January One

Evan Cleveland

I add my own shit to the compost pile. Good gardening manure isn’t hard to find. Homes in Nepal and even trains in Sweden run off the bio-gas of the people. Prisoners in Rwanda create the electricity to light their penance with gas from their own feces. My cloister here in the woods, by the creek, won’t be so different. It means separation from Jacie, but that’s part of the process, the healing. Dedication and creation can lead to healing. She’ll miss me, she said, the only neighbor worth talking to. My apartment is empty now, next door to Jacie’s, next to the cracking parking lots and the empty Astrodome. But I can act this time. I can help fight.

My eyes hardly noticed the morning arrive out here. The silence lifted long before anything else. A bird sang, then another. I don’t know what they are. But down here, beneath the tall trees, by the slow creek, the sun doesn’t rise so much as the light expands. The blackness fades to colors, to gray to blue to yellow to red.

The little brown seeds I planted this morning in the moist dirt will help Jacie. Their THC will bring back her appetite. It will curb her nausea and give her strength. And the compost I started in December will make it strong. I’ll sit here and watch while the seeds grow, then I’ll harvest the female marijuana plants.

The morning’s light reflects off the slow stream, and the shallow water shifts around the rocks, bouncing the rising sun into my eyes. I feel that first touch of hunger, the hardest to refuse.

I met Jacie in my old apartment complex just before the last New Year. Before her cancer. Our efficiencies shared a wall which shook from her stereo – “November Rain” – late her first night there. I had heard the song twice that week but, before then, not since I was a kid, when the older kids all sang it. I knocked on her door. She screamed to come in, and I saw her for the first time, on the floor with a few boxes, her stereo all she’d unpacked. Her eyes looked watery from alcohol, and she was smoking a joint.

“This is the song to party alone to,” she said. And, “Come meet me sometime tomorrow.”

A few days later, that last New Year’s, she bought the two of us vodka, and we unpacked boxes. I had only turned twenty, and she twenty-six, and we didn’t turn on the TV to watch the ball drop an hour early, like I would have alone. Unpacking those few boxes was celebration enough, not even a kiss at midnight.

Last night, here at the creek, she hugged me, after the new year turned. She told me she didn’t want anyone to watch her through the chemo again. I saw her last time, but that was it, really. She’d hide in her apartment with DVD’s and pull in the Snoopy welcome mat. I’d stop by anyway and bring her the organic fruit and wheatgrass, the herbal shampoo and deodorant, anything I thought she might need.

“Stop by tomorrow,” I said after the hug last night. “Tell me what the doctors say.” She watched the creek break the moon into a handful of pieces, then said, “Lukas, camping behind your mother’s doesn’t make you Thoreau.”

But poisons come through our mouths and our skins, those invisible parts of our air and food, and this fruit fast here in the woods will clean them out. I have to for the compost, for the plants, for Jacie. Animals know. A sick dog stops eating and waits for its cells to eliminate, to empty and heal.

Eight months ago, early in her last treatment, I stopped by with the special shampoo she liked. “An all-natural herbal blend, for dry or damaged hair,” I read to her. She sat on her love seat, the only place she had to sit except for the bar stool with the ripped cushion, or the bed. She stopped painting her toenails the gunmetal gray and started to cry.

I look at my watch – 7:34. I take it off and place it in the dew-damp grass. Jacie can keep it when she comes by today. I don’t need it, not on this vigil.

The sun climbs, and I look at the still green blades of grass by my feet. I stare, and the space crawls with tiny insects that walk and hop, invisible unless I focus. They seem infinite, these new neighbors. Leaving the apartment next to Jacie brings our separation, but also a duty, also a purification.

I’ll pull the male marijuana plants from the stream’s banks before they can fertilize. I’ll harvest the females when they’ve ripened, at the height of their reproductive blooms, when their THC is the strongest. Three weeks to dry, three weeks before they can restore the appetite her chemo will take. Three weeks to give her strength.

I flipped through her CD collection last year while she sipped juice through a straw, drinking slowly, lost in the conspiracies of Who Was Jack Ruby?. Page by page, she hardly spoke to me. Warm juice didn’t bother her stomach. The straw helped too, she said, made it easier to swallow. I noticed in the light through the cheap mini-blinds how much thinner the act of sucking made her face.

I drink the warm juice I’ve made back at the house behind me, the fresh apple juice, swishing it in my mouth to speed it to my blood. I’ve thrown the rinds, the cores, even the seeds, to the compost pile. I’ve replaced all the fruits and vegetables in my mother’s pantry with organic, to make the compost grow with the leftovers from her meals.

