Prickly Pear Cactus
Before my brother was born he was a cactus, solitary, beautiful, frequented by insects. In winter he would dehydrate to keep from freezing beneath the snow, and in summer he’d bloom just for one day.
The bridge extends across the water, littered with crab carcasses and oyster shells. Wind blows beach grass and reeds. I peer over the edge, at the murky sea water below, unable to tell if the tide is coming or going.
The bridge connects to an island covered in pine trees. Nuthatches and warblers flit in the branches. Along the wooded edge, beach grass leads to a seawall made of rock. Prickly pear cacti grow in the sand, flowering yellow in the July sun.
I stoop to watch ants and wasps pollinate the flowers. Spines cover their flat green paddles.
There’s only one cactus that grows in the harbor, only one cactus native to all of New England.
Optunia humifusa.
“Who are you to me?” I ask, as seagulls fly overhead.
There’s a vacancy where my brother should be, an absence of memories, gaps, smiles turned to frowns, a struggle against context, until an ambulance in winter, the darkest part of the year, where sunlight is a luxury of hours.
Across the water a cover band plays reggae on the wharf. People dance under tents, protected from the sun.
Earlier, I hung out with a guy who lives in a shack without running water. He was on pills and looked like he hadn’t slept for days. I wondered if he was aware he wouldn’t stop moving while we talked at the bar, like his nerves were full of ants. How uncomfortable he must be, I thought. His purple rimmed eyes, blinking over and over.
“I’ve got to go home,” he apologized.
If you disconnect from your body you can become a cactus too, I thought after dropping him off at his shack. But I knew he had already disconnected, that he was in the process of extricating himself from his human form, blood, tissue, bones, gray matter.
I drove to the bayside and parked in a dirt lot by the water, thinking about how he seemed fine when I met him a few months ago. How well could I see that night in a dimly lit lodge, surrounded by music and partygoers, in a fugue state of grief?
The cacti swell with summer humidity. Iridescent wasps, immune to the sting of salt air float over their flowers.
I once asked my brother how Optunia got here.
“Birds,” he said.
“Do they miss the tropics?” I asked.
He nodded, without confidence, and told me that migratory birds travel thousands of feet overhead, even while we’re sleeping.
Before he died, my brother said he wanted to be scattered somewhere warm, and I wondered if it was because he used to be a seed, carried in the belly of a bird away from a place that never snowed.
Gabrielle Griffis is a musician, writer and multimedia artist. She works as a librarian. Her fiction has been published in Wigleaf, Split Lip, Matchbook, Monkeybicycle, CHEAP POP, XRAY, Okay Donkey and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Microfiction 2022 and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. Read more at http://gabriellegriffis.com or follow at @ggriffiss.
