Mom saw the devastation the next morning, she screamed. She tore into my room.
Lisa, she snarled, taking my wrist. Where’s Alice? What did you know about this?
About what?
She smelled heated, clay and fields in summer. Saliva collected in the corner of her mouth. She was different, venomous.
Outside, the Garden was in tatters, the plants torn up, roots like beached jellyfish. Eyes mashed into spilling gore sacs, ears torn apart, torsos cleaved in two. I had destroyed it all, left nothing standing, and the pressure had been released, just a little bit.
It wasn’t her, I said.
There was a millisecond pause before she spoke.
Why?
She seemed unable to say anything else, unable to look at me with anything other than horror, disgust, fury. The weather pattern of emotions circled across her face, bearing down.
I couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t explain the feeling of smashing those body parts, making everything a little less impossible. The way they felt under the shovel, under my heels, small and delicate and breakable—like deep soft parts of myself, like objects to be hated.
Mom crumpled, started sobbing. She sat on the floor next to my backpack. She put her hands up—the tiniest of scars ringing her joints—to wipe the tears away, an automatic gesture I’d watched how many times in my life. But I knew when she reached, when her warm, lively fingers touched skin, they’d find no wetness. Lucky duck! With our patented KeepEmDry® technology, you’ll never have to shed another tear as long as you have your Garden.
The sobs racked her harder, dry.
I’m sorry, I whispered. I’m sorry.
She twitched, almost imperceptible, away from me.
I’m so tired of myself, she said. Not even to me. Not to anyone. To the emptiness around us, surrounding the Garden and its gashed-up remains, to the hollowness that leaked into us, too, the hollowness of wanting.