The Gift of Cactus

“I’m as lost as you! I don’t know where else she could be,” The phone burned against my ear. “I’m just telling you what happened. I knocked, I called, I looked through the window, no grandma.”

The day came surging down the mountains as we bickered, sunlight breaking hard over the peaks and smothering the valley beneath a heat far too heavy for the season. “It’s hot as hell, but you never know with her she might’ve gone for a walk anyway. I could just wait, meet up with everyone later.” 

“In this heat? When we’re all expecting you?” My sister scoffed. “Come on Dylan, you know there’s no need. Consider it a gift to mom, we’ll just call her later and say sorry we missed you. The usual bullshit.” Her laughter came through in scalding waves. 

“But that's Christmas that’s the Christmas bullshit,” I reminded her. “We get far enough away from Phoenix that we’ve got no choice but to miss her. She’s never missed mom’s birthday.” 

“That’s why it’s a gift! Honestly a much better one than what she would get if grams actually showed up. Don’t kill yourself waiting for her and just get home.” 

Grandma’s gift to mom last year, as always, had been a cactus; an infant saguaro cut from the wild and potted so callously its delicate root system was left half-destroyed. That was no mistake, the cruelty was the point. Each year the stolen plants were chosen younger, their fine roots fractured more severely, starvation prolonged until the silent, suffering things screamed as they withered. Our mantle was lined with their petrified remains. 

“Be honest with me, don’t you think mom would be a little disappointed if she didn’t make it?”

“God! I don’t know… maybe? Saying they’ve got a weird relationship isn’t breaking any new ground,” she groaned. “If you want to stick with this, fine. You’ve got until dad gets involved.”

#

Half an hour passed in silent waiting. This was far more time than the woman was owed, that’s what mom would say. My sister might chime in from the patio that we should take this as a message and cut her out of birthdays like we’d long ago done with every other holiday. 

They’d be right, I should leave.

The Spring sun threw its light into all kinds of shapes and shadows as the morning dragged onward, shifting the angle to test each crevice or slanted passage. Grandma might be obscured in any of those darkening side-yards or lost in the glare of sunlight blooming harsh against the side of a car. Either way she was watching, waiting for me to retreat, eyes glinting out of their wrinkled caverns like black gems exposed to daylight for the first time in millennia.  

A call echoed around the neighborhood like it was the only sound in all of Phoenix. 

Sorry dad, I’m not losing today. You want to end this, come get me.

I waited until he’d recorded a voicemail I would never listen to and pocketed the phone unused. More minutes slid past in the newly charged silence, that open defiance compelling my fingers and feet into a flurry of tapping, ticking motion. My joints, twitching like broken clockwork, whispered time and time and… 

This morning might be the longest I’d spent at grandma’s in years. Easily the most since I was a little kid, before she was forbidden from seeing us outside of holidays. All the visits after that, the pick-ups and drop-offs I was enlisted for, they’d passed in the same silent, ticking clockwork dream of this waiting. We barely spoke. I never looked at her. I was sitting in front of her house and I couldn’t describe the actual building if my life depended on it.   

There was an advantage in that ignorance when everything she touched became a weapon. Yet her own secrets, the weapons we had been denied, where else would she hide them but right here? If anything might win the war it was behind me, all I had to do was look. 

My skin turned out goosebumps as I paced into the driveway, blocking out the daylight with one hand to push some shadow over the house and pull a sun-stained facade into view. There it was, an exceedingly common house for the neighborhood. The lawn was kept in perfect condition and each concrete wall power-washed into lifeless conformity. A droll personality clung to the structure. The taste was sour and lingering, good for nothing but spitting out, yet it could not push me away. Without a lion to defend it, the den was nothing but a hole in the ground, so easy to slither into. 

I let myself in with the spare key. Indoors the day was bearable, and that sourness softened somewhat when mingled with the familiar. 

Compared to the drab exterior, the house’s insides were alive with bombastic turquoise decoration. Jewelry spilled everywhere in eye-straining waves of color that left you with nothing but your own judgment to separate the plastic from the priceless. That was purposeful, of course, a test carefully arranged to expose the uninitiated. 

I only have to misspeak once. That’s it. One failure and she’ll devour me whole. A belief my mother passed down in earnest to all of her children, one I had believed with no question as a child toddling after grandma in her rock garden. That garden was the only somewhat living thing I had ever seen her show compassion. In my early childhood, when I visited her almost every weekend,  time often passed gawking at her devotion in well-practiced silence. 

“What’s the point of this garden, grandma?” I had pestered her one day when her mood was in a rare lightness. “You’re making a desert here, you know we live in the desert.”

“Oh sure we do,” she’d replied, bending down to brush the night’s dust from a boulder, returning it to the acceptable conditions of untouched and timeless. “But this one is mine.”

