The children thought their mother would start dating again when they both moved out, but she grew orchids instead. They see her in the morning wielding a mister like a rifle, crouching at every jungly windowsill before she marches outside to the greenhouse, where she stays for hours, and where, years ago, their father grew herbs and tomato seedlings, in the pre-illness era. Their mother has a way of succumbing completely to her hobbies, indulging in a competitive self-seriousness that neither of the children inherited. Every time they come over, they find packages on the front porch, their insides layered with protective foam. Live Plant. Handle With Care.

Some of these plants are expensive. Their mother likes expensive things, but she is not erotic. Orchids are erotic. You have to consider the honest look of them: the labial petals ballet-slipper pink and eggshell white splayed delicately open, the blood-brown leopard spots on ridged tongues; you're always compelled to stroke them with your finger. When the children ask why orchids, their mother says, "Because they're handsome," as if she is describing a square-faced Irish washerwoman, and when they press her further she says, "Because growing things is good for people." This is what the children wanted: something to riff on. They express their love that way. Both of them would like their mother to know how much they love her, even though they don't understand why she has decided to fill her emptiness with orchids. One of them tries to tell her a story about an infamous military general, how tenderly he clipped his bonsais, how precisely he shunted bamboo spears under his prisoners' fingernails. The other describes the plot to Little Shop of Horrors. Their mother sprays them both with the mister, but she doesn't laugh and she doesn't riff back. She's never been much of a talker.

She talks to the orchids forever though. The children have seen it.

For that, the orchids love their mother in that green way only plants can love. Her breath settles on their origami faces, and they absorb it as they absorb the mist and fertilizer at their roots, the magnified white light spearing in through the greenhouse's plastic panels. Through her love, they grow large, some of the blooms as large as fists. Some of them grow to take the shape of organisms capable of more complicated feelings—spiders, doves, ducks, monkeys. One bloom is shaped like a tiny purple man with a long proboscis-like penis. Evolution is one big joke to orchids. Their mother seems to appreciate this. She seems to appreciate also how each bloom, each and every bloom, contains her breath, and therefore everything she has ever said to them, all her secret fears and longings, all her tenderness. Sometimes, when she thinks no one is watching, she cups the flowers in her hands as if they are faces and kisses them.

The children want the orchids to share what their mother has given. One night, after she's gone to bed, they go out to the greenhouse and stand in the dark fragrant air and let everything fall silent around them. They convince themselves that the orchids are whispering to each other in an ageless chlorophyllic language. For one of the children, it hits her ears like glitter and cotton. For the other, like oil and sleet. An hour goes by as they stand next to each other, straining and listening, straining and listening, though they don't speak this language, and they realize eventually that they don't know what they should be listening for at all.


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Jen Julian is the author of Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses—a collection of stories. She lives in north Georgia.

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