Jonathan Riggs

A Green Thumb

The wax lips had no taste.

Tessa chewed on them pensively, the blazing sun causing the molecules or whatever in the wax to stretch and sweat and leave her fingers sticky and red.

“Watch me!” Stephen called from the inflatable pool, but she just looked to the skyline through her cheap sunglasses, mechanically chewing the paraffin, her face set in a hard expression.

“Doesn’t your family have any real food?” she asked, but Stephen was splashing with his face underwater and didn’t answer.

From the little she knew about them, Stephen’s parents were weird. It had been sweet of him to produce the candy, even it were something as unappetizing as wax lips, dusty in their plastic wrapper, as old as last Halloween: ancient.

She sighed, craning her neck back in the sweating plastic deck chair, the grass tickling her bare feet, wishing the phone would ring. She’d given Erik the number of where she’d be babysitting…and, just in case, she’d left the patio door open.

“Did you see?” Stephen asked, gasping for air. Water ran down his round face; his cheeks were red. “I held my breath for, like, an hour.”

“Wow,” she said unenthusiastically, wishing for a bottle of Pepsi or, even better, some of the liqueurs she knew Stephen’s parents kept on the top row of their creepy little liquor cabinet. The five bottles fascinated her, and she’d taken them out the last time she was there—the key was ridiculously easy to find—and held each tiny bottle up to the light. The candy colors of each bottle intrigued her—red, green, purple, orange—and she’d been dying to ask where they were from. The fifth bottle was empty, but the labels were in some bizarre language she couldn’t read—maybe French, or Japanese—and every time she babysat for Stephen, her mind would return to the little locked cabinet. How would they taste?

She licked her lips.

“Where did your parents go again?” she called to Stephen, who was maneuvering a plastic frog through the water. The green garden hose, which had filled up the pool only an hour or two ago, curled in the grass like an open-mouthed snake, dripping into the ground.

“To have a baby,” he answered, distracted.

“No they didn’t,” she answered, not surprised that he would lie to her, but still a little hurt. “Your mom would’ve said something.”

“They are, too,” he said, splashing. “I’m going to have a little brother or sister, they haven’t decided which they want to have.”

“So they’re adopting?”

“No,” he said, staring at her. “They’re having a baby.”

“Whatever,” she said, but she wasn’t that angry, not really, that he persisted in lying. He wasn’t a bad kid, really, and she knew he was lonely, that the kids at school tormented him. This fantasy of his parents bringing home a baby—well, she could understand. She used to wish for a little sister, for someone. She batted those thoughts away as she pulled a sweaty strand of hair out of her face. Tessa threw the sticky, stretched-out lips into the herb garden. Stephen’s parents kept so many gardens, they’d never notice, she thought.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, standing up, the chair’s plastic pulling against her skin like a reluctant octopus. The slight breeze felt cool on her skin, surprised and stripped.

Stephen tilted his head as if he’d slightly heard her, but he remained entranced with the frog and the play of water through his fingers. He was small for his age, and a funny-looking little kid, as if his parents had just carved him out of wood.

She walked past, sweat beading at her throat. When she ran her hand across her forehead, it came back damp; her bathing suit’s seams pulled at her sunburned skin.

From the open patio door came the blast of air conditioner she’d cranked up as soon as Stephen’s parents had left. She stood in the doorway for a second, relishing the strange sensation of cold and heat and her place at their nexus. The macramé holders for the hanging plants creaked as they swung a little from the kitchen ceiling.

“I’ll be right back,” she called over her shoulder, and Stephen splashed in response, singsonging some little rhyme under his breath she couldn’t quite hear. He didn’t get along with the other kids his age at school, she knew, and he had trouble keeping up with the lessons. She’d be surprised if he even knew how to read. 

Tessa stepped into the house, her bare feet thrilling to the chill of the tiles, leaving ghostly footprints as she padded through the kitchen and to the dark, wood-paneled den. Ferns shivered in the air-conditioned atmosphere on every shelf of the huge bookcase lurking against one wall; Stephen’s parents’ bowling trophies sparkled in the slits of sunlight that cut through the half-closed wooden Venetian blinds. Stephen’s parents were strange housekeepers. Although the house was always clean, there was a strange, timeless quality about this room that always fascinated Tessa. The sun caught particles of dust shimmering in the air, and even with the air conditioning, the atmosphere felt preserved somehow, with the mustiness of a museum.

