WHERE THE FACE BECOMES A PLANT
Cameron Finch's writing and interviews have appeared in various journals including CRAFT, Electric Literature, Entropy, Isele, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and The Rumpus. Find out more at ccfinch.com or on Twitter at @_ccfinch_
Knuckle-cracking is one way to call something you don’t want to talk about. You know, all those hungry bones. You pronounce extra sounds where others do not, and chew to distract your mouth with something. All those stomach moans.
This isn’t the last time you will dream of your future plant body, your calyxed head.
You have had night dream after night dream of bodies, bodies sprouting so many flowers. Turtlenecks topped with feathered dandelions. Flattened T-shirts, then a fountaining of calla lilies. Tuxedos sprigging into fern, lunaria. All of these could be you.
…Why can’t these bodies exist in the daylight? …
You have sniffed your underwear many times to remind yourself you’re alive. Do flowers have garments? Of course not. This ritual you think you will miss. The daily oatmeal, too. That bowl that keeps you safe. But soon you will forget all that pomp, all that costuming.
… And when will your body begin to transform? The waiting feels like a trick…
*
Haven’t you always wanted to lack a face? Ever since you were first given the gloves and told to dump out a trash can in the middle of campus in the bright middling day. There you were sorting through the receptacle, categorizing its contents on a laid-out tarp. Here are the recyclables. Here the food products. Here is the trash. Only you found the crumpled piece of paper and shoved it in your pocket. Later, you couldn’t read it, the photocopied page from a Japanese passport. To the right of the text was a photograph, the face cut out entirely, cauterized right out of existence. You wore the photo round your finger for many days, wondering where do faces go to hide.
*
Haven’t you always wanted to lack a face, as you scratch another zig-zag line onto walls, onto snow, onto any offering surface. You have filled notebooks with a featureless head, lines where the brains would be, the nose, the hint of lip. You trace the outline of the miniature shoulders, the smartly tied knot of a fictional scarf. The Shadow Man you call this creature which lives inside your mind, a creature which you now realize is perhaps not man or anything at all. Just a version of you, the way a name or a pronoun works for some. You’re not sure where it came from, this fingerprint of yours, drawn and released from certain captivity. Will you run out of shadows? Shall we say the shadow has been there all along, sprouting?
*
Perhaps you are getting used to facelessness, this mask slung across your mouth, your chin. When your glasses slip down your nose, you see nothing but blur, like a face hushed inside an egg.
*
Ever since you were brought back from the almost dead and the flesh again invaded your cheeks.
Ever since you cut short your hair, your name, cut up all the pieces you thought you were and now which goes where. They will not fit as they were. This you know is true.
*
These are called roots.
*
You’re hesitating…why? The plants, they are simple and luminous.
Is it the loss of mouth, of language, that you are afraid of? How to say what you want to say without lips, without tongue, with pollen and corolla. Why is it so difficult to speak as you are?
Plants know the mouth is not the weapon. It’s the human mind that creates the fragments that can crack a window or a skull. Can devastate a petal in half.
You are afraid of those who believe that fiddlehead bodies should not walk in the same manner as a cat or fruit vendor or somebody’s child may walk down the street. You are afraid of their power to make it so.
You are afraid of those who believe they can knuckle-crack for you. But a knuckle knows itself, dervish and adroit. Traces circles around those that attempt to set the bones straight. Like a sun on the end of a string.
What is there to offer them, those so threatened by plants?
A succulent, perhaps. A cabbage on a stake, our tulips on a platter. Dirt to be used in a pinch. Mirrors.
You are still learning how to grow. Despite the weight of all these suns.
*
It’s about now that you become aware of the you in this piece. It has worked its way in, all on its own. Just like the bugs crawling up your thigh, down the stem of your neck, slipping inside the sore on your right heel.
This is transformation.
Like the nimble Hijikata who called his dance hall Asbestos, your new plant body begins to walk with the bugs. Scarab eyes flutter on the balls of your feet, living jewels you will have to dance on. What choice do you have? They become you as they enter your secret doors.
You wonder if Hijikata knew of ophiocordyceps, the fungus dormant in so many ant brains. Have you ever seen the weed fork from the insect minds like an asking wand? Observing the disease bouquet from their precious heads, you’d call it a ballet if the act weren’t so violently green. You watch Hijikata wriggle himself ecstatic on his stage he calls womb, and you, too, lose yourself to growth. Invite the dying ants to eat what remains of your human knuckles. Let them live again. Call it dance, call it hope, call it hospital.
It’s probably the wriggling, the skin meeting rib bone, or the antennae tickling your spleen that leads to this recognition. They hurt just like you. The ants — they are plants. Like you.
They chlorophyll your throat, their many legs, and you are thankful you’re not asked to give a speech.
*
What it all really comes down to is wounds, you suppose.
Wounds … Bugs, knuckles, faces, plants: they want them, too. Helps them learn what they are.