Lori Barrett
Jax and the Climbing Vine
Jax knelt on the grass bordering her overgrown garden, under a thick layer of clouds. Vines unfurled from a nearly dead clematis threatening to choke the blooms from her perennial bed.
“They call it the devil’s rope,” the woman who previously owned her home explained as she walked Jax and Ben through the yard ten years ago.
“Grim,” Ben had responded.
Jax picked up a green tendril and tugged. It followed her fingers, pulling dianthus and phlox blossoms out of the soil. Earthworms and centipedes oozed from their burrows. She unearthed a flying fairy, lost and lamented by her daughter Violet eight years before. Back when they’d hang out in the garden, weeding together or creating fairy villages with moss and bark.
She followed the web of roots to the base of a dead fig tree, where it spiraled in and out of the tree’s base. She needed her pruners.
“Ben,” she called inside.
No response. He was packing for a business trip, which on this morning meant he was rewrapping the handle of his tennis racket. They met in a badminton league, at a time when she was light as a shuttlecock, skipping and jumping with her racket to score points. They’d go out after games, split pitchers of beer and laugh about mistakes they made during play and in life. Now their criticisms had thorns. Now her feet were heavy with responsibility and fatigue. Ben, on the other hand, had unearthed two nights a week for tennis.
“Why do you need that if it’s a work trip?” she’d asked about the racket on her way outside to pull weeds.
“I won’t be working 24/7,” he said.
She tried to pull the vine away from the dead wood but it was wound too tightly. She stuck the toe of her shoe between the fig tree’s twisted roots to give herself leverage. The vine wouldn’t budge. She put her other shoe in between the roots and stepped off the ground. She felt like Tarzan. Or Jane. She began to climb.
From the height of her daughter’s bedroom window she saw Violet sprawled across her bed staring at her phone. In a few hours she had soccer practice. Ben was supposed to drive her before he left. Jax knew his packing would take precedence. She’d drive, which also meant Jax would be the one to remind Violet about laundry, walking the dog, emptying the dishwasher. Resentment propagated between mother and daughter like a fungus. The garden was Jax’s refuge, where bickering roots and stems acquiesced to her guidance.
Trepidation dwindled with each step away from her house and neighborhood. Wind whispered encouragement. Finally she came to a flat carpet of clouds. She put a foot down to test the stability. Confident it could support her, she stepped off the vine.
She looked over an expanse of white punctuated by swaying wild grasses and brush, a pillowy prairie interrupted by a small house with a turret. How was any of this possible, she wondered. A cloud, a grassland, a mini castle? She walked toward the structure and knocked on the door. No one answered, though she thought she heard voices. She tried the handle. It opened.
Inside it smelled of adolescent sweat and salty snacks. As she moved, her hip bumped a table covered in empty sports-drink bottles, balled up napkins, and wrappers from cereal bars and flaming hot snacks. One of the bottles rolled off the table. She froze.
From the bedroom a bored voice said: “Fee fi fo fud. I smell the scent of motherhood.”
She ducked into a closet and tried to quiet her breath. Footsteps passed. After a few minutes the beeps and chimes of a video game filled the room. Spoons clinked against bowls. Voices spoke in superlatives: most, worst, so real, so fake.
She crept out of the house and hid behind a bush. She took in the sea of strange plants across the horizon, the tufts of spiky grass poking through the clouds like infant hair. She touched one of the dark, glossy leaves of the bush next to her. It looked like gardenia or magnolia, with big, reflective leaves. She could almost see her reflection. White spores covered the underside. She ran her finger over the surface and a few fell off into her hand. She wished she had her reading glasses. From what her aging eyes could make out, they looked like badminton shuttlecocks.
She was startled by what sounded like the click of fingers tapping on a phone screen. The teens spilled from the mini castle.
“I knew I smelled something mom-ish,” one of them said, rolling his eyes.
She yanked a branch of the shrub, hoping to carry it home and propagate it in her garden. It wouldn’t separate.
From the corner of her eye she thought she saw a young girl kneeling, hair blowing in the breeze. She crawled toward the girl, hoping to get some answers. Close up, she realized it was wavy, wild grass, not a person. She wished again for her reading glasses. She ran her fingers through the wispy plumes, softer than any grass she’d ever felt. Like Violet’s hair. Or her own, when she was younger. Then the fragrance hit: drugstore shampoo from the eighties — something like Prell or Agree. It was the scent of hours alone in her bedroom, reading or listening to music. She reclined as she stroked the grass, almost falling asleep.
“Hey,” shouted one of the kids. “There she is. Get her!”
Four kids, cellphones in hand, ran toward her. One of them shouted: “Be she alive or be she dead, we’ll need her skills to make our beds.”
Another yelled, “And our dinner.”
She crawled toward the vine she’d climbed up on, ducking behind another bush as she moved, this one with velvety leaves like the lamb’s ears in her garden, with bunches of tiny green buds, like hydrangea at the start of the season. Little mounds of potential ready to burst. It smelled like new books, her first job at a publishing house, and the sandalwood oil she wore then.
She wasn’t sure if it was the strange fragrances or the thin air that made her so disoriented. She was surrounded by tactile reminders of treasures she once had: beauty, free time, ambition. It took her breath away. Could she carry any of it home? Would she want to? Maybe she would just eat a few leaves?
One of the kids approached.
“Have you seen my phone charger?”
These kids were killing her buzz. They were more menacing than regular teens. She hadn’t heard them laugh once. She ran toward the vine she’d climbed up on, passing the hairlike grass. She wrapped a bunch of it around her fist and tugged.
“Wait! I don’t have any clean clothes,” one of the kids called.
“Can you bring some snacks when you come back?” said another.
She hurried down the vine. She landed on the ground as Ben stepped outside, his tennis racket in hand.
“Did you call me?” He looked puzzled.
Jax stared at the ground, unsure what had just happened.
Ben tried a smile. “I’m running out of time. Do you think you could run Violet to practice?”
Maybe she’d fallen asleep. Except the grass was still in her hand.
“Find the time,” she said. She walked into her kitchen to put the grass in a jar of water.
Lori Barrett lives and writes in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Salon, Citron Review, Laurel Review, Peatsmoke Journal, Maudlin House, and Identity Theory. She’s an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Find more of her work at LoriBarrettwrites.com.
