Plant by Leah Browning
Editorial Intern Maddy Weist on today’s short: Showing your plants love & admiration is believed to help them thrive- but what about affection? “Plant” explores an intimately organic relationship with a houseplant and its owner, or lover, in a lustfully prolific manner. We loved this symbiotic bond & found ourselves infatuated with this imagined love story. We think you will too!
Plant
The nursery has been invaded by poinsettias and seven-foot firs, crowding around the cash registers with their red velvet bows. The houseplants, even the orchids and bonsai trees, have been pushed backwards to make room.
I find the rubber plant leaning against the back wall, between an old Coke machine and a door marked Employees Only. He’s half my height and looks like he’s seen better days. Still, I wind up carrying him toward the neck of the store and taking him home with me.
My apartment is on the fourth floor of an old brick building. Every afternoon, I join him by the window, curling up on the sofa with a blanket and a book as the pale winter sun moves slowly across the living room. Within a few weeks, he’s already doubled in size. His leaves turn thick and glossy.
A year passes, then another. I have lost other plants in the past, but I feel good about this one. The following summer, we marry in a small ceremony on the beach.
When we get back to our hotel room that night, I take my sandals off at the door. We are both glazed with a fine coating of sand. After a bath, though, I stroke his long green leaves. We order room service, a bottle of champagne.
The return flight is too long, and we’re both happy to be home again. We cook together in the evenings, watch movies. We grow old.
Often, at night, I am restless. I pace back and forth across the living room floor. One night, standing at the window, I watch snow falling slowly in the moonlight. Far below me, on the other side of the street, a man is trying to dig a car out from a snowbank.
On the wall, the hands of the clock revolve, revolve, though little time passes. Outside, it continues to snow. The building has an animal warmth, exhaling through the radiators. I stand at the window in my nightgown, and we wait for the sun to rise.
Leah Browning is the author of Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, a pair of flash fiction mini-books published by Silent Station Press, and When the Sun Comes Out After Three Days of Rain, a collection of poetry published by Kelsay Books. She is also the author of three short nonfiction books and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Her stories have appeared in Waxwing, Contrary Magazine, Harpur Palate, Four Way Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Flock, Necessary Fiction, The Threepenny Review, Watershed Review, Superstition Review, Terrain.org, Newfound, and elsewhere. Browning’s first full-length collection of short stories, The Costume Wedding, is forthcoming from Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW Press. In addition to writing, she has served as editor of the Apple Valley Review since 2005. She tweets @leahbrowninglit.
