Integument by Alexandra Manglis
Associate nonfiction editor Z Howard on today’s bonus essay: This is one of those pieces that sticks with you like a thorn in your paw (or, as the case may be, like a parasitoid wasp egg in a tomato hornworm). Manglis moves tenderly through this piece, but no less urgently, exploring what it is to grow, to be empty, to take up space.
Integument
There’s a hornworm on the tomato plant and it is dying. I have traveled six thousand miles and twelve months to meet it. I have cultivated the garden it finds itself in, grown the food it is drawn to. My body collects soil, digs, pulls, carries water. Before all this I was told by the neighbors to weed out all the maple tree saplings that were poking through my garden’s unmowed grass. “Otherwise the forest will just take over,” they said to me, a person who has never lived with forests. And so I set about the unfamiliar task of clearing. Though I couldn’t be sure if I was making space or removing it, or what the difference between the two really was.
(Does the hornworm know it is dying?)
I plant the tomato seeds indoors in empty take-out sushi boxes, watch them unhurriedly spring into long green stems. I read the farmer’s almanac and wait till the last frost is over before planting them in pots made of leggy steel structures and white plastic bags. I pull out sheaves of spiderwort to make space for the pots so that the tomato plants can gorge on south-facing sunlight. They are unwieldy, awkward. They want to sprawl and clamber and they especially seem to like falling over, like drama queens, and I think of that O’Hara line: “oh Lana Turner we love you get up!” So I give them wooden sticks to help them get up and they stretch into flamboyant structures. The plastic bags, steel, soil, found wood, and growing, flowering, fruiting tomato plants sometimes fool me into thinking I’ve got art sculptures in my garden. At dusk I sit on the front steps watching them and I scratch long wounds into my legs and feet where the mosquitoes bite me. The blood drains out of me, leaves caked blood marks on my skin and on the grass. Once, I spent seven weeks bleeding out an early miscarriage. Was that a clearing?
I discover the dying hornworm mid-morning, behind a leaf. My hand almost brushes up against it and when I see it and my proximity to it I jolt uncontrollably backwards. Its long green voracious body, that could eat a tomato plant to death in two days, is covered in dozens of long white parasitic wasp eggs. The word “riddled” crawls towards the horror of this texture to the eye, but cannot meaningfully connect how deeply the eggs hit an instinct of revulsion that my mind associates with rot and decay. I see the hornworm try to move its tiny elephantine-like head up and down and how it fails into stillness; how nestled, how deeply embedded the eggs are in its meat. I think of how much more voracious the eggs must be than the hornworm is, how powerful they are in their multitudes to hold this living body, a giant to them, stock still.
The wasps eventually clear the hornworm’s body out from beneath its skin. It shrivels down to black. I barely notice it when I go weed out the maple trees.
Alexandra Manglis is a Cypriot writer of fiction and creative nonfiction who has also worked extensively as a poetry editor. She recently co-edited 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive (Milkweed 2019), a collection of lyrical essays by contemporary North American poets on the subject of nineteenth-century literature. She is a 2021 recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an enthusiastic alumna of the Clarion West class of 2017, holds a D. Phil in English from the University of Oxford, and was twice mentioned in passing by the New Yorker’s Page-Turner. You can currently find her in Northampton, Massachusetts.