Every trip to her house was preceded by a set of warnings, things not to say or do or think whilst in the witch’s presence. The ceremony imbued the woman with a fantastic, fairy tale danger. Countless weekends were lost to the tense and addictively tantalizing role of defenseless child, kicking over stones, watering cacti, all the while slipping deeper, deeper under the witch’s spell. I can’t remember exactly why we stopped coming back, but years after my last visit I still remember the garden. I dream about the mean, prickly things we grew together when no one was looking. 

“Your sister’s right. She’s not coming. Get home.” Dad’s command flashed into view at the top of my phone. These silent battles of will were not an interest he shared with the rest of us. If I didn’t follow this order, it would only be another ten minutes at most before he was outside with the horn blaring. 

“Ok. I’ll leave a note and come right home.”

Sorry dad, I’ll take those ten minutes. This isn’t a chance I’m ever getting again.

#

I abandoned the note half-finished besides the spare key and a pile of white flowers with waxy petals peeling long and outward. 

My excuse for staying the extra minutes secured, I stepped through the sliding doors and back into the swarming heat. The plan I’d concocted was childish, perhaps petty, but that was also tradition. If she had kept the garden like I’d remembered there would be a range of succulents and cacti waiting where we’d grown them. It was the latter I was after. Not a saguaro, unfortunately, just whichever jade mass of ribs looked the meanest. That one I’d rip from the ground with enough gentle viciousness that it starved like all the others. Mom’s birthday gift: family traditions kept alive with or without the witch to enforce them…

Then I laid eyes on what had become of our garden, and all of that was lost. 

Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. Almost two decades separated my hands from the crouching rearrangement of these same stones, yet the sweat I left on them years and years ago still stained their pockmarked and dusty skin. I could barely remember grandma’s face, the front of her house had been an enigma until I’d retrieved its blotched appearance from the sun, but I knew this garden looked just as it had the last time I saw it. That knowing was a snake coiling its slick body through the wrinkles of my brain. It was a sweet taste turning putrid on the rotting surface of my tongue. It could’ve been a dream, it must be, but the heat was real, the morning was real, this impossibly unchanged place couldn’t be denied. 

So much time just for life to fail in a landscape meticulously designed for it.  The parched soil had birthed stagnation instead of succulents, tranquility leaching out like a parasite that throttled its host. The twitching, ticking in my legs told me nothing would ever bloom here again. Any amount of time might continue to pass and the nothing that had occurred in this garden would only persist. 

I forgot the plan, the stealing, the tradition, the war. Blood drained in a chill rush from face to feet as my head ballooned outwards, light and unrestrained. The timelessness was intoxicating. If I wanted it I could drift backwards into the patterns of another decade, another self. I could be crouched by a cactus, sprinkling it with water, pressing my finger just so slightly against the needles that scarlet drops burst out and run. Turquoise dreams. 

Shouldn’t that comfort me? I wanted it to, I wished it would but just the thought, the presence latent to this place was putting my stomach in convulsions. The memories I’d devoured were alive and twitching inside of me, a needled mass swelling with each anxious gasp, pushing jagged ends into everything soft or forgiving. The expansion threatened to burst past all defenses, force scarlet through skin and color the garden in the sunset shades of insides turned violently out.

The need to escape from this impossible space thrashed wildly to life, desperate and violent as a coyote cornered somewhere between my ribs. Fingers gripped wildly at empty space. Muscles squeezed and squirmed in the confines of my prickling skin as I staggered towards the house, hands clawing uselessly at my throat. I couldn’t stop it from closing around the agelessness of this ancient place, choking, burning. I collapsed against the screen door, a star cracking into existence where my shoulder slammed against the glass. I hacked at the needles, all that time trapped and bleeding.

A flood of acid filled my mouth and the years came tumbling down onto the handmade welcome mat, beautiful weaving stained by a mash of breakfast and broken cactus needles. 

“Oh shit,” I gurgled through the last wretches. “Sorry grandma.”

I tasted salt, sweat slipping off my lips. The memories within me settled into a fine precipitate and, slowly, I began to think again. The garden was behind me, I could let it be. The sourness that lingered on my tongue faded into static as the world returned. 

I forced myself back up on unsteady feet, wiping dribbles of spit from my face. She’ll eat me alive.

I hurried through the screen-door, blinking back the assault of turquoise and searching around for a pantry that might hold cleaning supplies. My eyes washed over the kitchen and living room, the remote and her glasses left amongst a hoard of costume jewelry, an overturned pill bottle, the unfinished note waiting with a bouquet of saguaro flowers clipped in full bloom. 

Urgency dragged me toward the sink, but the bottom pantry revealed nothing to wipe away the time I’d hurled out in the garden. There were no paper towels, no cleaning rags or sprays. 

The entire cabinet was empty except for a single, gnarled cactus growing feebly off what water dripped down from the plumbing.

“Grams what the fuck?”

#

The plant was an unexpected haul once I’d freed it from the cabinet. Dry dirt spilled from a crack in the pot as it slammed down onto the coffee table. Muscles burning, I bent down to view the mystery from all angles. 

