ganymede 1: enquiry into plants
Earlier, when she had been looking straight up the building, Leonie noticed that the bottoms of the balconies were traced with wild vines.
“Do those just keep growing?” she asked her company, gesturing to the ivy creeping up the walls with her unoccupied hand. Smoke crowded the air between the circle, filling each crevice with a distinct blurry soot. They were standing out on a balcony, a small ashtray by the glass door.
“Sure. I haven’t ever cut them,” responds the girl who presumably owns the apartment. A tall man with a dark green cap nods, scanning the walls— “English ivy, and there’s a passionflower over there,” he says, taking a drag. “Leonie, got vines back home?”
She had forgotten they all knew her, by name and by childhood. Details, names, faces occurring and unchanging in their minds. She blanched. “No.”
The man looked at her, a silent question in his eyes. “Not anymore?” “No,” Leonie repeated.
Everyone was quiet for a while.
A girl in a long red nightgown holding a glass of wine pushed the screen door open, clearly expecting to join in on a lively group of friends. The heaviness of the smoke cut into her immediately, and she spoke while rapidly blinking. “We’re cracking open a bottle, come in,” she said, her eyes closed, turning back around. “If you want.”
By that time, she was already inside, thorny silence dripping over the group like a raincloud.
As her companions filed through the door without another word, Leonie just watched them, putting out her cigarette. The apartment owner’s long, straight black hair was adorned with miscellaneous dust particles. The brown shirt belonging to the tall man was in a permanent state of disarray, similar to the urgent man himself. The last girl— she was like the sunshine melting over a tiny green flower, grass growing on a volcano, pure obsidian cutting open an angry animal, and no one knew her even one bit. Rarely did Leonie share a table with a girl like that, who hadn’t turned out like herself.
They were all eerily similar, she figured, to each their own labyrinth, and the mazes weren’t family-friendly puzzles with an answer key. She closed the door gently behind her, melting into the purple-and-red strobe lights.
Sensationally: open-eyed hands, the brokenness of fast-glancing mouths, maps of Atlantis drawn across the floor with dirty white sneakers.
Leonie loses everything, now, then, falling, without a sound, in the cacophony. Past shifts to present; you— I— she— comes down with dreamlike diagnoses.
How she knew— knowing and kneeling, the concepts bleeding into a lacerated mess.
Leonie woke up curled by a wall, looking dazedly at the mass of fused humanness as they swayed and rolled. Next to her, the last girl from outside sobbed as quietly as she could manage. Long had the days passed where she was equipped to deal with such a situation, and long had the days passed when she possessed the benevolence to feel bad about doing absolutely nothing.
She got up and walked away on unsteady footing. Later, as her twisted body slept fitfully on a bench, her nightmares were consumed with the crying girl’s angry murmurs, vines and sticks of the sort grabbing at the edges of her subconscious, leaving her to topple forward in an overgrown midnight field. As her face hits the flowers, the screen shatters and so does the stretching band between all the karmic creations—