She went, as she always did, to the liquor cabinet, a curiously-designed monstrosity perched in the corner on spindly, sprawling gold legs that looked like nothing as much as a pair of chicken feet, scaly and scratching.

The case was set throughout with mirrors and glass, often at odd angles, and to gaze into the liquor cabinet was always a disorienting experience at first. The base of the cabinet was filled with a wild assortment of bottles, all with varying amounts of liquid inside. She didn’t recognize any of the brands, and some of the bottles were strangely shaped, with spiraling necks or elaborate corks topped with tiny carvings. Above the chaos of the bottles sat a small shelf, where the five liqueur bottles slept: delicate but squat, the mirror at their back heightening their gem-like glow, the empty one winking like a diamond. Tessa thought, as always, of mines and dwarves cutting jewels from the walls, pulsing with light from deep within, sparkling in time with the heartbeat of the earth itself.

She swallowed, touching the thin glass case that contained and displayed all the bottles. With one finger, she traced the elaborate outline of the keyhole, illuminated with a series of intricate wooden carvings. The key was so easy to find…

“Tessa!” Stephen screamed from what felt like a million miles away. In the mirrored cabinet, her eyes widened with terror; she turned and ran through the house, still feeling the moisture of the glass on her fingertips. The blast of heat when she burst through the doorway nauseated her; the transition from cold to hot was too quick.

“Tessa!” Stephen screamed again, standing up in the pool, his voice reedy and piercing. She went to him, grabbing his thin shoulders roughly.

“What? What is it?” she cried, shaking him, more out of fear than anything else.

“A bug,” he whimpered, pointing. She followed his gaze to see a large beetle flailing in the water.

“That’s it?” She let him go: her fingers had left little white flecks on his brown shoulders. The marks seemed to fade almost reluctantly, his skin slow to absorb the damage she had done, and, coupled with his strange little face, so ugly, she repeated herself even more sharply: “That’s it?”

“It’s drowning,” he cried. The beetle, an iridescent green blue black, about the size of a quarter, wiggled minuscule legs, as fine as the eyelashes a lady would draw on. It chittered, an alien sound, and Tessa drew back, thinking now of scarabs and shells and almost fascinated by the interplay of colors, like the melting rainbows of a gasoline puddle, in the struggling bug.

“I thought you were in trouble,” she said gruffly, not looking at him.

“Tessa, save it,” he cried, his voice too shrill for a boy his age, for a boy even, and she felt a stab of disgust as he stood, his weird little woody body, trembling. The other kids had very cruel names for him at school, she knew.

“It’s just a bug,” she said, standing up.

“I’m scared to touch it,” he whispered, his eyes electric with hysteria. The effect calmed her, deadening her sympathy like a silver candle snuffer swallowing a tiny flame.

“Calm down,” she said slowly.

“It’s dying!” He stepped up and down, wracked with agitation, with worry, with many other things she couldn’t name. His face pulsed with an unrecognizable energy; he was ugly, and she hated him.

The insect buzzed again, its legs working uselessly through the water. Stephen whimpered.

“Calm down,” she repeated, towering above the bug, the pool, the boy. She hated them all. Stephen started crying, ugly sniffles, as he tried to choke them back.

“Here,” she said coldly, relenting only in action, sweeping her hand through the water. The momentum of her action swept up the bug and splashed it onto the smashed-down, rapidly yellowing grass.

“It’s dead,” he whispered, and they both looked down to where it lay, one wing limply extending, seemingly cracking the shell, otherwise unmoving.

“For Christ’s sake, it was just a bug,” she said as evenly as she could. Tessa closed her eyes against the heat, the noise, the sight of the beetle stretching out, as if to meet death halfway. Life was cruel, and the sooner Stephen realized it, the better off he’d be. She thought of her own father’s face, screwed-up with rage, as he swung at her over another F.

“Enough,” she said crisply. “Are you finished swimming?”

He looked up from the beetle to her, and for an eerie instant, he didn’t look like a child anymore, but something much older, more sinister. She thought he was reading her thoughts; something strange passed over his face.

“No,” he said quietly, and he was just a little boy again, and a corner of her heart melted. She moved to hug him, but he pulled away, stepping back onto the wrinkled blue plastic bottom of the pool, which seemed to her absurdly small.

Rebuffed, Tessa stalked back into the house, wiping sweat, coconut-scented suntan lotion and something else roughly out of her eyes.

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