Out in the open the cactus’ fasciated head stretched to barely over a foot in height. In a world where this situation still made sense, that height should mean relative youth, but the proliferation and length of its spines were all signs of a plant at least several decades old. I might have been born while this plant was already alive and expanding. It might outlive me if I let it. 

Every visit to grandma’s house shifted a few degrees colder. We were never alone in the garden; we grew nothing in secret. This tangled mess of ribs and spines was here, watching. I would have had no way to discover it, no inclination to check beneath the sink and see what the woman was hiding. 

I risked a glance at the unchanging rock garden, swallowing a surge of acid. All that growth denied, and where did it go?

What unnatural growth the plant had claimed came to it perverted. The lack of space fused its ribs together into a twisted, bulbous mass billowing outward like a mushroom cloud frozen into flesh at the moment of detonation. Tissue boiled in motionless agony, tormented by a secret, seething heat. The saguaros I’d known didn’t move like this. 

I reached out a finger, pressing it just slightly enough against the spines to burst free a drop of scarlet blood. It had the firm, razored touch of a saguaro, although how one could survive in a kitchen cabinet for so long I couldn’t understand. It was as impossible as the unchanged rock garden. And yet it was here, same as the garden, it existed despite me. I touched it and bled. 

“Is this your gift?” 

“Dylan!”

A car-horn blasted through concrete walls. Time froze around me, seconds stiffening like hairs on the nape of a hunted animal’s neck. The blaring fell silent for just long enough that its splitting return shook loose the same surge of dread.  

“Coming out.” I tapped a rapid message as I sprung unsteady to my feet, flinging out one hand to keep myself upright. Grasping fingers found the cactus instead of an armrest…

“Shit!” I yanked my hand back with a fistful of spines embedded deep past the skin and into sinew. The horn carried on its complaining as blood gushed out, scarlet filling in each crevice and slanted passage of my palm like a sunrise seeps color into low clouds. “God! That fucking hurts!”

I squeezed my wrist but all that red was already fast in motion, escaping past the spines, over clenched fists and into everything. My pained stumbling only threw the blood over more of the furniture. Turquoise, whether it was worth anything or not, was all around me becoming stained, contaminated. 

She’s going to have a heart attack! I attempted to hide my fist inside my chest and screamed as the spines pushed through my shirt and bled me again. Everywhere I turned was blood, everything I touched ached and squirmed and bloomed red. 

This is all because of that stupid cactus!

The plant offered no defense when I kicked it to the ground. Ceramic shards splintered off, ripping green scars over the ribs. My foot came up with a spine protruding from its sole and I buried the new agony back inside the cactus with a squelch. I wished it could let me know this hurt, but the only one screaming here was me.

“JUST GO AWAY!” The saguaro flew through the screen door, pot and glass shattering together. The blood moving through and out of me was wrathful; it demanded a whirlwind, a shattering. The turquoise followed with the wind, plastic and priceless raining down over the dry, desert garden. Free of the witch’s presence and exposed to the open sun it was all so dull. As I continued emptying the house of every useless trinket she’d packed it with, cursing in time with the throbbing in my hand and the blaring of the car-horn, I could dredge up nothing that remained of the old magic. Beneath the costume was only a house, not a witch’s lair, not a lion’s den.

A house, blood-stained and vacant. No one lived here, no one ever had. 

Hot breath escaped over teeth gritted so tightly my ears ached. Reality teetered on the failing balance of my glass-peppered, spine-punctured feet. The gush of blood had drained out all reason and rage, setting me adrift in a woozy tranquility where thoughts withered and miscarried. I failed to pull a spine out of my hand and wept. The horn droned on. My phone buzzed back to life, so I tossed it into the rock garden with the rest of the garbage. 

That was ridiculous, childish, shameful. The words stirred nothing inside me but the rock garden’s needled remnants. 

Dreaming of bandages, I trailed blood in an uneven path to the bathroom. Something soft and stiffening crinkled against my foot as I pushed through the door. I stopped to look down and saw a woman, smaller than I remembered, dead on the bathroom floor. Her eyes were black gems receded into caves of thin and deeply wrinkled skin. Her hands clasped tightly over a silent heart; fists raised against death. All of her was covered in daggers. Thorns stretched out the frayed edges of a woman almost translucent with age. Here and there a spine had broken free of feeble skin and stabbed its razored head out into the world like it could gore empty space.  

I pressed the tip of my finger against her and watched the familiar wound swell and run scarlet with our blood.

Inspired by:

"And that’s what losing a parent is like. It’s like Becker. Suddenly, you realize you’ll never have the good relationship you wanted, and as long as they were alive, even though you’d never admit it, part of you, the stupidest goddamn part of you, was still holding on to that chance." Bojack Horseman "Free Churro" (2018) directed by Amy Winfrey.