A character without a plot
This guy is just wandering around looking for a story to go in, so I thought I’d put him here for now. Written summer 2023.
It takes a certain resilience to grow up in the wet. The consistency of which brings to mind trench foot and toadstools and muddy soil. It takes some spine to breathe in water and push it back out again and slurp your boots out of the muck and go forth-- creeping or with gusto-- but go forth nonetheless.
Sometimes when the wet is soft and the clouds turn purple and black against the hay fields the drama sucks you in. You breathe in moist peat and exhale saltwater and sky. But mostly the wet is gray; broken up by red cedar bark and deep blue fir, pressing downwards and sideways and sometimes just sedentary in the air. Closing in all around, pushing you out anyway into the still.
When spring arrives, it does so literally. Bubbling out of the ground, running down hills, clearing the roads of baby treefrogs and winter decay in one big gulp. The reeds are thick with blackbirds, the air pierced by their young screaming. Whether they cry in the fear of falling or in the ecstasy of flight, Ez could never tell.
Ez grew up quiet. He mowed lawns in the summer, chopped wood in the winter and in spring, he raised tadpoles into frogs in a terrarium outside the basement window. The house was never finished- it ran down with the endless rain and forgotten plans. But the deck provided good shade for the basement and the marshier the pond got, the easier it was for Ez to fish the jello-like orbs out of the brackish pools and escort them to their new glass abode. At school, he kept his hood pulled over bright orange hair, and wore his pants long to cover the frogs on his socks but at home he became obsessed with the possibility of metamorphosis.
Each March afternoon, the bus dropped Ez off on the side of the highway, next to the marshy bit where one can never be sure where solid ground ends and mud begins. He always kept an orange in his backpack for the walk home. Each day, he ate it in the same way, dropping pieces of peel behind him like orange breadcrumbs marking the path between two worlds. He was meticulous in his peeling, he liked the way the smell of citrus stayed under his fingernails and the texture of the juice vesicles under his tongue. He knew that an orange almost always has ten segments, and that orange seeds are called “pips.” Knowing things like that kept Ez organized and helped him focus, and while he appreciated the consistency of the average supermarket fruit, he was always on the lookout for a 7-segment orange. Seven was Ez’s lucky number. You really shouldn’t mess with them when they come up, he thought.
Walking through the bog in March, Ez almost couldn’t think for all the racket. Everything was squelching and moving and birthing and being born-- he had to go slowly. More often than not when his orange was done, he’d take out his magnifying glass and his copy of Flora and Fauna of the Pacific Northwest: 3rd Edition Illustrated and find something interesting to look at. By the time Ez was 11, he had mastered the lifecycle of the big dragonflies and walked about spelling out things like taraxacum officinale and narcissus in his head. Like I said, knowing things kept Ez organized. Mostly he liked spring because in spring, everything changes. Eggs into birds, seeds into plants, caterpillars into butterflies, roe into salmon, and most importantly, jello into tadpoles into frogs.
Noun: metamorphosis; plural noun: metamorphoses
(in an insect or amphibian) the process of transformation from an immature form to an adult form in two or more distinct stages.
A change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one
Meta: change (Greek)
Morphe: form (Greek)
