For the third day in a row, Brian looked down while brushing his teeth and saw a tiny green shoot sprouting out of the drain. Only last night, at 2am no less, he had pulled the little fucker out and thrown it down the toilet.
“Miriam!” he shouted to his wife, who no doubt was still curled in bed. “The tree’s back!”
“Mhmh?” Cursing at her lack of interest, he spat out toothpaste and watched how the white foam flecked the two bright leaves of the shoot. Remnants of raisins and granola showered like rubble around it. He turned on both taps and washed it away, but the shoot remained.
On his commute to work, he noticed something was on fire at the side of the motorway. The flames were big, apocalyptic, and when he opened the passenger window the black stench of burning rubber filled his car. There wasn’t a scrapyard round here; there were no reasons to be burning rubber. This was the fucking countryside, not some rustbelt wasteland.
At the office, he turned in the financial reports that were due at 10am. He sat through a meeting which featured the usual pantomime antics of his boss, the kind of man whose entire career is based on imitating the flamboyance of a Disney character while necking enough coffee and bourbon to seem manically on form at every performance.
“What we are building up to,” he announced, “is the ultimate synergy.” His arms flailed back in grand gesture, nearly knocking over the pie chart drawing his assistant had etched on the flip chart. “Capital merging with capital, a clean abstraction, the upward surge of profit. Think of this as MarioKart. How many of you have played MarioKart?” His eyes narrowed as he surveyed his colleagues round the table.
There was much quivering, as only a handful of people raised their hands.
“Well, the chosen few will know what I mean by the Rainbow Road,” he continued. “We’re on that motherfucking Rainbow Road. One veer off and we plunge into space, the black void, and that’s that. So I can’t afford a single mishap, I don’t care what happens. We need to synthesise, synergise, synchronise. You hear me?”
Every week, the boss delivered a near-identical speech; the only thing that changed was the arbitrary cultural reference he dragged up, presumably from the stacks of CDs and video-games in his son’s bedroom.
At this point, the assistant stood up hastily. She was young for the job, a high achiever, reaching for those virtual stars in a pair of vicious heels.
“What we mean,” she said, trying to clarify, “is it’s important not to underestimate green shoots. Those little signs of growth. Shares in petroleum, in plastic, are rising nicely. Not to mention South American superfood angiosperms, part of a wider move towards elite organic harvests. While the economy flounders around us, clinging to the small things is what will help us reach that upward surge.”
“Thank you, Heidi.” The boss shot her an appreciative leer. “Now what the fuck is an angiosperm?”
On his lunch-break, Brian ate a sad desk sandwich with a fellow number-cruncher. The two of them were the runts of the litter, the ones that never got invited to the cloying, marathon lunches the boss often dragged the office out on. This meant they were never in line for promotion, but bore the advantage of letting them avoid the poisonous oysters and chardonnay which often left their colleagues retching all afternoon.
“You know Liam,” Brian mused, “I found a green shoot in my sink the other day. It’s still there, even though I thought I pulled it out.”
“What?” Liam was dim-witted and this was maybe why he never got called out to lunch.
“Like, an actual green shoot. I think it’s getting taller.”
“Maybe God’s trying to tell you something,” Liam said ominously.
Back home that evening, Brian found that the shoot had gotten much taller indeed. So tall that various branches curled out thirstily, wrapping themselves round the taps. Brian shrugged and didn’t bother brushing his teeth that night. He pressed himself into Miriam’s back but realised she was already asleep. It was what, nine o’clock?
He got up very early and left the flat straight away to get to work. The accounts were flying off his desk that morning.
“Good work Ben,” his boss said, floating past the desk, collecting his documents.
“I’m on the upward surge,” Brian nodded.
On his way out the door that night he gave Heidi a contrived and lustful glance. She looked at him with eyebrows raised, but this could mean anything. He decided to drive out to the spot where yesterday he’d seen the flames. It was a pit in the ground, a charred patch of grass gone black. He fancied there was some resemblance to a pie chart, the way the different shades of burnt matter lay, wedge-like, in the circle. He did some rearranging, moving shrivelled plastic and ash and wood chips around until they met satisfactory dimensions.
When he came home with soot all over his hands and face, Miriam said he looked beautiful. She was a Leo and had a thing for fire. He looked into her eyes for the first time in weeks. Her whole body seemed to pause, to start melting right in front of him. The light from the kitchen window made her skin so pale, except for a flash of orange across her face. He was about to kiss her, to fall into the molten mass of her body, when she reached straight for his belt buckle. This was a first.
Afterwards, he went into the bathroom to wash his face. The tree had taken over the entire bathroom. In just a few hours, the little green stems had become proper woven wooden branches. He had to climb over and around them just to take a piss. What came out of him was yellow, dark. The flames were inside him now, and the leaves of the tree shimmered around his body, bathing him in luxurious gold.
“Honey,” he heard Miriam’s voice at the door, glistening with the shrapnel of Heidi’s lisp. He realised he was still clutching his limp penis. “D’you think the world’s ending?”
mariaology 