The Turned Into's continued


Zoë was still a little miffed.

"If you use a word like 'sage' without knowing the Latin name it could mean Leucophyllum, or Salvia, or Artemisia.  As a medicine woman, Zodiac should know better.  The Latin names are so easy, and they're poetic, too.  Vaccinium vitis-idaea, Hedera helix, Thuja occidentalis."

Taking his seat beside her, Gerry asked, "So how's it going with you?"

"We, my guests and I, made jam from the grapes and strawberries that we grew last year, and Winter bakes honey bread, and we buy fresh fruit at the Farmer's Market.  Altogether, I'd say we survive.  The girls get cell phones from their work 'cause they're on call so much.  They have to buy their own scrubs, but I make most of the rest of our clothes.  This coat was a gift from my mommy."

Zoë had lived with her "mommy" and two sisters until she was twenty-five.  She had a sign on her bedroom at her mother's house that said, "Zoë's Room."  Facing an immense cottonwood that presented a true spectacle, even in the dark, and a little worried that her cashier may have fallen back to sleep, she seemed somewhat distracted, less impressed with Gerry's loyalty to her - despite her considerable idiosyncrasies - than he might have expected.

"Quite pastoral," he said, both impressed and slightly annoyed.  He noticed that someone had painted a picture of an owl eating a human placenta on the sign for Zoë's store, a crude set of lines with something of a totem or familiar in its look.

Spring had arrived rather abruptly after a hard winter and the almond trees were blooming in the front yard of the modest little house.  A peach tree had also flowered, and ground cherry bushes were putting forth a few blossoms that were white-pink in the frothy moonlight.  Gerry imagined that the grapevines in the back yard were producing freshly unfolded leaves, pixie handprints; wet and shiny like red and green skin.  The Carolina jasmine covering the windows was bursting with yellow trumpet flowers. 

Gerry took Zoë's hand and held it to his heart.  It was warm and limp.

"I hope you're not going to tell me that you all go swimming in the canals during the summer…"

"I'll swim wherever I want.  And I'm not telling you any of this to impress you," she said.  "You asked how things were going with me.  I'm making lots of money off my work, too, if you really must know."

"You should get some chickens or ducks.  You know, for the eggs.  You could build them nests."

"I'd rather die than eat an egg.  It's monstrous, really."

"I suppose it is.  Vitelline villainy."

"No, really.  Don't joke about that sort of thing."

Gerry remembered that the egg was a symbol for the universe in many religions.  He actually suspected that Zoë ate nothing but dried roots from a plain earthenware bowl; roots that smelled of mice and looked like scorched sticks.  She was barefoot when he met her, and her bare feet and the hem of her dress were stained with red mud as she wandered by a little spring that had risen out of the limestone and clay in an abandoned field near her store.  It was evening, and supple gold tones shimmered along the flat horizon under an atmosphere of fire.  The sweet, clear, grass-choked waters of the spring reflected the blood-and-gilded sky, as they spread out to a spot where someone had built a rough wall of pale pink untrimmed limestone without mortar or wash.  It was child's play, really, just a pile of small, flat stones, but it held the waters at bay.  A family of plump, brown quail and sinuous wild turkey waded and drank with their implausible beaks in the wind-whipped, shallow pools surrounded by cypresses, trees greedy for water, their foliage slowly changing to shadowy olive and liver and indigo in the sad, serene twilight.

Sad, serene, to the man who stood alone at the marsh's edge, unnoticed by birds and dragonflies, a man as still as the dying air, as the auric dust passing through a sieve.  He remembered playing there as a child, before the suburbs encroached on it.  The blue of ragged salt cedars against the pink stone wall touched him deeply.  A cold wind was blowing, and the winter-fat bushes and clumps of tall dried grass moved gracefully, tolerantly, under its force.  The landscape seemed alive, as did the sky, which was turning from sunset colors to dark gray.

Nearby, Zoë was walking with purpose, singing to herself and digging for roots in the wet soil with her hands.  Her song was as beautiful as her laugh was unsettling.  She wore a buttermilk ramie/blend scarf that fluttered in the wind like a pennant.  Her scarf was the source of base jealousy on the part of her guests, especially when it made a satisfying scratchy sound. 

The year was ending, and it was too cold for anyone to be walking with bare, muddy feet at twilight.  Gerry remembered the lines from Shelly about winter, "such as when the birds die."  He called to her, and she looked at him with startled green eyes.  Setting down the willow basket full of roots that she carried on one arm, she placed her hands on her hips and asked him what he wanted.

"Where are your shoes?" he asked.

"Where are your feet?" she answered.