I buried my mom last week, and her first leaf emerged this morning. The green limb blinked out of the dirt bed. The directions on her packaging dictated the watering routine. In an auburn pot, I interred into the dirt a single seed, sort of a kidney bean or fetus, which was not the typical size, but bigger. Correct soil and proper pH gathered in this earth womb, my grow-light adjusted to the optimal distance (10 inches as per my 30-watt bulb) from the tentative green tendril.
I hadn’t cried when my mom passed. My family chalked it up to shock. True, her death
diverged from the way I anticipated. Too soon, fast, and not enough weepy, hospital-sentimental hand-holding. Scientific advancements proved literally fruitful for this issue. I enfolded a sample of my mother’s DNA, a lock of hair and 1-centimetre square of skin salvaged from the corpse, and mailed it to Morsanito™. Within a month the seed arrived in a bubbled pouch in the post.
She germinated in a baggie with a moistened paper towel while I sculpted her nest.
I watered my mom twice a day and sat each morning with a steaming tea watching the baby leaf wobble gently. Thin green fingers pointed up and leaves stretched out and branched
into elephant ears. Yellow flowers yawned on the vines between the leafy continents. The fruit grew resembling a melon-sized bean, and kept going. When my siblings came and saw the thing coming from the pot on the table they said what the fuck, and I observed yes, I know I need a larger table. The fruit and the vine of the mother-plant grew too fast, and I didn’t think I wanted to put her on the floor. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable with that. The enormous mother of baby fruit took up most of the dining table.
The DNA was good and the face forming beneath the phylo-film resembled not a child,
but my dear mother as I remember her from faded photos of her youth. The organic bag around the GMO baby then sucked directly to her veggie flesh, adhering to her and becoming her skin. When her skin started to go pink, her eyes opened. She didn’t cry.
Wastefully, though, I had to reject that one. She had no hands and a blunted nose.
You know how when you grow produce, some will go to the chickens or compost because of
lumps? The first couple mom-children went that way—my mom but wonky, like a Roma tomato with bruises, warts and blotches. I didn’t have chickens. I knew others with veggie kids that came out lousy. They leaked and smelled bad after a while. Some grew a fine fuzz. Cheeks too large, eyes too tiny, arms a funny length. I composted each until I got a pristine mom, receiving packages and trying again, again.
I raised this young girl, who was my mom, but I couldn’t wait for her to be my mom. I
needed her advice—should I buy or rent? Should I get married to him? Should my taxes go into the interest-free saving account, or something? So I told the young girl all the things I remembered my mom telling me, because then she would be on the same page when she finally was mom-age to give me advice.
Her skin glowed a greenish undertone. Her voice sounded like wind through the leaves of trees. Her eyes were wrong, but with too many moms composted already, all fermenting into fertilizer, I kept her. The bright, cold green orbs departed from the warm tree bark hue of my mother’s eyes. This one’s resemblance to my mother, and, I guess, by extension, me, was otherwise perfect.
She grew with leaves on her head, which needed plenty of sunshine. They were thick and veined. She enjoyed sitting and soaking in the warm rays, and I read her favorite books to her, American Dirt, Where the Crawdads Sing and All My Puny Sorrows. She asked me for paints, and I told her no. My mother never painted, in fact, she held painters in contempt, preferring musicians. My new mom nodded. She nodded.
I woke up on a Wednesday, saw the dull sun on the floor, and I finally felt her death. That
woman who died, who fell one day, she was my mother. The plant mom in my kitchen, watching as I taught her how she used to cook Kraft Dinner exactly the way I liked, that was someone else. None of the experiences my mom actually lived through would be contained in this young girl. She couldn’t be the star piano player at school; she couldn’t meet my dad, John Mackenzie, in 2015; I couldn’t put her through the pandemic as a teenager. The logistics would be impossible. My mom was dead.
I laid on the couch watching plant-mom. She held the umbilical vine, connected to her
belly button. Her long hair clung, creeping on her shoulders. She would soon be the age she died. Crows-feet dabbled about the corners of her eyes, and her lips pursed like two raisins. But this creature was too quiet, too uninterested in celebrity gossip, apathetic to my poor dating choices, bored by Deepak Chopra and the divine feminine. I winced and I winced again. I kept wincing. I took a shower and I got out hot and relaxed, but the next moment my head throbbed a dull pain like a church bell. Was I on the ground? I had fallen. I saw my mom looming over me mouthing words. My name? Her lips pressed into an M and opened and then again closed to another M. She cut the vine with a pair of shears. The ceiling changed colours and the sun spun fast making all the shadows whirl.
I got out of the hospital with my mom holding my hand. The next couple weeks I couldn’t do anything. My mom turned out great at motherhood—she came into herself again, a new harvest.
Vegetable mom wasn’t meat mom, but she brought me food. I couldn’t get up much.
How wrinkled, shriveled and rotten I had become. I checked the mirror, like surveying
the fridge. Week-old produce dripping and shrinking. But mom takes care of me. She brings
meals.
With dumb serenity, she brought me to bed. Mom tucked me in with studied action, a
perfect reenactment of when I was a child. She stood at the door frame, looking at me,
silhouetted against the light of the hallway. She held the frame. She was like a child holding the hem of her parent’s coat. Then she left, and the light flicked off.
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