prologue :: the roots have & to hold
A man holds his still-beating heart in hand. He wonders how many repetitions make something true. He cannot remember how he got here, when he began cradling that most important self outside of him, arms outstretched so the veins don’t tangle.
He needs circularity. What comes in must go out—so above as below. He massages this balance into the ventricles. Like thumbing a beloved’s forehead—this the naturalization of care, this attending tenderness. The protection of tooth and claw misses a nerve.
He sees what color is outside the body and how it glistens like oil. Night pools moonlit—a shivering black thing. He croons and rubs, ever so.
His feet strike concrete, rhythm vibrating from confined earth. His heart pulses down until the beat and the step and the dirt are indecipherable—position failing language.
People pass, offering, asking him to share in burden. But he shakes his head, hands already full.
thorns & all
She grew from the roots of his ventricles, that dark place where breath takes on material. A twisting, snarled thing: all green shoots and searching.
It wasn’t that she was his, or that he generated her—she couldn’t be made of him, or otherwise,her means nothing less than her own. But his heart was the site at which she decided to root, nettle herself deep in his shadow. And so he couldn’t say where she came from, and she wouldn’t. Some things are meant to keep in private, a shared magic bound by blood.
Maybe she blew in on the wind.
After all, carrying his heart outstretched in front of his arms—who knew what matter of debris or stardust might cling to that precious slickness?! He was lucky she wasn’t a rock, some pebble or grain to lodge in the muscle of each contraction, a reminder of earth’s presence under feet. Just because his hands ached with care didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the ground pulsate back—tide pouring into, then out of, his ears as the body chases the moon.
She could hear it, too, enclosed as she was in his slickness, not contained but cradled. If he held himself, he held her too—the rocking step-blood-beat and the shudder of labor. Who was the gourd, and who beads: the body a muscular instrument to be played. Tuned to changes in moisture, her seeds sifted his dirt. Searching.
It wasn’t without pain—rooting never is—and her edges sliced his heart—maybe not as a rock would have, not when what was eroded was self. But herself she buried within him, minor tears in the muscle so he grew over her in a veil of organ.
The scars sealed over, as though he meant to trap her—not consciously, but a reaction from deep in his body. Autonomous. Take and become one in this grave or womb.
But she could not be trapped. After all, she wanted space and sun to grow, so she stretched towards the light. It was slow reaching—she did not shove but firmly pressed him aside. And the more he tried to surround the more firmly she pressed back his heart—never violent, but sure.
Okay, well maybe some violence. Close your hand around a thorn and you can’t be surprised when it surfaces bleeding, difficult to tell if the blood is yours or the thorn’s.
Her growth sliced him open again. And again the scars sealed the muscle, stronger than it was though perhaps not as pliant. Something to withstand the elements, maybe protect that slickness inside.
And so it was: she grew larger, more snarled, and his heart grew stronger, until her nodes arched up and through the cusp of his valves. She strengthened his heart’s structure, constructed a skeleton able to bear its own weight. It began with a peak of bud, then the gentle unfurling of leaf, broad and green, always accompanied by thorns, iron-rich in protection.
And as his heart pumped to combine breath and blood with light, she grew until her vines cascaded over him. Starting as one she flourished into many, her selves propagating first down his hands, then reaching back towards the veins, dancing the connections between his body and heart.
She enveloped him in tangle. And it became difficult to determine where he ended and she began. Passersby could see, yes, here was a vine, here a vein, okay there piqued the specter of his blood. But they couldn’t separate, no more than you’d sever the body from mind. Which was anyone’s guess.
Of course, that didn’t stop them from trying. Unnatural was the claim, that forever breaking apart what they didn’t understand.
Remember the fairy tale: once upon a time hierarchy grew into hegemony—vines climbing a brick wall. Only these were the choking kind.
But this wasn’t what she and he were. And perhaps because there was no strangle of supremacy—because air did not move between them so much as it held them in place, showed cohesion, bound as they were by their snarl—
It was too much.
They were too much.
Her too-muchness had become his: she had leaked into him. Or maybe it had always been his. Because it didn’t matter where the too-muchness came from—these were, after all, people willing to poison themselves to avoid the labor of pulling each weed, to say nothing of its use. How like them to kill medicine at the root.
And so the people halted them, blocked the path they’d been forging. But with her he had grown accustomed to the pulse of earth up his feet. Without movement to ground them, his heart overcompensated, thrumming with rhythm.
But they did not break. The verdant beams erected within provided structure—a soothe. The people looked—and for once their fear prevented touching. They couldn’t tell, after all, who cradled who, and so they couldn’t plan the cut.
The people argued what was typical: who came first: a heart or its thorns. Who labored or earned what place—just another way of saying who looked the most like something they understood. Who deserved.
So she and he didn’t escape but held each other in place—that little mothering fit within each. And they waited, as all sometimes must.
And in this hold her vines struck dirt. The earth tasted his beat and her electricity—how these vibrations wove in, though, and out of each other like velvet. And it shook with pleasure, knowing what it was to be touched back.
The people fell to their knees.
It opened for her and him. Beckoned them into its dark cool. What could they do but return to the birthplace of everything that is and ever was?
You can hear them now, if you put your ear to the dirt. Breathe deep, spread your fingers through the bodies of grass. Hear yours in their mirror, at once surface and symbol. Love that reflection.
Kym Cunningham (she/they) once graduated from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette with a PhD in English. They do a few things in order to pay to live in Southern California, spending whatever constitutes free time traveling the coast with their partner and feral dog-child, Truffle Monster. If so inclined, you can read more of Kym’s work at kym-era.com. If the cost is prohibitive (especially if you identify as a member of a marginalized community, including currently and previously incarcerated writers), contact Kym via this website for complimentary copies. We work to make the future worth inheriting. Stay feral.