Jacie wouldn’t always answer when I knocked, not every time, and I brought to my kitchen whatever I’d tried to deliver. It didn’t matter. I stocked it for her instead of leaving it outside for people to steal or rats to scavenge.

She didn’t stay last night like I’d asked, to watch the moon rise and fall into the new year, into the first day of my vigil. But she put her head in my lap and let me touch her soft hair. Her face looked full, and her hair felt thick and long. I wanted to lay my hand on the ring of fat around her waist, a slight bulge above her jeans, but I didn’t.

The hunger returns now, strong and sharp, but I know the toxins are running out, and even my feces will be clean, the way it must be. I imagine each cell emptying itself through my sweat, my urine. The sun starts to edge down the sky, but the light remains morning bright in my head.

I remember her propped up in bed last time, a pink plastic trough beneath her chin. From the bar stool, I paused and unpaused Soylent Green, part of her weekend Heston marathon. “Yes, he’s a fanatic,” she said, “but I love him.” She slept off and on or just closed her eyes. I’d stop the movie and watch her, the dark circles always beneath her eyes, as though even sleep exhausted her. Then she threw up a final time and cursed. “Go Lukas,” she told me, “just go to your own fucking apartment.”

Those days she asked me to leave or she didn’t answer, I’d look through what I still had for her in my kitchen. I’d think of what she might want or need next and make a list on my refrigerator door.

A shadow falls from a tree to my right, something small and solid landing on the ground with a thud and a scattering of leaves. A squirrel lies still then struggles, twisting and contorting its body, its little eyes wide.

Evening races into night out here. The sun doesn’t linger in the woods, trying to fill the hidden places. Night falls quickly among the trees. I can’t see the old watch I left in the grass. I wrap myself in the afghan a grandmother I never met crocheted for me.

Stars fill the sky in those spaces between tree tops. I think about the small compost heap, slowly growing, warming up. This heap for the plants, for Jacie, will soon have organisms to counter the stars. More than the cells in me, eliminating, purifying.

More than Jacie’s that divide too fast.

I did kiss her one night last year, a small kiss, a brush against her lips as she lay in bed, lit by the television. I shouldn’t have. I thought she was sleeping, but she wrapped her arms around me, the bones sharp against my neck. She guided me onto her, and I felt bulky between her thin legs. We kissed, her tongue dry in my mouth. Her breaths came faster, too fast. “Fuck, Lukas,” she said. “Just get off me,” and we stopped.

I went home and sat on my bed, my back against our shared wall. I listened to her footsteps across the floor, heard her open a kitchen drawer. I could hear the knife tap the cutting board with each piece of fruit she sliced. Her juicer turned pulp into juice, and I listened to her drink, juice combinations running through my head. Carrots for energy. Kale for calcium. Cucumber for cleansing.

I shut my eyes now, covering the stars. The small stream runs much more loudly at night. Frogs croak, and color flashes behind my eyes with every noise. I feel the dark. It’s not cold, not biting, but it wraps around me with an empty chill.

Last year, immediately after her surgery, I came to see her, though she’d asked me to wait. She lay in the hospital bed, her body made still by the medication, the drip into her veins. I stood next to her, her face too still and calm. She woke and looked at me, confusion, maybe panic in her eyes, and her face retreated into the stiff pillow.

She told me once how she hated to wake up at night. She knew of a woman at the hospital who had woken to use the restroom, then climbed back into bed and died. The chemo gave Jacie diarrhea, and she’d wake at night, too afraid to move. I wondered when I woke in the dark if she were awake and worried behind the wall. I’d listen until I slept again.

I hope tonight will stay warm enough. The house is close behind me, but my place is here by the creek with the seeds, my fledgling plants. I’m far from Jacie out here, from the wall we shared, but from here I can fight.

My father and I walked through these woods, long before the development trimmed them back. His big hand, scratched and used to the woods, held my little one. We found two skulls one day, two deer skulls, dried and white, locked together by their antlers. These two bucks, he told me, had met and smashed and collapsed in these woods, locked together, their muzzles a breath away.

Their battle eased into shallow breaths, and the sun passed over, and the rain and the nights covered their exhausted bodies. The sun parched their bones to a pale white, here, by the small stream, where I close my eyes and wait.

Evan Cleveland teaches creative writing to children in schools, hospitals, and juvenile detention centers through the Houston non-profit, Writers in the Schools. His latest projects revolve around his children – chasing the crawling baby with his wife or playing with dolls. Occasionally he waters his gardens so the stink bugs and squirrels have something to eat.